There are three temples and a mosque in the town of Yanguan. On each of the three occasions I have been to Yanguan, I've been to a different temple; I suppose this means that the next time I will have to visit the mosque.

I spend well upwards of an hour sitting outside the Saltwell Temple that not only gives Yanguan (Salt Official) Town it's name but was also immortalised in a poem by Du Fu. As with the last time I was in Yanguan, the temple is locked. Unlike the last time though, I've called the number on the gate and I'm waiting for someone to come and open it up for me.

Two other obvious tourists show up around the time that the caretaker comes and unlocks and I start to jokingly give them shit about it but then they—and the crowd of school kids that follow us inside—decide to actually do temple things in the temple so I just go and awkwardly look at frescoes instead.

I appreciate good art. I absolutely adore poorly executed art made with love. I'm not much of a fan of middle of the road stuff, and I particularly loathe mass produced consumer grade "art".

Most nearly everything visible in the Saltwell Temple post dates the 1993 restoration. As mid 90s fresco goes, it's astonishingly well done. Unlike many temple painters, whoever did these was clearly trained in such arcane skills as making your people look human. 

I'm rather surprised by the wood statues of the various gods and goddesses. Both the one shrine that's still empty but for a "god goes here" plaque, and the main hall where the fresco painter had initially painted the figures on the wall tell me that the wooden figures are modern folk art rather than something historical yet, for most of the past decade¹, every modern statue I've come across was concrete or heavy plaster.

For this temple, for this caretaker, photographing the stories on the walls is okay but photographing the gods in their shrines is not.

I personally tend to subscribe to the idea that tasteful photos (i.e. not selfies) of the figures from both a comparative religion point of view and an appreciating the art point of view is something that the figures wouldn't mind if the figures had consciousness.

Not everyone does though.

And as long as the person disagreeing with me over photography is doing so from an honest "it makes me uncomfortable for you to take a picture of that" point of view, I will respect their wishes.

It's when the person disagreeing with me over photography insists on articulating a bullshit excuse like "your camera is sending out invisible light beams that will damage the sculpture" that I start having problems. It particularly bothers me that, in most instances where I've been around truly authentically religious people, I've been encouraged to take beautiful photos that accurately document the awesomeness of [insert religious figure here] and the effort that the locals have made into creating a respectful representation of [religious figure].

After a visit to Saltwell Temple that was substantially shorter than the time spent sitting on the stoop waiting to be let in, I get a bowl of the most amazing noodles at the traditional market alley at the intersection of what I shall refer to as Main Street and Temple Avenue.

I do not, as I had initially hoped, manage to find out the schedule of the Market Days like the one which was going on the last time I woke up in Yanguan but, although the police officer who called me in the morning to ensure from a paperwork related point of view that I wasn't spending the night again didn't quite understand my point², he's since added me on TikTok³ so I'll have plenty of time to ask him later.

It's around noon by the time I actually hit the road. I stop in the town of Qishanbao not to visit their large fortress or the temple inside it (both of which were an overpriced tourist site in 2018) but to take a video of the old commercial street from when this was still the Main Road. 

While Main Street (which I don't visit this time) is still full of shops and people, the cars and the trucks and the through traffic doesn't come this way anymore so the white tiled buildings with blue window glass from a late 90s push by the government to update everything outsiders might casually see and make it look pretty remains a frozen moment in time.

The town of Changdao beneath the Changdao Fort (which is currently made completely invisible by spring growth and is only known to exist by way of a concrete plaque and my having been through here in the fall of 2018) is my next stop. Here I get a not very good frozen yogurt while I sit in the shade and quickly do a bit of work for my Large Media Client.

Back on the road, I'm heading to Xihe which I've never visited before. The slogans alongside this road have a particularly "feminist" bent⁴ and I can't decide if this is at odds with my catching sight of a lotus foot granny hobbling along the side of the road or in response to this being the kind of area where foot binding was sufficiently prevalent sufficiently long enough into the modern era that it's still possible to just randomly see a woman with lotus feet⁵ making her way about.

I can't find the fort that gives the town of Stonefort it's name and there's another fort I'll try to visit near the end of the day where there's a map marker and a historical plaque but nothing I can find. However, Stonefort has two sets of grottoes.

There's the ones you can visit with the standing Buddhas that I only find out about via the comments section of my TikTok after I've already left and there's the cluster of nine on a cliff that make me want—for the second time the trip—more than anything else, to have a drone. In theory, there's a path for climbing along the cliff which could be used to get to the grottoes, but, it's the "KEEP OUT: Historical Relics Protection Area" sign next to the path that let me know to be looking around for the historical relics and I'm not real big on going places I've been explicitly forbidden from going.

After another bout of work completed while eating most of an astonishingly not very good bowl of wontons, I'll make it into Xihe as the sun is setting to find a closed looking police station. As this is a County Seat and I'm actively expecting lodging problems, I call emergency services and get to meet three lovely officers who have no problem at all with registering me or my staying anywhere I want.

That's not to say however that lodging will be easy tonight.

Tomorrow is the middle school entrance exam and, in order to make sure that their children make it on time to the schools they have been on time to every day this year on a day when roads are closed specifically in order to facilitate children to the test sites on time, every parent in the county with the money to do so has taken the closest hotel room they could get to their child's school.

I will go to 12 hotels before I find one that still has a vacancy.

¹ There were some straw and mud plaster figures in Hebei in 2012. They've since been replaced with concrete.

² I got the schedule of the annual Temple Fair instead

³ All of the police who have added me on TikTok are interesting in different ways. One of the detectives from my drug arrest is prone to duck face selfies and wishing she had a boyfriend, the other doesn't post any of his own content but really likes to watch construction videos; the officer in Guizhou has the most adorablely bad videos of him and his wife being an old married couple interspersed with photos of the weather;  there's a few who are trying to be the Next Officer With a Big Social Media Following making rehashed Public Safety Announcements; and, then there's this guy with mostly calligraphy that's mostly by his own hand.

⁴ Nothing quite so forceful as the 反对家暴 "Fight Against Domestic Violence" I'll see about a week later but still an unusually large number of pro-women slogans in an unusually short span of distance.

⁵ The granny north of Qingcheng was the first person I've ever met with bound feet and, being as it happened to her as a 10 year old, you could be mistaken in just thinking she had small feet. These were obvious from across the road lotus feet.