Longevity Mountain (3)—Road to South Peak

Click here for the introduction (first post) to the Round and Square series "Longevity Mountain."
Click here for the table of contents (second post) to the Round and Square series "Longevity Mountain."

Longevity Mountain 1          Longevity Mountain 2          Longevity Mountain 3          Longevity Mountain 4 
Longevity Mountain 5          Longevity Mountain 6          Longevity Mountain 7          Longevity Mountain 8
Longevity Mountain 9          Longevity Mountain 10        Longevity Mountain 11        Longevity Mountain 12

[a] South Peak view  RL

During the last two weeks of July and into early August I will be posting segments from my project dealing with five Chinese mountains that are often referred to as "the sacred mountains of China." They represent each of the "five directions" found in early Chinese thought (think of the ones you know and then add the middle as the fifth); they have figured prominently in Chinese political culture, travel, and religion for 3,000 years. I have spent almost 400 days on the mountains, and am working on a series of books that detail the mountains and their "home" areas. Mountains were said to connect earth (thought to be "square") with heaven (thought to be "round"). The entire project is called—this may or may not surprise you—Round and Square.

One volume is planned for each mountain, beginning with the southern peak, Mt. Heng, in Hunan province. The reasoning behind this choice of a starting place took me months to develop, but suffice it to say that these books will take the reader up and down each of the five sacred (sometimes called "Daoist") mountains and around the lunar calendar in an exploration of Chinese life and culture. As an introduction to the series, I have included an introduction that is based on a recent book proposal and a full "sample" table of contents. These are followed by nine "scenes" from Longevity Mountain that are meant to give readers a sense of the project as a whole. Photographs used in this series were taken during my travels, unless otherwise indicated. My photos are marked "RL."

Scene Three

The Road to South Peak

Leaving the Changsha south bus station, I begin the three-hour trip to the village of Nanyue. In English, we’d probably call it “South Peak.” Each major city in China has four bus stations, reaching out in all directions to the countryside. With a major train station in the city’s center, it creates a kind of diesel-fueled twist on the five-direction, five-mountain theme of early Chinese cosmology. For the most part, the locations are obvious—southerly destinations leave from the southern station, northerly destinations from the northern station, and so forth. To give a North American reference, let’s say you are in Cleveland and traveling to Toronto; you would leave from the northern station. 

Occasionally though, it is a bit tricky, and it is always better to ask than to guess. One summer day in Hangzhou I planned to take the bus due west to 九華山, Nine Flowers Mountain, in Anhui Province. When I bought my ticket, I told the attendant “jiuhua shan.” She promptly told me the price, took my money, and gave me a ticket for...Yellow Mountain, to the southwest (or west-south, as the Chinese say). Undoing the process, and getting my money back, I finally learned that the bus to westerly Nine Flowers Mountain leaves from the north station.

[b] Town  RL

We are in the southland now, and my bus—a thirty-seat “mid-size”—pulls out of the station, drives a kilometer or two through Changsha industry to Zhongyi First Road, cuts through a “no-entry” exit lane, and weaves through six lanes of flying traffic (three lanes each way, with no median). I might have preferred waiting at the stoplight for the left turn signal to this particular shortcut. I calm down when I no longer see trucks and buses barreling headlong toward the windshield, and vow to look out the side windows, if only to keep terror at bay.

The pace slows, and I sit, riveted by the unfolding picture of the southern summer agricultural season—the lush rice fields, the little gaggle of goslings being led toward the stream by a sauntering owner with a long directing stick, the oxen in the fields, slowly pulling ancient plows through knee-deep mud. Every meter of ground seems planted, terraced, and tended (with curiously small bodies—the result of stooping…while standing up to the knees in mud). I can’t even make out knees in most cases, but heads are everywhere—some covered by traditional straw triangle hats, some with black wads of hair in the sun, and one or two with NBA logo caps.

The clusters of buildings spaced alongside the road—these are not even “small towns”—are still quite sturdy tiny communities, and show a mixture of prosperity, eclecticism, and economic confusion. Grocery stores double as mechanic shops; stone workers (making marble housing items such as stone lions and even baseball players) mix with slat producers, which are everywhere. Elm wood producers with elaborate unfinished trunks sit by the side of chicken coops. A group of boys plays half-court basketball amidst chickens, dogs, and leftover grain from the earlier “drying” phases of local agriculture. If this were the NBA, little kids with towels would run out during pauses in the action to sweep away the stray corn.

The starkest example, though, appears on a sign in a small roadside community about an hour out of Changsha.

Well Water

Air-Conditioning Refills

Wheel and Tire Repair

Pig Washing

Hogwash. 

We rumble down the road. As the bus nears Nanyue (South Peak), the little town at the edge of the mountain, I focus on keeping my tongue in my mouth. This has nothing to do with speech; all of my seatmates are sleeping, in any case. No one wants to talk. No, the road is so bumpy that a misplaced tongue could be a severed one. It reminds me of the passage in Around the World in Eighty Days, when Passepartout is given the advice that bus travelers in Hunan should note well. Elephant, bus—same issue.

Phileas Fogg and Sir Francis Cromarty, plunged to the neck in the peculiar howdahs provided for them, were horribly jostled by the swift trotting of the elephant, spurred on as he was by the skilful Parsee; but they endured the discomfort with true British phlegm, talking little, and scarcely able to catch a glimpse of each other. As for Passepartout, who was mounted on the beast's back, and received the direct force of each concussion as he trod along, he was very careful, in accordance with his master's advice, to keep his tongue from between his teeth, as it would otherwise have been bitten off short. The worthy fellow bounced from the elephant's neck to his rump, and vaulted like a clown on a spring-board; yet he laughed in the midst of his bouncing, and from time to time took a piece of sugar out of his pocket, and inserted it in Kiouni's trunk, who received it without in the least slackening his regular trot.[1]

Treats for the bus drivers might not be far off in my future trips through the back roads of China’s provinces. Cigarettes. Salty snacks. Dried fish. Smooth roads. Lowered speeds.

As the bus nears the Hengshan district, I begin to see a single Chinese character, repeated hundreds of times over the space of several kilometers, at roadside stands, restaurants, and grocery shops. If only flashcards worked like this, language learning would be easy.

 香

 Fragrance, incense, Texas tea. Throughout South Peak and all along the road, incense is the fuel that drives peoples trips to 壽嶽, Longevity Mountain, as it is popularly called. Burning incense at “useful” locations is the reason most people come here. The suppliers are everywhere, and all sell the same product. Pilgrims practice a kind of divinatory economics that “spends” incense in a wide array of temples and shrines. There are far too many places to express devotion for even a truckload of incense sticks. One must plan…plan.

[c] City  RL

Reaching the city itself, it seems that every shop functions as an incense seller, and only a few have expanded to sell beverages, snacks, and maps. Incense is the big seller, and nothing else comes close to equaling it. It is all incense, water bottles, towels, fish snacks, nuts, cigarettes, backpacks, more incense…and maps.

And maps. An enormous number of South Peak stores have extra large, excellently detailed maps of the southern mountain. They are wall-sized, and placed on sturdy poster board. There are no fold marks. This contrasts with the puny, half-page maps of the mountain available to the rest of us. The difference is stark, and I—an admirer of beautiful maps—mention this to several store owners. All just shrug and say a variation of “we just have them (and they would not be for sale in any case, even if you could find a way to get it home).” There is nothing particularly special about them now, since most are grease-spotted and aging. They reflect, however, in their archaeological urgency, a time about a decade ago when local commercial operators—a version of the Chamber of Commerce, perhaps—stressed uniformity and knowledge of the mountain. Now they sit in every restaurant and incense shop in town, slowly aging on the walls or in the windows, while active climbers carry pathetic little slivers of paper that pretend to be maps.

I find my hotel and admire its wall-sized copy of a painting of the southern mountain’s seventy-two peaks, completed in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). The receptionist notices my interest, calls me over, hands me one of the ubiquitous little maps, and says “Here you go!”

I smile and thank her.

[1] Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004), 56.

Bibliography

Verne, Jules. Around the World in Eighty Days. New York: Penguin Classics, 2004.

[d] Parallelism  RL

Longevity Mountain 1          Longevity Mountain 2          Longevity Mountain 3          Longevity Mountain 4 
Longevity Mountain 5          Longevity Mountain 6          Longevity Mountain 7          Longevity Mountain 8
Longevity Mountain 9          Longevity Mountain 10        Longevity Mountain 11        Longevity Mountain 12

NEXT

Always the Southern Entrance

We will walk through the temple at the base of the mountain...in the correct direction.