Huangshan revisited

Huangshan, Anhi province

I last visited Huangshan in southern Anhui province in July, 1981, when I was leaving Wuhan after two years. Some students and faculty came to the boat dock to see me off. I was going to Wuhu, from there catching a bus to Huangshan. En route to Wuhu, I read Norman Mailer’s then-new The Executioner’s Song, about the execution of Gary Gilmore by firing squad, the first person executed since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1975. I thought this would be a good way to begin reintegrating myself into American society.


Huangshan: 88 craggy peaks


I revisited Huanghsan last month, thirty years later. It’s a range of 88 peaks, the tallest, Lotus Peak, not much over a mile high. They are folded granitic intrusions, different mountains having distinctive contortions, folds, erosion patterns and surfaces. Some are smooth, some jagged, the effects of weathering producing shapes that invite fanciful names.


The 老爷

 Cars and buses take you part way up, to the park entrance, where you pay a stiff 250 kuai, about $40, for entrance, unless you’re lucky enough to be over 60, when it’s half price. I was happy to produce my passport and get in for half price, less happy when a young climber told a friend to move out of my way in a narrow spot to let the laoye, 老爷, through, a term meaning roughly “grandfather.”

Thirty years ago I’d climbed to Heavenly Capital Peak in four hours and was back down for lunch, but I wrote in my journal that “the last part, climbing almost straight up stairs in places too narrow for two to pass abreast, cut right into the rock, was so exhausting I could barely manage the more straightforward climb to adjacent Jade Screen peak, where I had lunch and a beer, and numbly headed down, arriving at 3:30 or so.”

That first part of the climb is the hardest; once you are to Heavenly Capital Peak, the others – White Goose Ridge, Beginning-to-Believe Peak (the sign says, in English, “It’s so fantastic you don’t believe your eyes; seeing with your eyes you believe it’s really fantastic.”) Lion Peak, Jade Screen Peak – are less strenuous since paths connect the peaks.

So I kept climbing and climbing until early evening, when people begin to gather on the peaks to watch the sunset. But time had told on the老爷; my legs were tired and wobbly and I wanted to get back to the bottom before dark. The town of Tangkou is at the bottom of the mountains; Huangshan city is some distance away.


Tangkou town

Huangshan was a popular place when I went there thirty years ago, especially with students. On my second morning there in 1981 it was rainy, and I climbed up to Bei Hai where I spent the night at a hotel on top. I wrote in my journal that there were “makeshift dormitories for the Chinese students who were off long before dawn – a large crowd gathering for both sunset and dawn,” but there was none of the sea of clouds effect for which Huangshan is famed and which has attracted the brushes of countless painters over the centuries, “just puffs of cloud misting here and there, and boys huddled in winter jackets provided by the hotel for the specific purpose of watching the sunrise.”


There are people on that peak!

There weren’t any clouds on this visit either. Instead of the hardy students of those days, when Huangshan was harder to get to and harder to climb, there are large tour groups with bright colored gimme hats and metal-tipped walking sticks, and guides with shrieking speakers. People still take their mountain climbing seriously though; clusters of people gather at the top of peaks that have no apparent means of access. Admonitory signs, in English and Chinese, line the paths, my favorite being “Leave your virtue in Huangshan.” A less entertaining translation: “Leave Huangshan beautiful.”

Leave your virtue in Huangshan

Back in Tangkou, I had a vigorous foot and leg massage and, to my surprise, felt no after effects the next morning. I missed the Bei Hai sunrise, since it was a short outing: I had to take an early bus to Hangzhou and flight back to Wuhan.

May day in Fenghuang ancient town



Fenghuang at night

 Over the May 1 holiday I went to Fenghuang in western Hunan province, another popular “ancient town” that people flock to as old China disappears. Getting there involved taking the high speed train to Changsha out of the Wuhan train station, which is actually in northern Wuchang and serves only the high speed train network. It’s a huge, ultramodern place, more like airport than train station, with sixteen gates. The high speed rail network is still a-building all over China; when it’s done it’s going to be the best of its kind in the world.

The trip to Changsha was very twenty-first century; after that, things began to retreat rapidly toward the mid-twentieth, and earlier. The bus trip to Fenghuang was out of the Changsha west bus station, a jumble of a place, not helped by pouring rain. There were no gates through which to access the buses: you just go out and stumble about trying find your bus in the muddy yard, while people with little signs try to find you. The four hour bus trip went through rugged, beautifully mountainous countryside, but the road was atrocious, with constant stops for construction and mudslides.

Fenghuang and the Tuo river

Fenghuang – Phoenix town -- has an interesting history. It was set up along the Tuo River during the Ming and Qing dynasties during a campaign to suppress rebellions by the local Miao population. The Xiangxi Border Wall built to protect the town still stands. It was, a local brochure notes, a rather small wall, a sixth the length of the Great Wall, “because that Miao Ethnic Minority group was not that formidable as North minorities.”

The town is in a picturesque setting along the river. Despite the hard journey there, the place was jammed over the brief May Day holiday: the sign over one bar cum service center identified the place as “China’s famous tourist area bays,” and “A beautiful met A roman tic story – All in keep watcher.”

People were doing all the things people do in ancient towns: dressing up in Miao costumes and having their picture taken, dressing up in Kuomintang uniforms and having their picture taken, going for a boat ride on the river in a Wupeng boat and having their picture taken.

KMT kitsch

Eating, of course. My favorite dish was little deep fried small whole crabs, although the tiny whole deep fried crispy shrimps were pretty good too. And the little deep fried fish. And the deep fried dofu.

Deep fried yummies



Miao for a day


Fenghuang was home to the famous writer Shen Congwen, Miao author of Xiao Xiao and other novels dealing mainly with Miao life. The New York Times noted on his death in 1988 that he had been compared to Chekhov, but was denounced “by the Communists and Nationalists alike,” and his books were banned in Taiwan and destroyed in China: “So successful was the effort to erase Mr. Shen's name from the modern literary record that few younger Chinese today recognize his name, much less the breadth of his work.” This was in 1988, but Shen’s former home in Fenghuang is now a tourist site, and his books widely sold, at least in Fenghuang.


Rafting to Miao village



Getting to Miao ren gu

Miao plowman

On the second day I took a bus trip to a Miao village, the name of which I was never able to get clear (it was just called “Miao ren gu,” ancient village, by everyone I asked). Getting there involved long delays, a bus ride, followed by a raft ride, then clambering through a cave to get to the remote location the villagers had chosen to protect themselves from the Han forces. It was another muddy, rainy day, but a picturesque setting, where people wear reed capes in the rain and use water buffalo to plow, something you don’t see much elsewhere in China now.

The return bus trip to Changsha on day 3 was less arduous – better bus, fewer stops – but I arrived at Changsha west bus station in saturating rain, deep mud, long lines of sodden, grimy people in the rain struggling to clamber on to the few buses. Eventually, wet and grumpy, I got to my hotel, conveniently located near the Whacko market.


Hunan Normal school


The next day, a Monday, I visited Hunan First Normal College, Chairman Mao’s former school in Changsha. I had greater ambitions, wanting to see the Changsha museum and the Mawangdui tombs, which I’d visited in 1980, but both are closed on Mondays. Mao was a student at the school from 1913 to 1918, and taught there for a time in the early 1920s. Despite its several exalted designations (“One –thousand-year Academy and One-hundred-year Normal School,” as well as “National Major Cultural Relic Preservation Unit,” and “Patriotic Education Base for Changsha and Hunan Province”), the school is still busy, with noisy music students on the day I was there.