2015 China

23 April, Zhangye
Beichen Hotel 168CNY

A visit to the dentist is always stressful. Try it in a foreign country where all you can say in Chinese is “Hello”, “Thank you” and “South Africa” and all he can say in English is “No, no, no”, “OK, OK, OK” and “Please” accompanied by a gesture for you to rinse. I lost a filling a day or two back; cannot remember when last I needed a filling – a decade or two ago, perhaps. After the dentist got over the surprise of being confronted by a westerner, he took a look at my tooth and wrote on a piece of scrap paper three price options: 100, 200 or 300CNY. No idea what the various prices offered; I chose the cheapest. When I lay back down in the pale blue chair, several dental assistants and at least one other dentist came out to peer at me and into my mouth and later I caught two young women taking my photograph on their cell phones. I did not need an injection (or perhaps that just did not come with the cheaper option), but the young dentist did have to drill away the remainder of a sizeable filling. My fillings date from my youth and are all silver. I departed the practice, which has one chair in a picture window fronting the street (glad I wasn‘t seated there), with a white filling. Perhaps the silver mouth rather than the western face accounted for the photo taking.

Zhangye’s Grand Buddha Temple dates from 900 years ago. The main hall holds China’s largest indoor reclining Buddha. “The length of the body of the Buddha is 34.5 meters, the shoulders are 7.5 meters wide, the ears are 4 meters long and the feet are 5.2 meters long. A man could lie on the middle finger of the Buddha, while eight people could sit shoulder-to-shoulder on the Buddha's ear. This makes it easy to imagine the sheer magnitude of the sculpture” (chinahighlights.com). The figure is gold-plated and painted, and surrounded by statues of disciples and saintly warriors in a hall painted with glorious murals, “which depict episodes from the Mountain-sea Sutra (an ancient Chinese encyclopedia) and from Journey to the West (a celebrated novel written in the Ming Dynasty)” (travelchinaguide.com).

In the Sutra Depository “there are more than 6000 tomes of lectures, some of which, written in gold and silver, are the rarest and most precious” (travelchinaguide.com). The sutra hall appealed strongly to my orderly, some might call it controlling, personality. Beautiful books printed from wood-carved blocks or hand-painted. Printed including incredibly detailed drawings, religious in nature. Printed from top right to bottom left. Printed on long sheets of paper neatly concertinaed between two separate card covers sometimes elaborately embroidered. Five or six books carefully wrapped in cloth and tied with string. Each package of books placed in a box, perfectly fitted. Each box packed into a heavy wooden cupboard especially designed to take the boxes. Each box labelled. A stunning library of ancient texts.      

What a super meal we had tonight. We walked a block to a pedestrian street lined with old buildings sporting elaborate wood-carved eaves and there selected at random a restaurant in which to dine. Not entirely at random, actually; we exercised our usual test: is it filled with locals? In this street, though, all the restaurants met this criterion. Once we were seated we discovered the HuangJiHuang specialised in one type of dish only, a “three-sauce simmer pot”. The elaborate picture menu offered a range of ingredients for simmering: beef, pork, vegetables, bullfrog, sea turtle, prawns. Although the menu was in Chinese only, our waitress, wearing like the others a transparent plastic mask over her mouth, produced an English-language sheet and when we pointed a query at a picture that appealed to us, identified the main ingredient on the sheet. We chose beef, cheaper than the other options in a restaurant more expensive than those we usually frequent. Built into our table was a hotplate. Onto this our waitress placed a wide, shallow, two-handled pot with a glass lid. She brought to our table several separate containers from which pre-measured and pre-spiced and -herbed ingredients were added to the pot. First, what looked like lard, was meticulously placed in the centre of the pot. This was surrounded by vegetables, carefully spread: squash, celery, carrots, onions, whole garlic cloves, a small unknown fruit. With equal care the sliced beef was layered to cover the vegetables. Three additional spices and a reddish oil were sprinkled on top, the lid fitted and a timer set. Remaining on the table: a small Tupperware container of celery and a large Tupperware container holding a dark, mysterious sauce. In due course the sauce, thick and glutinous, was layered over the meat and the timer set again and soon thereafter we ate our delicious dinner, satisfied in every way.

From our hotel window we can see a city park. Every morning and every night locals gather here for both formation and two-step dancing. Very sociable and good exercise too.