The Yungang Grottoes and The Hanging Temple

We were woken up early to heated shouts, looked out of the third-floor hotel window, and saw a line-up of some thirty or forty bakers, dressed in regulation white overalls and caps, standing to attention like floury soldiers as their sergeant major stalked up and down the line shouting at them. This is the Chinese version of staff motivation. On seeing the bright blue sapphire sky shining eagerly above the black buildings, Clive and I were imbued with enough motivation to shower, get dressed and get out of the hotel in half an hour.

Near the bus station we met two men wearing cheap leather jackets and sunglasses, who pointed to their dusty red motorbikes. We bargained and got a price of fifteen Yuan to take us to the Yungang Grottoes. It wasn’t exactly Easy Rider, but the journey across the flat floodplains, along yellow roads, on the bouncy pillions of those little bikes was exhilarating nonetheless. Windswept, with dirt in our eyes and ears, hair sticking up everywhere, we clambered off at the entrance to the grottoes. The two men adjusted their sunglasses and roared off into the shimmering dust. Ahead and above us, the mountain ridges were outlined starkly by the bright blue sky in cinematic superimposition.

The Yungang Grottoes were carved out of and into the high sandstone mountains around 400 BC, the first of the Buddhist revival period and, it is held, the best. They are a series of fifty caves, each with different sitting Buddha figures and high pillars and walls of tiny intricate Bodhisattvas, used as cave-temples by the colony of monks here long ago. The detail and scale of the carvings are astonishing: giant sitting Buddhas, with feet bigger than busses, huge hands held out invitingly on which you could sit a whole coach party of tourists, wide noses and giant smiles, set against the smaller, repetitive decorative carvings in the cave walls, which are like a kind of holy wallpaper, some of which still retain patches of green, red and gold colour. However, the caves were as busy as they were breathtaking. You had to queue before getting a glimpse at each grotto, shuffling and pushing on the dusty paths, as the huge mysterious Buddhas watched the crowds unconcernedly. Perhaps they knew they’d be here for a lot longer than us transitory camera snappers with our peculiar forms of worship.

After we'd seen all we could of the grottoes, Clive and I walked around the corner of a sandstone cliff and were confronted, directly across the road, by a huge coalmine. The mine lay spread-eagled in a series of filthy huts, warehouses, and factories, ugly and black like a stain on the yellow land, huge smokestacks belching smudgy brown pollution into the innocent blue sky. Victorian-style wheel and pulley systems transported the coal from pit-faces to trucks. The trucks then fired their dust-addled engines and chugged off down the sandy roads, spewing black exhaust smoke behind them. The noise of machinery, engines, explosions and shouting men split the pristine sky. Miners, black and thin in the distance, trooped back and forth like rows of Lowrie stick-men. I pondered yet another incongruity in this dry, dirty region: a coal mine built behind the back of a smiling Buddha.

We hitched a lift to the Hanging Temple on a bus from Hangzhou, full of students and teachers from the Television University. At least, that's what they called it. Perhaps they meant it was a university for media studies, or perhaps for drama and the performing arts. Or maybe it really was a university dedicated to training young Chinese for acting in the two kinds of popular soap operas in the country: either tacky, predictable romances (the man always tall, quiet and deep, never showing his feelings, and the girlfriend hysterical, with a penchant for bursting into uncontrollable tears and screams in every episode), or gong-fu stories, set in ancient times (the men either porcine and comical, bearded and nasty, or long-haired and handsome, the girls either an evil queen, a cute and cheeky sister or a stunning damsel who always needs rescuing).

Our coach inched ever-slower round treacherous turns with sheer drops plummeting below, onwards and upwards so slowly, into the spectacular peaks of Shanxi province's Heng Shan mountain range, the floodplains stretching like an endless yellow sea into the distance, the yellow mountains, with their wind-blasted, rain-warped, sandstone rock formations slowly crowding around us. Tiny mountain villages huddle in the nooks and crannies of the rock, mud huts with small areas of irrigated field that looked dried-up and fruitless. Some of the villages consist of cave-houses hollowed out of the mountainsides, rough little oblong windows and doorways winking from the side of the cliffs. It must be a tough, thirsty, physical life of hardship this high up in a cave-house with no running water or electricity, and I didn’t envy the villagers’ life here.

The day warmed like a turned-up oven, the sun beating down on the shining metal of the unsheltered coaches, which smoked and struggled up the slopes like an army of giant mechanical ants. Our bus ground to a halt, engine steaming. Feeling traitorous, we left our TV friends and tried to hitch a lift with one of the passing line of busses, but none of them would stop. Perhaps they didn't want to stop on this steep mountainside, just in case they never got started again. The TV coach's engine roared back to life and, shamefaced, we jumped on again to insulted looks. Half an hour later, we eventually reached the Xuan Kong Si, or Hanging Temple.

There has apparently been a temple on this site (a sheer, unforgiving cliff face of sandstone rock) since the Northern Wei dynasty, which makes the site more than 1,400 years old. In heavy rain, the Heng river, which used to flow right alongside the original temple, would burst its banks and wash away the temple with it. So, the monks came up with the ingenious (or crazy?) idea of building the temple higher and higher up the mountain face, holding the foundations of the temple steady on high stilts above the water. Every time the floods washed away the temple, they’d build it again, only higher up. The cycle of destruction and rebuilding ended when the Heng river was dammed off, leaving the temple literally hanging hundreds of feet up the rock wall above a dry bed of pebbles. Its name in Chinese, which translates as Temple Suspended over the Void, seems appropriate.

The temples are a chain of two- and three-story pagoda complexes with the sandstone face of the mountain as their back wall and a frontage of ornate carved wood, painted in reds and greens, hanging grandly, surreally, from the mountain. I'd love to be able to describe the insides of the temples, but we didn't go into them. As we approached the entrance, marvelling at the precarious beauty of this feat of holy engineering, we were confronted by a huge crowd of people. The Hanging Temple just wasn’t designed for this volume of visitors. Once you've queued in cordoned-off lines to buy your ticket, you’re let out into a wide open space, with no guards or ushers demanding you stand in line and wait; therefore, a couple of hundred tourists, penned into this space, were surging and pushing against each other like a football crowd after a goal to get to the entrance first. We saw that to get up to the temple, you needed to pass through a gate then ascend steps no wider than two or three persons abreast. The Chinese people, with their inability to queue politely, were clustered around this bottleneck. At least two hundred people were trying to squeeze all at once into a gap for two.

It was horrendous. I’ve never seen anything like it. There was only one guard at the gate, and I thought he was about to get over-run. He screamed nervously at the crowd through his loudhailer. Another large surge began as even more people were allowed into the pen, but not enough people had either left or entered the temple to make room for them. People behind unintentionally pushed those in front, who turned around in anger and started pushing back, throwing punches, arguing and grappling. Little children were getting crushed against the legs of adults and crying shrilly. Men were fighting each other around the bottleneck entrance. Tourists coming back down from the temple couldn’t get out for the mass of people below them. It was an absolute shambles. Ridiculous. Dangerous. Nick and I, slightly shaken by these scenes, walked in the opposite direction up the mountain path to the viaduct. Heng Shan mountain presides over a reservoir of still blue water, which sparkled serenely in the spring sunshine. Swifts and martins swooped and played over the water, chasing insects. It was amazingly quiet and calm. Yet only a few hundred feet below us, people were jammed in tight together, screaming, pushing and fighting.

Today I saw how the internal tourism of China is destroying every place of historical heritage or natural beauty it purports to protect. More and more people in China are now making enough money to have a holiday yet, as the holidays are controlled by the government, everyone travels at the same time. Also, not many holidaymakers are allowed a visa to travel out of the country, so everyone heads for the same places. They do not have a choice of France, Spain or the Canaries, Peru or Hawaii, Sydney or Delhi. They have a choice of Tai Shan and the Hanging Temple, or Dali and Lijiang, or Guilin and Yangshuo, and therefore descend on these beautiful little places in huge numbers, leaving destruction in their wake. And it's not even fun! The pushing and shoving endemic in Chinese culture is intensified by the sheer mass of people, so that you have to fight for every bus, hotel and photo opportunity you can get. Countries such as Brazil, Peru or Thailand have complained that the new force of colonial destruction endangering their culture and environment is that of tourism. 'We' go to these countries, stay in nice hotels, visit safari parks, climb mountains, but don't realise the destruction and the draining of natural resources the tourist industry masks. Sure, we bring money to the local economies, but in an industry which is long-term unsustainable. China, however, is managing just fine to destroy its cultural heritage and scenic spots all by itself. Perfectly happily, in fact, as its making money out of it. Is that the difference between an under-developed and developing country, that the developing country is much more capable of ruining its environment without outside help?