Dong Bei trails: Qi Xing Shan

Editor’s Note: The author often writes of his travels and the following adds to his adventures in China chronicled in these pages in times past.

We often have the urge to move out of the confines of academe and explore the wonders of our surrounding environs. The relics of ages past abound around Shenyang (the old Mukden to history buffs) here in Liaoning, Northeast China, previously the Manchukuo of Japan and the Manchu region of the last reigning dynasty of China, the foreign and non-Han Qings. One of those relics of antiquity is the Beiling Shaolin Park, second in size to the Forbidden City of Beijing though of equal imperial magnificence in cultural aura and architectural design.

In China, with the new focus on cultural artifacts as financial assets, most of the ancient sites and the recreated newer ones cater to the awe and wonder of the visiting travelers and tourists as we wade through its more tacky commercial offerings.

Thus we tend to look for the little insignificant cultural site that is not along the well-beaten track, nor cost an arm and a leg to visit. An hour out of the Aerospace University outskirt of Shenyang, still within the bus system, is a rural village I heard described by a colleague as a local Buddhist shrine, vintage a millennium old.

At the top what to us is nothing but a little molehill called Qi Xing Shan (shan means “mountain”) stands a stupa erected close to a thousand years ago with a Buddhist monastery nearby to guard the pilgrim site and propagate meditational practices. The description was inviting enough that at the first opportunity, we poured our green tea into our drinking carafe and headed out with our backpack an hour’s ride north of our location.

We will skip the travails of getting to the place on a milk run of a public conveyance for another telling, other than to say that going elbow-to-elbow with the farmers in a packed bus might be more authenticity than we bargained for. We cannot complain, though, since the ride cost less than a dollar!

The little settlement is not like the commune we visited outside of Shanghai in the late ’80s. Then, the dwellings were spartan but tidy, with a communal rationale for the private living quarters, the communal kitchen, and the common toiletry structures. Instead, Mao’s three-wheel multi-function unit that was a tractor, thresher, mini-bus, etc., has been supplanted by copies of U.S. prairie harvesters and combines. The produce output has obviously skyrocketed, the locals affording all the cheap and tacky gadgetries of contemporary commercial life.

The site of the mountain shrine would reveal a very telling story of how the memory of the past is retained while meeting the practical requirements of the present. The Buddhist monastic compound remains a traveler’s destination, more for the faithful than gawkers. The temple buildings show new structures under construction. Since the Guo Chang Dang (communist administration) is hardly known to spend public resources on religious buildings, this came as a surprise.

The site turned out to be a combination of public works, applied technology, historical preservation, and real estate transaction. On top of the hill stood the old stupa now just a hundred meters from a precipice that used to be a slope but now goes straight down into a quarry.

We stood on top of a cliff not unlike being above the face of the limestone quarry at Kannat Tabla on Saipan. The stupa sat just below an imposing gunnery of more recent vintage, built in the late ’40s by the Guo Ming Dang (nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek who later fled to Taiwan) to counter Mao’s insurgents (Dong Bei, the northeast, was the first territory wrestled by the revolutionaries from the nationalists), but above a popularly visited pilgrim’s shrine where the faithful lit their incense to accompany earnest supplications for assistance to good fortune!

Half of the hill was traded by the monastery to the locals to quarry material to build a long dike that keeps the river waters from inundating the farms during the rains. We saw practical engineering locally used to meet farm requirements, while preserving a religious institution that freights historical memory and cultural practices.

Like other communal nodes that gather folks during holidays, tourism already has designs in converting the newly dug quarry area into a family entertainment center with the pits deep and wide enough to simulate a river and a lake, while the other half of the hill retains the forested quality of its slopes heading down to the grain and vegetable farms, fruit orchards, and animal husbandry pens surrounding the perched monastery. The dike protects the crops from the river that used to overflow its banks. The common folks are productive and happy, the government proud, and the local bank uncomplaining with the increase in productivity and financial transactions.

We thought we were just visiting a religious shrine! Instead, we encountered a microcosm of China. Beijing was hardly involved in any of these transactions other than providing a policy cover that allowed the local government and the resident folks to meet their own requirements, with the blessings of the religious establishment, but at their own cost. Would that the CNMI operated likewise!

Jaime R. Vergara (jrvergarajr2031@aol.com) is a former PSS teacher and is currently writing from the campus of Shenyang Aerospace University in China.