Chengdu

Just got back from my whirlwind adventure through Sichuan and Yunan provinces.  As I got some space to cover between Pandas and the Himalayas, I'll break the trip into a couple bite-sized pieces.

After flying from Nanjing to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, the first thing we saw was a traditional tea show at a nearby Buddhist monastery.  Each variety of tea had different but strikingly complex methods of preparation, including stylistic cleansing of utensils using boiling water down to the intricate multi-pot steeping process, each stage punctuated by prayers.

After sampling some of the local cuisine renowned for its spiciness (it wasn't that spicy), we hit up the Panda Base Breeding and Research Center.  The utterances of "awww" quickly became innumerable as we toured adult, adolescent, and youth enclosures.  While we usually would have had the opportunity to pay an obscene amount of money to hold a panda cub, we were luckily relieved of this temptation by the cubs too thoroughly incensing themselves in a rather vicious-looking two-on-one fight.  It was, however, the cutest vicious two-on-one fight I've ever seen.  

That night we sampled the local Sichuan Opera, which, as it turns out, is actually a very brief opera interrupted by an extended (and at times bizarre and atonal) talent show composed of marionettes, trumpet and erhu players, and shadow puppets.  The actual opera was equally bizarre, featuring what appeared to be an old woman forcing an old dunce to perform various difficult tasks with a burning basin lamp balanced on his head.  The woman yelled a string of sentences at the dunce as he crawled backwards under a table while balancing said lamp, causing the Chinese around us to burst into laughter.  Upon asking one of our Chinese program mates what the woman had said, she replied (between further bouts of laughter) simply that the woman had told the dunce to crawl backwards under the table while balancing the lamp.  Chinese humor continues to elude me.

The next day we went to the Jianchuan Museum cluster outside of Chengdu.  I visited The Hall of the Sichuan Army in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, which housed photographs and artifacts from the Sichuan branch of the Chinese army in WWII.  One photograph's caption spoke of a convoy of Sichuan "supply ships" heading to the front lines (the photograph was of a line of donkeys).  The just-completed Chengdu Earthquake Museum housed "relics" from this past spring's catastrophic earthquake, ranging from a boat used to rescue victims from the nearby river to a grandfather clock that stopped at the exact moment the earthquake hit. 

We next visited the San Xingdui Museum, which housed artifacts from the still-shrouded-in-mystery Shu culture.  Predating the Yellow River Valley civilization that many originally thought was the birthplace of Chinese civilization, the place is filled with strikingly unique bronze-cast figures, resembling few other image motifs found in primary Chinese history. 

Finally, we visited Chengdu's excellent Daoist temple before setting out for Shangrila. 

You can see the complete Chengdu album here.  The brief videos below are of the traditional tea show, a giant panda at the Panda Base, and one of the San Xingdui statues.