DisOrientated - A Weblog by Philip Sen - Mei You

January 31, 2004

Mei You - Qufu

Confucius, he saaaaay..... "mei you Shanghai dao piao".

In Qufu, the trappings of tourism are all around you. World weary ponies haul gaudily decorated sightseeing carriages, vying for road space with the squadrons of orange and green pedicabs charging five kwai a ride. Like many another Chinese city, the sky is blackened around the edges by the stain of pollution. Yet here in modern-day Shandong province was born a man whose influence has lasted for millennia.

If only the great Confucius had applied his scholarly wisdom to the Chinese transport ticketing system. By this time, the money (and the magnetic strip on my bank card) was wearing thin and I needed to make my way back.

Of the town's three tourist offices, none were of any help. I jumped on a bus to Yanzhou, 14km down the road and queued at the station for an hour, only to be laughed at by the woman at the counter when I asked for a ticket.

It was not until the next day, in Jining, another 30km down the road, that I found a bus ticket back home. Home. Suppose I'm calling Shanghai that now.

Still, while not as laid back - backward - as Pingyao, Qufu retains an ancient charm. A friend said that to have a Confucian temple is a paradox; Confucianism is more a philosophy, a way of life, than a religion. Nevertheless, at the birthplace of the man himself you would expect to find the largest Confucian temple in the world, and Kong Miao is not a disappointment.

To get to Kong Miao, you must walk through the southernmost of the city's many gates, a double-walled structure insulating the compound from the great unwashed. Crossing little bridges over a series of dried-up moats, you are confronted by a spacious courtyard filled with trees.

The forestation within the temples seems to be a feature unique to Qufu, making them parks as much as places of thought, and giving them a sense of transcending the banality of urban life.

Passing beyond the trees, some twisted and splintered beyond recognition as trees, the third courtyard is home to gigantic turtles, or gixi bearing stone steles (stone tablets carved with Chinese characters) mottled with rusty lichen and tipped by ornate carvings of the double dragon.

The courtyard is dominated by the first of the main halls, the Kuiwen pavilion. Like many of China's purportedly ancient buildings, though first constructed a thousand years ago, it had a tendency to be repeatedly burnt down and rebuilt.

Then there is the Hall of Integration itself, introduced by the apricot altar from where Confucius is said to have delivered his lectures. Fronting the building are three incense burners and a series of decorated columns. Inside there he sits, the man himself, 3m tall with lips peeled back in a toothish smile, curtained off by a fading gold drape with a blue dragon motif.

On the other side of the temple walls a confusion of hawkers and street stand keepers flog a profusion of Confucian artefacts. It's all here, 'jade', 'bronze', paper cuttings, teatowels and the rest of it. Bearded and benevolent, the souvenirs belay Confucius' iconic status. Here he just seems like a latter-day Colonel Sanders.

'Job done in five minutes', proclaim the banners dangling from the chop-carvers' tables, and by golly, you too can have a mini Confucius with your name engraved on his base quicker than you can say... "rotten wood cannot be carved, nor are dung walls plastered". (Incredibly that was the first thing that came up after I Googled for "sayings of Confucius".)

After passing through yet more city gates and a praetorian guard of yet more hawkers lining the approach, you find yourself in Confucius' burial ground. More than this, the cemetary of all his decendents, or all who claim to be, which includes anyone with the surname Kong who has ever been near Qufu.

Again, the ambience is not of the sterility and sanctity one would expect of a working European graveyard but of a sprawling, unkempt and untended wood. Here and there rise altogether 100,000 barrows, the domes of earth under which the Kongs are buried, alongside numerous (4,000) steles and stone statues of horses, goats and grinning tigers. Wild and atmospheric, it reminds a Londoner of Highgate, where among others you can find Karl Marx.

Confucius himself lies in a pavilion watched over by two brooding granite sentinels. His mausoleum is an underwhelming mound of earth dressed in shaggy grass browned by the dry winter. Beside him is his son, Kong Li, and before him is his grandson, Kong Ji.

As I departed, a cavalcade of pickup trucks, a minibus and a tractor linked to a trailer full of earth squeezed through the second Saint's gate. Most of the people were wearing a white headdress of sorts, and in the back of one of the vehicles a band played on pipes and drums. It was only later that I realised that this was a funeral procession, Qufu style.

Returning to the city, next door to the temple is the Confucius mansion, the complex from where the Kong clan watched over the county. Wandering around the maze of courtyards and peering inside to view the museum displays, it wa easy to feel that the place had only recently been vacated. Oddments left lying around by the staff included a pair of gloves and a facecloth incongruously hanging in the centre of one of the quads.

Calligraphy wall hangings and old-style furniture sat confortably among more modern grandfather clocks. The Hall of loyalty and forbearance, named after Confucius' principle of loyalty and consideration, was notable for its ill-maintained look, the paint flaking away from the wood in ugly strips. Some symbolism here?

Elsewhere in the city are the Yan and Zhou temples, the former predating even Kong Miao. Grab a cab and you can find Shao Hao's Mausoleum. making your way past two enormous gixi with their stone tablets, you come to the tomb itself, a 10m high pyramid topped by a temple the size of a garden privy.

Finally, if it floats your boat you can visit the 'Ancient Lu State', in reality the ultimate tackfest. While there I was accosted by monks (or Butlins redcoats in disguise) and almost forced not only into taking part in an authentic Confucian ceremony but also into a kung-fu duel.

The theme park, for that it what it is, does have some educational value in illustrating how people used to live. The polystyrene pig. The jousting sheep. The broom room. And the final denoument of the practised art of Chinglish... "play dice, guess cock".

By heck, those ancient Chinese knew how to have fun.

Posted by Sendover at January 31, 2004 08:57 PM | TrackBack

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