The past few weeks I have been busy doing cheerful things - hosting visitors from London, buying Christmas foods, ordering Christmas gifts for people online, tidying the house in preparation for Christmas visitors, and even some travelling in and around Sichuan.
Despite keeping a diary, it's not possible to remember all the moments, cheerful or otherwise, and the task becomes harder still during a busy period. Meanwhile, time continues its merry dance of the hours. Christmas comes and goes.
And yet, even if it is a hopeless task, I still want to remember, record and pass on. And not just at Christmas or because it is Christmas - although the urge to communicate with others is doubtless stronger at this time of year - but because it matters to me. So, the following are a few snapshots of the past few weeks.
Leshan
We spent the best part of a Saturday in Leshan, which is only about 2 hours south from Chengdu by bus. The principal attraction is the Big Buddha (大佛), which is the world's tallest sitting Buddha. Despite its vastness, the Buddha remained elusive. We could see its head, close-up, from the top of the mountain, and we saw the entire statue, hazily from one of the muddy, finger-like islands that sticks into the river. Viewed from here, it blended mysteriously into the landscape, only its head truly visible.
But we never got a good look at the whole thing: the angles were all wrong somehow. The Buddha capriciously faced slightly away from the city. A few people grumbled, complaining they had been denied the "money shot"; as a group we fell to speculating on better angles - surely if we were on one of the boats that passed directly beneath the Buddha on the river, we would finally have the perfect view? That must be the best spot, no? After all, that's how the sailors on the river would have seen the Buddha hundreds of years ago, and it was intended for their eyes, wasn't it? Eventually our speculations petered out.
And yet, the impossibility of seeing the whole thing fitted. That day the weather in Leshan was misty and atmospheric - everything was smudged like a Chinese watercolour landscape. Across the face of the waters, the Buddha timelessly gazed, invited, perhaps even reassured, but he did not reveal.
Shimian County
In mid-December, we did a site visit to a county about 4 hours west of Chengdu, in the foothills of the Tibetan plateau. I had visited this landscape before, in 2005, but I had forgotten how it looked, or rather, it was only when I returned there that the memory of its beauty fully revived. Being there was thus a double joy - the immediate appreciation of the landscape overlaid with earlier memories. I remembered all my earlier wonder - it's not like other parts of China that I have seen - the scale is more magnificent, the colours deeper. In places, the violence of the broad, gushing, green waters and sheer cliffs gives way to placid lakes that made me think of Swiss postcards.
Chongqing
Chongqing is evocative, because it was briefly the capital of China during the Second World War, when the whole of eastern China was captured by the Japanese, and it looked for a moment like China itself might cease to exist. The nationalist (Kuomintang or KMT) government chose Chongqing because it was relatively far inland and because its mountainous terrain (it is nicknamed "Mountain City" or 山城), surrounded on three sides by water, offered excellent natural defences. Notwithstanding these advantages, Chongqing suffered a great deal during the War - from heavy aerial bombardment from the Japanese, from floods of refugees arriving from other parts of China, and from espionage and counter-espionage between the KMT and the Communists, who were both struggling for supremacy. These events have left their mark on the city, although it is better known these days as the political base of Bo Xilai, the disgraced "princeling", whose wife was convicted for killing a British businessman several years ago.
I went there last weekend (26-27 December) with a friend, who had family there, and was very lucky to be taken in and shown around by her family. To me, the geography of the city - mountains and water - give it a character that is unusual among major Chinese cities. The closest analogy my friend and I could think of was with Hong Kong (another major city of mountains and water), but really its character is all its own, just as the bluntness that we observed (certainly from my friend's aunt, but also more generally, or so it seemed to us) is probably unrepeatable elsewhere.
And finally, a panda
Because this is what I went to see with my friend on Christmas Day.
Despite keeping a diary, it's not possible to remember all the moments, cheerful or otherwise, and the task becomes harder still during a busy period. Meanwhile, time continues its merry dance of the hours. Christmas comes and goes.
And yet, even if it is a hopeless task, I still want to remember, record and pass on. And not just at Christmas or because it is Christmas - although the urge to communicate with others is doubtless stronger at this time of year - but because it matters to me. So, the following are a few snapshots of the past few weeks.
Leshan
We spent the best part of a Saturday in Leshan, which is only about 2 hours south from Chengdu by bus. The principal attraction is the Big Buddha (大佛), which is the world's tallest sitting Buddha. Despite its vastness, the Buddha remained elusive. We could see its head, close-up, from the top of the mountain, and we saw the entire statue, hazily from one of the muddy, finger-like islands that sticks into the river. Viewed from here, it blended mysteriously into the landscape, only its head truly visible.
But we never got a good look at the whole thing: the angles were all wrong somehow. The Buddha capriciously faced slightly away from the city. A few people grumbled, complaining they had been denied the "money shot"; as a group we fell to speculating on better angles - surely if we were on one of the boats that passed directly beneath the Buddha on the river, we would finally have the perfect view? That must be the best spot, no? After all, that's how the sailors on the river would have seen the Buddha hundreds of years ago, and it was intended for their eyes, wasn't it? Eventually our speculations petered out.
And yet, the impossibility of seeing the whole thing fitted. That day the weather in Leshan was misty and atmospheric - everything was smudged like a Chinese watercolour landscape. Across the face of the waters, the Buddha timelessly gazed, invited, perhaps even reassured, but he did not reveal.
Shimian County
In mid-December, we did a site visit to a county about 4 hours west of Chengdu, in the foothills of the Tibetan plateau. I had visited this landscape before, in 2005, but I had forgotten how it looked, or rather, it was only when I returned there that the memory of its beauty fully revived. Being there was thus a double joy - the immediate appreciation of the landscape overlaid with earlier memories. I remembered all my earlier wonder - it's not like other parts of China that I have seen - the scale is more magnificent, the colours deeper. In places, the violence of the broad, gushing, green waters and sheer cliffs gives way to placid lakes that made me think of Swiss postcards.
Chongqing
Chongqing is evocative, because it was briefly the capital of China during the Second World War, when the whole of eastern China was captured by the Japanese, and it looked for a moment like China itself might cease to exist. The nationalist (Kuomintang or KMT) government chose Chongqing because it was relatively far inland and because its mountainous terrain (it is nicknamed "Mountain City" or 山城), surrounded on three sides by water, offered excellent natural defences. Notwithstanding these advantages, Chongqing suffered a great deal during the War - from heavy aerial bombardment from the Japanese, from floods of refugees arriving from other parts of China, and from espionage and counter-espionage between the KMT and the Communists, who were both struggling for supremacy. These events have left their mark on the city, although it is better known these days as the political base of Bo Xilai, the disgraced "princeling", whose wife was convicted for killing a British businessman several years ago.
I went there last weekend (26-27 December) with a friend, who had family there, and was very lucky to be taken in and shown around by her family. To me, the geography of the city - mountains and water - give it a character that is unusual among major Chinese cities. The closest analogy my friend and I could think of was with Hong Kong (another major city of mountains and water), but really its character is all its own, just as the bluntness that we observed (certainly from my friend's aunt, but also more generally, or so it seemed to us) is probably unrepeatable elsewhere.
And finally, a panda
Because this is what I went to see with my friend on Christmas Day.
