Kali in Disguise

This morning I went to a village outside of Quanzhou. I'd read about a shrine that the people there had erected, in which an Indian sculpture of the goddess Kali is worshiped as the Buddhist Goddess Guanyin. From the available pictures, it was clear that this sculpture used to be a part of the Indian temple in Quanzhou, and I wanted to visit it on my own to get some choice shots. I was (and continue to be) so lucky that the museum director here has taken me under his wing--he asked his driver to take me there, and I would have NEVER found this place otherwise. Here we are walking into the entrance of the village, which can only be approached on foot. As I have commented elsewhere, it never ceases to astonish me what lies behind somewhat modern looking buildings in China. After walking through the gateway (pictured above in the distance), we found ourselves in the middle of a countryside with architecture from at least a hundred years back. Bison tied up in the front yards of houses, motor cars and narrow dusty streets. It was very much like being in a village in India.
This shot is taken after having entered the village: I went with the driver, a visiting professor from Tokyo University, and her research assistant.This is the unassuming shrine of "Guanyin" or the Indian goddess Kali. There was a little shop immediately opposite, and they kindly gave us the keys to open the bars of the shrine.
The goddess Kali, attended by two ladies in waiting, has been painted a brilliant gold and red in the modern era. You can also see that they have painted in the irises of her eyes. This is a great reminder that most medieval Indian temples today do not look like they did when the temples were in use; every sculpture in an active Hindu temple is painted in bright colors.
Kali holds a drum, and unidentified object, a snake, and a bell, and sits astride a defeated demon, possibly Mahisa.
I began to attract a bit of a crowd as I crouched next to the sculpture, photographing and measuring. This older gentleman seemed particularly interested in what I was doing, but could only speak in a whisper.

I started asking a lot of questions about where the sculpture was before it came to be installed in this shrine, and everyone was a bit confused, so they guided me to the house of a village elder. Thus began the insanity of translation: we have myself, who speaks minimal Mandarin, the driver who speaks Mandarin with a heavy Fujian accent, the elder who speaks minimal Mandarin with an even heavier accent, the Tokyo professor who only speaks Mandarin, and her research assistant who speaks Mandarin, Fujian dialect, and a bit of English. Communication was somewhat challenging, but I eventually learned the Kali sculpture has a really intriguing history. Our knowledge of it only goes back to the beginning of the 1960s, during Mao's Cultural Revolution. Before this time, it was installed in a small pavilion at the foot of an ancient bridge, about a kilometer away from the village. Older bridges in Fujian province were highly symbolic, and traditionally were built by Buddhist monks, hoping to gain merit in the afterlife. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao encouraged peasants to destroy anything ancient and religious, and so the Kali sculpture and bridge were disassembled and built into a large wall that surrounded the village. In the late 70s, when China was officially "opened," the villagers decided to knock down the wall. When they found the Kali sculpture, they decided that it was the Buddhist goddess Guanyin, and built a shrine for it in 1980. This information is interesting for tracking the everchanging life of this Kali statue throughout history--I wonder when it was first accepted as a Buddhist icon?

Photo of the man and woman of the house, with lots of pictures of their children and grandchildren underneath. This is pretty much what I aspire to. The man told me that his younger brother lives in San Francisco and works at the national library, but that he still can't speak English. Small world!

The beautiful doors of their home. If you'll notice, the tiny, mostly obscured little woman cut out on the door is holding the same character that is painted on the external wall. It is "fu" or fortune, doubtlessly a marker of feng shui.
And just cause, I'm showing you a picture of our lunch, which was really good. I've been eating a lot of seafood these days. The large bowls are noodle soup with squid, clams, cauliflower, fishballs, etc. I had to resist taking a picture of the carnage that ensued for the sake of politeness; but let me tell you that messy eating is customary!! By the time we were finished, the table was piled high with shells, gristle, and napkins filled with icky substances. Jia-you! By the way, while we're on the subject of blunders with food, I'll let you all know that I accidentally ordered pigs' ears in a restaurant the other day. I didn't eat them.

Lingam or not?

One of the many mysteries that surrounds the Indian community living in Quanzhou is what kind of religion they practiced. Today, we classify one of the major Indic religions as "Hindu;" however, this is just a large and unwieldy designation, as there hundreds of gods, each with its own set of religious practices. Trust me, this is really complicated. If one was to try and break down normative Hindu practice into distinct categories, you could say that there are 3 important contingents, these are: Sivaites, Vaisnavites, and Goddess worshipers. Well, in the Indian temple of Quanzhou, we have imagery from all of the above, and no answers. There is this thing though:What is it? What an interesting question. . . some scholars have argued that this is a lingam, the aniconic symbol of the God Siva, which would prove that the Indian community was composed primarily of Siva worshipers. This would be particularly interesting since we believe that the temple was built by Tamils, and Siva worship is preeminent in Tamil Nadu today. The monument is about 13 feet tall, and has been referred to as "the bamboo stone shoot" in several historical journals of Quanzhou. Personally, I think that this looks nothing like your average south Indian lingam, and there is very little possibility it played a major role in whatever religion was practiced.
Here is something weird but cool--I can't exactly explain now without posting a lot of pictures (which is a somewhat tedious affair), but by looking at this little monster guy and comparing it to 3 other nearly identical architectural elements, I think I've come up with a vague theory on how to distinguish the different hands of craftsmen. This is good news, I think.

Walking in Quanzhou

China is, without a doubt, the weirdest place I have ever been. It is also the best place to stroll. Tonight, after I finished a meal of steamed fish (I think?) dumplings and a bowl of sweet tofu soup with red beans, I started to walk along the large street that runs past my hotel. I am staying in the newer part of Quanzhou, where the streets aren't too pretty. I put my hands in my pockets and walk forward with my chin up, trying to blend in via casual gait--to my continual delight, I learn through sidelong glances that I am received as a local--I have fooled them all! The large street is filled with what you might expect of a heavily trafficked area: loud neon signs over nice looking restaurants, street vendors selling grilled snacks, furniture stores, etc. I take a quick right tonight and I'm in the middle of a hutong. Suddenly, there is no room to walk--there is a wall at my right, and on the left there are lines and lines of people selling things on tables. Tall stacks of yellow paper with red designs, I imagine they are mantras that one can burn for good luck (courtesy of my art history background), lanterns, colored stone charms--I feel like Harry Potter. I see a bamboo steamer the size of a manhole cover and an enormous bowl filled with red dyed eggs. People are talking loudly with their doors wide open and I can see them watching TV in their one room houses. And then I am in a seafood market, populated entirely by women, caretakers of enormous bins of clams and squid. The few men present are skinny and toothless, one has a suspicious looking gash across his neck. I walk quickly towards the main road, but I decide to buy some fruit for tomorrow's breakfast and stop at a vendor. There are two nearly identical shelves of fruit, one next to the other. I point to the one on the right and tell the young woman shop owner that I want to buy two oranges. I then point to the peaches on the left, and an older woman quickly grabs another two for me. I turn around, perplexed that there are so many people attending to me, and see immediately from the younger woman's crestfallen expression that I have betrayed her. "Isn't this the same store?" I ask her. She shakes her head in an angry no. I have broken some unspoken rule. I pay for my cuckolded fruit and exit the scene quickly, passing by a woman who sits in the same spot every night, a small electric rain running in a continual circle at her feet. She is the only one who really stares at me. I can't help but feel like life here is not unlike the sensation of traveling--of constantly being in between two worlds without having to commit to one or the other. Or maybe that's just me.

A really good start

I do hate to interrupt the dope limerick championship that is being thrown down in the comments section of my previous post (please do continue!), but Laura has requested more art history, and I just happened to have had a very good day. I arrived in Xiamen yesterday afternoon and checked into my hotel, and I then contacted a researcher at Xiamen University, whom I had been in touch with about a year ago. He very graciously agreed to take me to the Xiamen University museum, which was closed because of the recent typhoon from Taiwan (I apparently have more of those to look forward to in the month that I am here), and I had about an hour to look at their collection of Hindu sculptures from the 13th century. I made a few very interesting observations, the first being that foundation inscriptions from both mosques and Hindu temples were carved from the same kind of stone. On my Munsell rock color chart, the precise designation is "5YR 8/1", a pinkish gray stone with black specks. This is really important to know because it tells us that no matter what religion, patrons were selective with the types of stone they used: the foundation inscription is one of the most important parts of a monument because it identifies the donor and asks gods and countrymen for benediction, thus it seems likely that a more expensive stone would have been used. Below is an image of a foundation inscription from an Islamic tomb, I think in Arabic.
And here is the Tamil inscription, which I have also recently translated and analyzed, carved on the same type of stone. My camera really can't capture the colors very well, so I'll have to rely on this soil chart I think. That or I can just lie.
A "kudu" like arch that must have spanned a niche of some kind. I don't know for sure if it would have been used in the Hindu temple of Quanzhou. I'm going to try and find some other 13th century examples of Chinese architecture while I am here for comparison. It is definitely not in the style of the Late Chola architecture I have been researching.And the most exciting find of all today. . . Chola bronzes!!! This is pretty major, people. I'm researching a 13th century Hindu temple in China, for which there is practically no record other than bits of rubble, and these sculptures, which I didn't know existed before today because they have never been published, are very important for providing information about this community. We know very little about what kind of religion this community practiced, or where they got ideas for their imagery. In other instances of religions practiced by diaspora communities throughout history --take for example, Buddhism--the knowledge of what the deities actually looked like were transported from India to China in the form of small devotional deities. These small objects were easily portable, and provided the impetus for Chinese Buddhist iconography. Over time, the Chinese developed their own version of what the Buddha "looked like," but when you first start to see Buddhist icons in China (around the 3rd century), they really look a lot like the Indian icons.
And here they are! These small bronzes were very clearly made in south India and carried over to China. Basically, I'm going to have to look at these icons and identify them so I can tell who the community was worshipping, and then, I will look and see if these designs are reflected at all in the Chinese made sculptures at Quanzhou.Brahma, I think? Perhaps some Harihara variant? Laura?

I'm also having a temporary blank on this guy. It kind of looks like a Mahisasuramardini, but I think that it's a dude. Laura, again, your input would be appreciated. Also found, but not posted this time, are a bunch of white stone painted Siva lingams, and home made "tobacco" pipes. Awesome.

UPDATE: The director of the Quanzhou Maritime museum informed me that the bronzes are most likely modern, brought from India by the museum's founder in the 1940s. So, I'm full of it. Oh well. Also, sorry the pictures didn't show up but it is just too complicated to fix it. I will post some more on that later.

Graduation kuai dao le!

We had our graduation tonight and a party following. I'm sad to leave. The above photo is not from the restaurant where they held the party, but it deserves to be posted because that lantern is really cool. I think it is hand painted. It is from another hot pot restaurant around the corner from my school--I brought my cousins Doug, Cathy, Becca, and Sarah there the other night and instructed them on how to dunk raw meat in boiling soup and peanut sauce. More on that later. For now, excuse my format because I am in somewhat of a hurry. I leave for the south of China the day after tomorrow, where I will begin my "feel-good" work. I think my life there will probably be much less hectic than the last two months have been. But I digress: here are some pictures of me and others at the after party. I am wearing the butterfly qipao I alluded to earlier. I had to dress it down with my funky glasses because I did not have appropriate shoes. Also because I had to change really quickly after coming back from the
mammoth size jewelry mart all the way across town (amazing stuff, really amazing, including cinnabar bracelets, fake jade buddhas, strands of pearls, and original editions of mao's little red book!). Everyone is leaving, and so am I. I seriously remember just having arrived here. I will try to do my hot pot entry before I leave, but I make no promises.

How to count to ten in Chinese

The Perfect Sandwich

Oh, lawsy, lawsy! My roommate recently showed me a new dining spot on campus, and I am kicking myself for only having 2 weeks left of this program! I would have never noticed this place--it looks like a dive--a little room filled with various stands, but all of these stands make everything fresh daily! They have dumpling soup, crispy pancakes with pork fillings, bean filled bao, and the best of all--these amazing sandwiches! The sandwich is filled with a roast pork that is cut off a souvlaki like block--it is tossed with onions, lettuce, plum sauce, and tomato paste, and then stuffed into a fresh muffin. Seriously dangerous for many reasons. I've gone back 5 times in the last two days.
My dinner tonight: glorious, perfect sandwich, soy milk, and this interesting, slightly oily, sesame roll. Hail to the Chinese!

Hutong Noodle Soup

I had a lovely morning. First I went to the Lama temple, which is the largest Buddhist temple in Beijing. I will spare myself the embarrassment of describing my experience there, but will say that it involved an absurd amount of incense, bowing, and lots of shmutz on my pants. The temple was really nice, but the real discovery was the hutong behind the temple. A hutong is basically a shanty town--they are knocked down every day as Beijing becomes more and more modern. Still, there are quite a few of these, and I took a few pictures of the narrow alleys.
I couldn't get a great shot because the alleys were too narrow, but I think this gives a sense of the living conditions.
The major discovery of the day was a little restaurant serving hand pulled noodles! I was so excited, as I love noodles, and have had a surprisingly difficult time finding freshmade noodles in Beijing.
This man is skimming noodles off of a block of dough, which rests on his shoulder, into a bubbling vat of water. As a result, the noodles are of a thick, irregular shape, and delightfully filling.
After the noodles are boiled for a while, they are put in another vat filled with soup, beef, and bok choy.
A woman at a nearby table who requested I take her photo. I wish I'd taken a photo of the guys at my table, who were really nice and asked me what I was studying in China.
The final product: absolutely delicious noodles, probably one of the best meals I've had during this time, and it cost about forty cents.

Village Excursion

I just got back from a delightful, but wet, excursion to a nearby village. Our school had arranged for us to eat in the houses of these villagers, who seem to be making quite a good living off of Beijing tourists yearning for something authentic. I guess it says something positive about the economic benefits of exceedingly fast urban development. The food was pretty good, but I do miss Americana cuisine.
The village is located in the mountains, and much to my delight, there were also some rather beautiful 14th century stupas nearby. Who knew? I have never been to a place quite like China, where you really have to be in the know to find any of this amazing stuff. It seems like only a very small percentage of things that are worth seeing are broadcasted. Around every street corner is a new secret alcove---just the other night, my roommate and I found the expat restaurant enclave, where we happily ate steak frites.
A view of the stupas that accentuates the mountains behind them.
We climbed up the mountain and saw all sorts of beautiful scenery and architecture. Here is a particularly pretty waterfall.
And some particularly pretty girls standing in front of it!
And just for the hell of it, here is a picture of me getting really excited over eating a pizza from earlier this week. Pizza?! I've never really enjoyed pizza! The Beijing grease must be getting to me. . .