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By Root 1199 0

But then came Mao, and as with all things old, he was determined to crush Buddhism. Temples were destroyed and monasteries padlocked as Mao turned his sledgehammer on the opiate of the masses. Today, however, the Chinese government, confronted with such profound social discontent, has decided that a little opiate might be good for the masses. President Hu Jintao wants a harmonious society. So, too, do the Buddhists. And while Tibetan Buddhists remain as repressed as ever, the 7 million Buddhists in China who are not Tibetan have regained considerable latitude in expressing their beliefs. According to the government, there are now 13,000 Buddhist Temples in China, with more than 200,000 monks and nuns, including the ones here on Putuoshan.

Outside, the temple was surrounded by branching alleyways where young monks leapt among the puddles in front of shops selling joss sticks, golden Buddhas, chicken carcasses, slabs of meat, eels, starfish, mussels, clams, shark fins, and seafood of a kind completely unrecognizable to me, though no doubt I would find it in my evening meal. Pelted by cold, wet drops, I walked on to the One Hundred Step Beach, which is nine hundred steps smaller than the One Thousand Step Beach a short distance farther on. My umbrella whipped inside out and then collapsed in the gale, and as I watched the foaming sea I began to wonder how exactly I was going to get off the island after dinner. I had planned on taking an overnight boat to Shanghai, but this now struck me as an unsensible mode of transport.

I found refuge from the weather inside a small restaurant with a leaky roof overlooking the beach. What I really wanted was coffee and perhaps a slice of pumpkin bread. Instead I had seaweed tea, and ordered a boiled egg with slices of tomato and cucumber, and received instead a plate of scrambled eggs mixed with diced tomatoes. Perhaps the waiter thought I was Australian. That’s what Australians do, mix eggs and tomatoes with everything—an unholy combination, in my opinion.

The wind roared and the rain gave no indication of lessening, and so I decided that today I would just be wet. I made my way past streetlamps decorated with swastikas, a sight that always succeeds in startling me. But, in fact, in Buddhism it is a symbol for love and mercy, and to this day it strikes me as particularly twisted that the Nazis chose to appropriate this ancient image of peace and love. I made my way to the Western Paradise trail and climbed the stairs to a rock that was carved with calligraphy. Etched in stone was the character for love, and visitors had left thousands of padlocks linked to a low fence that lay before it, testimonies of someone’s devotion to another. At this point, I realized that I could go no farther—water was now rushing down the stairs and soon they would be all be but impassable. The wind had picked up further, sending twigs fluttering across the steps and against my rainwear, and I decided that the yin and yang of wandering around in a maelstrom compared to being dry and warm tilted to the latter. I returned to the hotel to inquire about boats traveling back to the mainland.

“No boats,” I was told. “Typhoon.”

There are typhoons and there are super typhoons. Typhoon Chancu was only the second super typhoon to ever be recorded in the South China Sea. And somehow, I had managed to place myself on an island while it struck. Clearly, I really needed to learn how to read a Chinese newspaper. This was inconvenient, a small problem, as I had to be in Hong Kong shortly to meet a friend. But instead of leisurely making my way south through Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong Provinces, I found myself marooned on an island while thunderous waves broke on its shore and gale-force winds buffeted the trees.

But this was my fault too. China is a big country, and you don’t quite realize how big it is until you start plotting the time and logistics it takes to get oneself from here to there. Nothing is straightforward in China; there are always complications. And it is enormous, this country of 1.3 billion people.