July 21, 2006
Going back over a week in our trip and despite the botched visa extension foray to Taiyuan, we really enjoyed Pingyao and wanted to post something about our time there. It's one of the best preserved Ming cities in China, which means it has the old city walls still in existence and the old courtyard houses haven't been razed for more modern buildings. The city walls are built in a roughly rectangular shape and the old streets and alleys are laid out to resemble the back of a turtle (a symbol of longevity) when looked at from above. The old walls of Pingyao reminded me of Essaouira where I checked email in Morocco, and the preservation and pedestrian-friendly tourist atmosphere reminded David of Venice. Both comparisons work especially well, since all three cites are World Heritage sites. Inside the city we toured an old banking house, one of the first in China, walked on the walls where we could, and wandered through several temples.
Our favorite temple was the Taoist Town God temple, not so much because it looked the best, though it did, but because we met Lucy, who gave us a tour of the temple. She's going to start university in Taiyuan in September and is spending her free time during the two month holiday giving free temple tours to foreigners so she can practice her English. We've met several people, mostly in Beijing, who claim to be students and who want us to talk to them to practice their English, but they usually have a calligraphy show they want us to see that's leaving the next day for Japan. Since we've received the same offer for the same show several different days, I don't think they're going to make it to Japan anytime soon. Lucy, however, had no show for us to see and it was great having someone of whom we could ask all sorts of questions.
The temple is apparently unusual in that it actually has three "sections" and is dedicated to different gods in each section. The main temple is dedicated to the Town God, who, along with his wife, protects Pingyao. To the right of the Town God's complex are the Kitchen God and his wife. Lucy told us that many households have small shrines to the Kitchen God because he provides good and abundant food. And then on the left, there's the God of Wealth, although there were actually three different wealth gods: one for students, one for businessmen and one for general prosperity.
Since it was a Taoist temple, there were some weird hell scenes of people being tortured who'd misbehaved during their lifetimes. Apparently there are three crimes for which you can't ever be reborn, but are instead eternally punished, but other than murder, I couldn't tell what the crimes were (Lucy clearly wasn't Taoist). One of the big three sin punishments was being impaled on a bunch of knives, one was being stewed in boiling oil and the other also involved knives, but the action was different, so I couldn't quite tell what was going on. All other crimes get you punished as well, and rather gruesomely, but you get reincarnated and can then build up a store of good deeds to eventually be released to heaven. You get your tongue pulled out and cut off for lying, but Lucy assured us that's a minor crime. Meat eating being taboo, butchers are flayed and cut up in the way that they dished up meat during their careers. Women aren't allowed to marry more than once, even if widowed, apparently, so if they do, their punishment is to be hung upside down and cut in two, one half for each husband. Naturally there seemed to be no such prohibition for men.
After we wandered all over the temple, asking questions about the statues and art, we switched to asking questions about Lucy. To go to university in China, everyone takes a standardized written and oral test. If your score is high enough, you can go to the best schools, such as Beijing U., but as your score drops, so do your options of schools. Lucy's score wasn't as high as she wished, which is why she's going to Taiyuan. The same process applies for graduate school, though, so she can try again, if she wants. University is affordable at Y4000 per year (about $500), and we were surprised to hear that Lucy doesn't think it's very much money, either. But studying abroad as her sister does in Canada, is much more costly. Lucy's plan is to do well at university, work for a few years and then study abroad in graduate school. I really hope she makes it.
-Leah
