Ancient (?!) Buddhist Carvings in Pinggu

Our intrepid hiker Raquel read in a local Chinese newspaper (yes, this laowai grew up in Beijing and attended local schools, learning fluent Mandarin) that the village of Diao Wo (刁窝) in Pinggu (平古) in greater Beijing’s outer suburbs had discovered a valley filled with ancient Buddhist carvings. The story went that in trying to clean up and develop a park trail, the villagers started pulling down eons of natural overgrowth only to discover the carvings.

Our hiking group was intrigued. With so many ancient sites in and around Beijing, often at risk of disappearing due to the monetary attraction of development, we wanted to both see these ancient carvings and support this park.

True, when we arrived and bought our tickets, it was disconcerting to discover that the Chinese pop music blaring over the loudspeaker in the parking lot continued along the path via various hidden speakers shaped as rocks. Loud Chinese Techno-pop is not what you’d like while communing with Nature presenting itself as waterfalls (turned out to be fake, run by a hose!), steep ravines, cliffs and rockfalls.

After a lovely lunch munching cliffside on the other side of the valley, we started to descend - blessedly without music!- and Lo! And Behold, spied the first of numerous carvings.

Yet, strangely, as we approached and saw these beautiful visages at close quarters, we asked, Why were they not roughened by centuries of erosion? And, What is this, a line drawing where a carving should be? And, oh dear! Is that a chisel left behind?!

It turns out that stone engravers have been working on these carvings over the past year. We did not grumble or argue to get the truth (and the drawings, incomplete carvings, sanding discs and chisels left behind gave us a good idea). Instead, we returned to the parking lot and engaged one of the attendants in conversation; we only complimented the lovely park and its beautiful carvings. Innocently we asked how long they’d been there, and the attendant rather proudly explained that the stonecutters had been working hard on them this past year for the park to open.

Ah well. The collusion of the (so-called) newspaper journalist and the park leaders reminds me of the altogether charming book The Banquet Bug by Geling Yan. Of all the books I’ve read on China, this is the first and ONLY book that has not only made me laugh out loud BUT has also captured modern life in Beijing perfectly. Publishers Weekly, in its review, described it as

A multifaceted mistaken-identity farce, Yan's novel chronicles the adventures of Dan Dong, a laid-off factory worker who wanders into a lavish banquet where journalists are wined and dined and receive "money for your troubles" fees for listening to—and hopefully reporting on—the presentations of corporations and charities. Dan quickly orders business cards that "said he was a reporter from some Internet news site," and hops aboard the banquet gravy train. Yan revels in the absurdity of her premise, and her over-the-top descriptions of banquet fare underscore her outrage at the few who gorge themselves on "animals from remote mountains and forests" while millions starve. The story changes gears, though, when Dan's reportage leads him into a dangerous, far-reaching scandal and he is arrested during a crackdown on "banquet bugs."

Read The Banquet Bug. And dream of newly ancient Buddhist carvings in a distant valley. (Pictures of our hike are shown in the blog slideshow.)