The last time I rode south from Anguo, I had a fabulous time up until just past Wuren Bridge [伍仁桥]. This time, riding south from Anguo, I had a fabulous time up until just past Wuren Bridge. I sense that, in the future, the next time I go to Anguo, I should consider riding a direction other than south.
I started the morning out with a big platter of steamed dumplings that took so long to arrive I'd already made two shots of espresso and was working on getting the third ready. I've got a bit of a dilemma with the coffee in that I want to use up the weight of my UHT boxed cream, but I also want to drink the better coffee (that doesn't need cream) before it ages from mind-blowingly awesome to being merely excellent.
Stopped by the bike shop on my way to the Temple of the Medicine King to wave hello and to refuse to stay either 'just until lunch' (in three hours) or 'just until the Herbal Medicine Fair' (in five days). Both the really nice people whose company I actually enjoy and the ones who seem to just be wowed by a foreigner always ask me to stay and I never can figure out if they really really mean it or if they are just being polite to me. It's frustrating.
Had a minor bike crash on the way to the Temple of the Medicine King. First someone cut me off and banged into my handlebars. Then, in swerving, a three wheeler and I mutually hit each other. Nothing was actually damaged but it took me a while to figure that out as, with my double brake set up, I didn't notice that the reason the rear wheel was jammed up solid was because one of the brake handles had become locked in place.
Most of the non-ancient buildings around the Temple of the Medicine King are gone. The actually really old really cool ones are still generally crumbling but the government has officially banned the owners from knocking them down and putting anything else in their place. Presumably, judging by the new 'old' construction going on at the newly built Medicine King Square and various Historic Downtowns around China, sometime in the next 5-10 years all the remaining non-historic buildings will be rebuilt to match the actually old ones. (The really creepy thing about Haikou's historic downtown is how many of the new buildings I can no longer identify as new.)
This one has got to be my favorite. They sell antiques. They also provide legal services.
As with the rest of Anguo, various prettying up was going on around the temple in advance of the Herbal Medicine Fair. So far as I can tell, this is the first year of holding the fair again after a hiatus of more than a decade and, back when it was held on a yearly basis, it was the biggest annual event in Anguo. Preparations for this year's Herbal Medicine Fair range from 'normal' stuff like making sure the park landscaping is tidy and putting up advertising banners to more extreme stuff like putting down a fresh layer of tarmac and repainting the lines on every single street in Anguo.
The big extended temple behind the original temple had just started being built 6 years ago. The square, which I visited first, wasn't (so far as I know) even in the planning stages.
"The cultural park is made of plastic bronze sculptures of the medicine king named Pitong and the bronze statue sitting forwards the east is 18 inches high and weighs more than 20 tons."
Bicycle for scale next to the "18 inch" tall statue of the Medicine King
Some important responsible person who spent nearly as much time taking pictures of me visiting the temple as he did showing off various things I might not otherwise have noticed wandered off from where he had been getting in people's way 'directing' the delivery of things to guide me around. It was only after he left that I noticed the quality of the translation on the few signs with English but, of course, I now couldn't find him to go be a business person and offer my services.
Forest of steles at the Temple of the Medicine King
Originally built in 1st year of the Ming Emperor Yongle, the Rear Hall has statues of the Medicine King and his two wives. The wall murals behind the figures are supposedly originals according to the introduction sign (but very clearly aren't)
One of his wives. Note the slight double-chin. Being fat means that you aren't skinny and for most of history that meant being insulated from starving to death during periods of food insecurity. Being fat was a good thing.
Murals like this series certainly are not originals (though there may be originals lurking somewhere beneath the centuries of restorations) but at least they have some artistic value
I still find most of the statues in the Temple of the Medicine King to be on the boring side of slightly tacky late 1990s early 2000s temple architecture but, in the intervening six years since the last time I was here, I've come to have a better appreciation for that particular style as an art form. I think this is generally because the more recent style of mass produced non-art to be found at commercialized temples is even worse.
Modern stuff like this (which wasn't finished in 2012) is very much not to my tastes at all but, again, I have to admit that it's much much better than the temples where every statue is a copy of some statue I've seen somewhere else
I swear, it's like every single place in China that has decorated the ceilings has to use one of five Approved Ceiling Decoration Patterns. These are bats, by the way. This is because bat "蝠" is pronounced the same as fortune "福"
Riding south from Anguo, my next stop was Xingguo Temple [兴国寺]. It's much less a wreck than it was in 2012. It's still a wreck. Just a different kind of wreck with lots of half started projects that weren't very well thought out. I appreciate why the people whose religion it is would want to fix the broken statues or gild the Buddha. I don't understand why they haven't also done basic maintenance on the building which was brand new six years ago but there's a lot of things I don't understand about China.
A newly gilded Buddha now indoors (albeit in a blue construction steel temporary workers housing type of indoors but still indoors)
Mark BinghamI assume the shape on the chest of this statue has a completely different meaning in the East than it does in the West? :-) Reply to this comment 1 year ago
Between Xingguo Temple and Wuren Bridge, I stopped at a lovely little martyr's cemetery as well as a martyr's memorial that must have been put up just before the very end of the Chinese Civil War as, despite memorializing a whole bunch of communists, it gave the date as being the 35th year of the founding of the Republic of China.
Other than that, it was a long straight boring provincial road that, mercifully, didn't have too many trucks. And, once I passed Wuren Bridge, it kept being a long straight boring provincial road.
A modern (2014) stone pavilion with a locking gate around the outside of the stone memorial pavilion
There were bright spots like the guy with the homemade recumbent or finding the tiny temple with decaying mud and wattle Buddhas all cleaned up with windows and a door, a new roof, an interior coat of plaster, and completely redone statues. But generally, at least until I managed to stop for a pee and stumble across the same 'unimportant' old stone bridge from six years ago, it was long straight boring and kind of trucky.
This time, I decided to go across the stone bridge and, once I'd crossed it, to ride through the countryside all the way through til I hit a good stopping point. Myf would have very much hated the road I was on and would have very much preferred the road I had been on but neither the potholes nor the dust were too bad and I'll take dust and potholes over trucks any day. It still wasn't super interesting but I liked it much better than the main route.
The view in 2012 gives both a better idea of the structure of the bridge and the state of water pollution in the area at the time. I'd always wondered how the stone slabs were fitted together; since they are falling apart on this bridge, I can see.
Getting close to Wuji County [无极县] and my eventual stopping point in Zhangduangu Town [张段古镇], I found myself riding through an area that produces a lot of leather goods. I don't know if any of the many factories I biked past were actual tanneries but they definitely stunk like nothing else I've ever smelled before. Thankfully, Zhangduangu was just far enough away that it didn't.
Ate a nice dinner of dumplings just off the big main road in Zhangduangu and headed for the first hotel I saw where, despite being not only in Hebei (which is often a problem for lots of people) but already technically inside Shijiazhuang (which is almost always a problem), and despite being only 60元 a night for an ensuite with air conditioning, they not only had zero problem with registering me (on the computer no less), they already had a cheat sheet taped to the wall with the important English phrases from passports.
I was their first American guest. With the leather goods factories in the area, they've also had a number of Mongolians and Indonesians.
Lots of Catholic churches in the Shijiazhuang area.
