South of the Yangtze Read online

  To Melanie Nan and Nic Gould

  Text and photographs copyright © 2016 by Bill Porter

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Porter, Bill, 1943-

  Title: South of the Yangtze: travels through the heart of China / Bill Porter.

  Description: Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016008978

  Subjects: LCSH: Yangtze River Region (China)--Description and travel. | Porter, Bill, 1943---Travel--China--Yangtze River Region. | Landscapes--China--Yangtze River Region. | Yangtze River Region (China)--History, Local. | Yangtze River Region (China)--Social life and customs. | Yangtze River Region (China)--Pictorial works. | Black-and-white photography--China--Yangtze River Region. | BISAC: TRAVEL / Asia / China.

  Classification: LCC DS793.Y3 P67 2016 | DDC 951.2--dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008978

  Cover and interior design by Gopa & Ted2, Inc.

  Typesetting by Tabitha Lahr

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  e-book isbn 9781619028845

  Contents

  Map

  1.Kuangchou

  2.Hengyang & Hengshan

  3.Revolutionaries

  4.Changsha

  5.Poets

  6.The Spirit of the River

  7.Lushan

  8.Pure Land & Zen

  9.Nanchang

  10.Porcelain & Ink

  11.Huangshan & Chiuhuashan

  12.Li Pai

  13.Nanking

  14.Immortals & Teapots

  15.Wuhsi & Changshu

  16.Suchou

  17.Hermits & Pearls

  18.Hangchou

  19.Shaohsing

  20.Tientai

  21.Ningpo

  22.Putuoshan

  Lexicon

  1. Kuangchou

  If you look at a map of China, you can’t help but notice that the country is dominated by two rivers—two rivers that wander more than 5,000 kilometers, from west to east, and from the roof of the world to the sea. The river that drains North China is the Yellow River, the Huangho, while the river that drains Central China is the Long River, or Changchiang, better known in the West as the Yangtze. I suppose we could also add the West River, which drains South China. But South China has not played much of a role in the development of Chinese civilization until very recently.

  Kuanghsiao Temple and mind-flapping flagpole

  Steve and Finn’s plane landing at Kai Tak

  Chinese civilization first developed 5,000 years ago in North China along the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, and that remained its center for the next 4,000 years. Then a thousand years ago, this changed. A thousand years ago, as a result of invasions from the north, the center of Chinese civilization moved south to the Yangtze. Several centuries later, the Chinese recaptured the North and once more established their capital there. But the Yangtze, not the Yellow River, has remained the center of its civilization ever since.

  A thousand years ago, the Chinese came up with a name for this region. They called it Chiangnan, South of the River, the river in question, of course, being the Yangtze. The Chinese still call it Chiangnan. Nowadays it includes the northern parts of Chekiang, Kiangsi, and Hunan provinces and the southern parts of Anhui and Kiangsu. But it’s not just a region on the map. It’s a region in the Chinese spirit. And if you ask a dozen Chinese what “Chiangnan” means, they’ll give you a dozen answers. For some, the word conjures forests of pine and bamboo. For others, hillsides of tea, terraces of rice, or lakes of lotuses and fish. Or they imagine Zen monasteries, Taoist temples, artfully-constructed gardens, or mist-shrouded peaks. Oddly enough, no one I have asked has ever mentioned the region’s cities, which include some of the largest in the world. Somehow, whatever else it might mean to the Chinese, Chiangnan means a landscape and a culture defined by mist, a landscape and a culture that lacks the harder edges of the arid, ever-embattled North.

  In the fall of 1991, I decided to travel through Chiangnan, following the old post roads that still connect its administrative centers and scenic wonders. I was in Hong Kong at the time, and being a foreigner, I needed a visa. This was always easy to arrange. China was next door. A visa could take as little as a day.

  Once I had my visa, it was time to pack. I got out the old Forest Service backpack I had acquired in the summer of 1977 while trying to recover from hepatitis with a regimen of physical labor. I tossed in a couple changes of clothes, including a jacket for the rain—the Yangtze, after all, carries more water than any other river in the world, and that water has to come from somewhere and fall on someone. I also added a camera to record the sights I hoped to see, and a journal to record the insights I hoped to be blessed with, and a set of prayer beads for the buses, and enough money to last six weeks. I figured the trip I had in mind would cost $1500—a modest amount, as I would be sharing hotel rooms and meals with my friends Finn Wilcox and Steve Johnson.

  A couple years earlier, Finn and Steve published a book together called Here Among the Sacrificed about the fine life of riding freight trains in America. Finn was a poet, and Steve was a photographer—not that either of them made a living doing either. Poems and photos were what they were good at. Both had to find other ways of making a living. Finn worked as a tree planter and landscape gardener. Steve worked in a boatyard repairing sailboats and fishing trawlers.

  I watched their plane arrive at Kai Tak Airport. Kai Tak landings were always exciting. Whenever pilots made that final turn as they straightened out short of the runway, passengers could look just beyond the wingtips into apartment buildings and see people playing mahjong or watching TV. It was exhilarating. When Finn and Steve came through customs, they were still talking about the landing and glad to be alive. I smiled and welcomed them to Hong Kong.

  Since they had already arranged their China visas in America, there was no need to linger. We headed for the train station. It was late September, but fall had yet to show up. The temperature was in the nineties. Fortunately, the express train we boarded in Hong Kong was air conditioned. It would be the last air-conditioning we would enjoy for quite a while.

  The train was the express to Kuangchou. Once it left, it didn’t stop until it got there. This was 1991, and the border town of Shenchen was simply that, just a border town. As we entered China, there was a big billboard with a smiling picture of Teng Hsiao-p’ing telling us that change was on the way. If it was, it hadn’t reached Shenchen. At least, not yet. A few minutes later, we entered a landscape of rice fields and duck ponds and farmers dressed in black wearing broad-brimmed hats of woven bamboo. Variations of this scene continued for two hours, until the factories began to appear, and finally the high-rise apartment buildings. Two and a half hours after leaving Hong Kong, we arrived in Kuangchou. We slipped through immigration and customs so fast we felt like diplomats.

  Outside the train station, we waited in line at a taxi stand. I hadn’t made hotel reservations, and we considered which one to stay at. We couldn’t afford the White Swan, but we wanted to stay in the same area along the Pearl River. We decided to try the Aichun, and a 10RMB taxi ride took us to its front door. It overlooked the banks of the river, and a triple with a river view cost a mere 170RMB, or 35 bucks
.

  The attendant unlocked the windows so that we could breathe in the air from the river. It smelled like it carried the sweat of every one of the city’s three million residents. After washing off our own with a hot shower and watching the sun go down from our room, we went for a walk along the promenade. We soon found ourselves opposite one of the city’s most famous restaurants: the Tatung. We walked inside and up a flight of stairs to the third floor. The place was packed. Obviously its reputation was still intact, and we did nothing to impugn it. Among the dishes we ordered was one for which it was rightfully famous: suckling pig. A modest portion cost a modest 17RMB or 3 bucks. It was so crisp and succulent we couldn’t believe such food could cost so little. And it was but one dish among half a dozen.

  Afterwards, we returned to the promenade and sat down on a stone bench that overlooked the river. Along the railing, two young people were leaning against each other. The only light was that of a gibbous moon. We sat there talking about the trip we were taking and the places we planned to see: the mountains, the temples, the shrines, the historical sights, even the cities, the places where people we admired had lived and died a long time ago. We agreed that paying our respects to China’s poets of the past would be a highlight of our trip, assuming we could find them. In honor of this sentiment, Finn wrote his first poem:

  Beneath the hanging banyans

  we open three warm beers

  and toast the floating moon

  that lights the muddy Pearl

  And so our trip began, beside the Pearl River that had been bringing travelers to Kuangchou for over 2,000 years. One traveler who sailed up the Pearl from the South China Sea was Bodhidharma. He was the man who brought Zen to China. After a three-year voyage by ship from his home in South India, he arrived in Kuangchou around 470 ,AD. One of the temples where he stayed was still there. It was called Kuanghsiao Temple, and it was our first destination the next morning.

  After checking out of our hotel and leaving our bags at the train station, we took a taxi to the temple. Five minutes later, we walked through its huge front gate. The first thing we noticed was a well on our right. According to a sign, it was dug by Bodhidharma before he headed north, crossed the Yangtze, and eventually settled in a cave near Shaolin Temple on Mount Sungshan. Chinese Buddhists call Bodhidharma China’s First Patriarch of Zen, Zen being the understanding of what the Buddha realized by means of an intuitive, direct approach rather than a philosophical one: a cup of tea instead of a discourse.

  Two hundred years after Bodhidharma arrived, a Buddhist layman named Hui-neng (638–713) also came to the same temple. Some years earlier he had traveled to a temple just north of the Yangtze to study with Hung-jen (601–674), Zen’s Fifth Patriarch. Nine months later, Hung-jen decided to pass on leadership of the Zen lineage. His health was failing, and he didn’t know whom to choose, so one day he called his disciples together and told them that whoever wrote a poem that best presented the teaching of Zen would become the Sixth Patriarch. The Fifth Patriarch’s chief disciple wrote:

  This body is a tree of wisdom

  this mind is like a mirror

  always keep it clean

  don’t let it gather dust

  Stupa containing Hui-neng’s hair

  When Hui-neng heard this, he laughed and responded with his own poem:

  Wisdom isn’t a tree

  the mind isn’t like a mirror

  there isn’t anything at all

  where do you get this dust

  Hung-jen proclaimed him the Sixth Patriarch. This happened in 672 AD. Hui-neng, however, was an uneducated layman and not a monk. To avoid jealous rivals he returned to his home province of Kuangtung and hid out in the mountains for a number of years. Finally, one day he entered the same temple where Finn and Steve and I were standing. He noticed that people were looking at a flag flapping in the wind. Two monks were arguing about the flag: one of them said the flag was moving, the other said the wind was doing the moving. Hui-neng interrupted them and said, “You’re both wrong. The only things moving around here are your minds.” Everyone was stunned. The abbot then introduced himself and said, “You, sir, are no ordinary visitor. I heard the Sixth Patriarch had come south. You wouldn’t be he, would you?” Hui-neng acknowledged his status and gave a sermon about the absence of duality in the realm of truth. Afterwards, the abbot offered to shave Hui-neng’s head. Up to that point, Hui-neng had been a layman. Now he became a monk.

  As we approached Kuanghsiao Temple’s main shrine hall, we could see the flagpole where the minds of the two monks flapped in the wind 1,300 years earlier. The main shrine hall, itself, was also noteworthy. It was first built in the fourth century, and it had been rebuilt many times. We were impressed by the understated colors of its most recent incarnation. Instead of the yellow roof tiles and red pillars meant to remind people of an imperial palace, its T’ang-dynasty color scheme of gray tiles, brown pillars, and white walls imparted a feeling of simplicity and serenity. When we looked inside, we saw dozens of Chinese—and even several Westerners—meditating in front of the hall’s three huge wooden buddhas.

  The temple’s most famous treasure, though, wasn’t its shrine hall or its buddha statues. It was a small stupa outside, behind the hall. It contained Hui-neng’s hair. We walked around to the back of the hall, then lit some incense and circumambulated the stupa three times. Bodhidharma and Hui-neng were our heroes, and here we were, standing in the same place where they once stood. It was a humbling, but also an exhilarating feeling, which we hoped we would be repeating in the days ahead.

  After paying our respects to China’s two most famous Zen masters, we walked around the temple grounds. The trees were huge, and there were signs on some. They were planted here before Hui-neng and Bodhidharma arrived and were part of a garden that belonged to an official who was banished to Kuangchou in the third century for criticizing the emperor. Among the trees he planted were bodhi trees, similar to the one under which the Buddha was enlightened. He also planted Indian almond trees, which the Chinese call k’o .

  During the fourth century, the official’s garden became a Buddhist monastery, and it’s been a monastery ever since. On our way out, we met a group of young monks who lived there. They were graduates of a famous Buddhist academy in Hsiamen and turned out to be friends of the monk who had guided Steve and me through the Chungnan Mountains south of Sian two years earlier during our search for hermits, a search that led to the writing of Road to Heaven. Their abbot also turned out to be a friend of Shou-yeh, the monk with whom I had first studied Buddhism in New York City over twenty years earlier. It was a small world.

  I was a graduate student at Columbia University, and Master Shou-yeh had just arrived from China, via Hong Kong. He was still fairly weak from writing out the Huayen Sutra, the longest of all Buddhist scriptures, in his own blood. But he was there to teach, and I was there to learn. Since I was a Westerner, he kept his instruction simple. He taught me the watermelon sutra, which consisted of just one word: “watermelon.” It was the only English word he knew. He told me to think about it on hot summer days. And there I was at Kuanghsiao Temple twenty years later thinking about watermelon. It wasn’t summer. But it was hot. As we walked back out the temple’s front gate, waiting for us across the street was a fruit stand and slices of watermelon—courtesy, no doubt, of my old master.

  Calligraphy of Su Tung-p’o: Six Banyans

  After quenching our thirst, we walked several more blocks to another place associated with Hui-neng. It was called Liujung Temple, Temple of the Six Banyans. The first thing we noticed, though, wasn’t its banyans but its nine-story pagoda. It was erected in 537, about fifty years after the temple was built. Locally, it was known as the Ornate Pagoda, to distinguish it from the minaret of the mosque several blocks to the south. The mosque was built in 627 by an uncle of Mohammed, which made it the oldest mosque in China. But its minaret was an unadorned, smooth-faced structure, and only twenty-five meters high, in contrast with the t
emple’s multi-tiered sixty-meter tower.

  Over the entrance were the words SIX BANYANS. The calligraphy was that of Su Tung-p’o, one of China’s great poets and calligraphers. Su visited the temple during his exile in the year 1100, a year before his death. When Su visited, there were six trees in the courtyard to the left of the pagoda. Hence, he wrote the characters Liu Jung, or Six Banyans, to commemorate his visit. Two of the trees were still here, shading the courtyard that stretched between a pavilion and a shrine hall honoring Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch. Inside the hall was a bronze statue cast in 989 from Hui-neng’s mummified body. He looked so thin we couldn’t help thinking about lunch.

  We were in luck. Three blocks away was Kuangchou’s most famous vegetarian restaurant. It was called Tsaikenhsiang, and it served dishes that looked like meat and tasted like meat but weren’t meat. They were made of tofu and wheat gluten and mushrooms, and everything we ordered tasted great. But we needed something to wash it down, and ordered beers. We were disappointed to learn that they didn’t serve alcohol. It was a Buddhist restaurant and beer wasn’t allowed. We sighed and paid the bill and considered our options.

  If it had been closer to sunset, we could have taken a taxi to Jenmin Bridge and boarded a Pearl River cruise. But it was early afternoon, and we thought a park might be nice. There were three downtown and all of them within the shortest of taxi rides. The closest was Orchid Park. As its name suggested, it was devoted to orchids. And the price of admission included a pot of tea. It wasn’t beer, but suddenly tea sounded good. Another possibility was the huge, rambling sprawl of Yuehhsiu Park just east of Orchid Park. It had something for everyone: man-made lakes, endless paths, the city museum, and statues of the five goats that brought the five immortals who founded Kuangchou more than 2,000 years earlier. There was also the less frequented oasis of Liuhua Park and its palm-lined pathways.