Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [132]
Fortunately, not every sight and diversion has yet been swallowed. Near the city of Fengdu, a little more than 100 miles downstream from our starting point of Chongqing, lies the Temple of Ghosts, and after we’d docked, I joined my cruisemates for a look at this famously haunted temple, perched on a hillside above the river. On the ramp, we encountered the usual plethora of map sellers and beggars and children whispering hungry, money. There was a chairlift to the summit, 600 feet up, but I’d been hankering for a walk, so I climbed the stone steps, listening to the strange Chinese pop music wafting though the speakers. I rejoined my cruisemates and tried to coax some English out of our tour guide.
“That’s a new city,” she said, pointing across the river to Fengdu. “Old city underneath walls.”
It was just like Fuling, which we’d passed earlier, an old city consumed by a massive seawall with a new city built on top. It’s an unsettling sight, seeing the effects of Beijing’s whims, knowing that a Party official’s ambitions could level hundreds of thousands of homes and displace millions, destroying the region’s cultural heritage forever.
But at least we had our little Temple of Ghosts. The eminence upon which it stood was one of the traditional spiritual graveyards of Taoism. The earliest temples were built in the third century not long after two men who were said to have superpowers, Wang Fangping and Yin Changsheng, moved to the hillside and combined their family names to Yin Wang, which, apparently, means Ruler of Hell. There were a number of shrines and pagodas, as well as a few monks in saffron robes, but mostly this Temple of Ghosts existed as a maudlin tourist attraction. There were stone statues of a man beating a woman, another was holding his severed hand, and there was one depicting a woman breast-feeding a deer. And these were the tasteful statues.
“This the torture chamber,” informed our guide. “Look, the playboy being ripped apart so all the women can have a part of him. There the playgirl turn into snake. That the bad husband being sawed in half.”
And on and on it went inside the Temple of Ghosts. Frankly, I couldn’t wait to leave. It had been a while since I’d been in the midst of something so very touristy, and as the ship set off, I was pleased to find myself back on the ship’s deck, just idly watching the limestone cliffs pass by. After a convivial dinner, I made my way to the lounge, where I found half the passengers gliding under the disco ball, waltzing as if they were at a party in old Vienna. Waltzing, as it turns out, is very popular in China, and even President Hu Jintao himself was on the university waltzing team back in the day. I was unaware that waltzing was also a competitive sport, but in China the government, in an effort to overcome the rising rates of obesity that have occurred as more Chinese eat Western foods, has mandated that schoolkids will now be forced to waltz. Lucky for the Chinese, Hu Jintao was not a square dancer.
Then arrangements were made, compromises offered, and the waltzers sat down and were replaced by the singers. The ship had a karaoke machine and soon the lyrics scrolled across the screen. I watched as a woman of middle years gleefully took to the stage and, to some exotic Arabic-sounding groove, began to sing before flubbing the intro and, after resetting the karaoke machine, started to sing again