Tian Tin

Tian Tin Buddha, Po Lin Monastery

(寶蓮禪寺天壇大佛)

I actually intended to see the Tian Tin Buddha my first week here. As it has now happened, I ended up seeing it the last. This is actually one of the few cultural icons of Hong Kong in my opinion. What makes it unique though as religious icons go, it's relatively new, having been started contruction on in the early 1990s. 

Nanjing: Purple Mountain

Our first and only full day at Nanjing saw us starting out at Purple Mountain (紫金山). With Nanjing as one of the historic capitals of China, serving at times under the Ming Dynasty and under the Republic, Purple Mountain is located towards the east of the old city (as determined by city walls), and houses the mausoleums of the early Ming emperors as well as that of Sun Yat-sen.

Well, we saw both. Nanjing's public light rail system is not as developed as more major Chinese cities, though a second line is being built and more are under planning, so we took a taxi to the base of the mountain, seeing that we had no idea how to work the buses, less read the bus stop signs.

From the taxi, we walked out to the entrance gate to the mausoleum of the first Ming emperor. The entrance fee was ¥70 CNY, less 20% with student discount if you read the signs. I read the signs but my friends didn't. Going to the mausoleum was a bit of a walk, though the crisp air, albeit quite cold during the late fall/early winter, presented a change from Hong Kong, and the escape to nature presented an escape from the city.

The first Ming Emperor's tomb was large and complex. Noticeable to me is the fact that the walls were painted pink rather than the traditional red. After seeing the Forbidden City in Beijing, along with plenty of other classic Chinese architecture, the complex seemed more large than interesting.

After walking halfway through the park, we approached the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum. Apparently, this is one of the few places in Mainland China where you can still see the Kuomintang symbol (white sun on blue background) so prominently displayed. I had my picture taken by the vendors. They used their digital point-and-shoots rather than the big single-lens reflex cameras that I expected.

Sun Yat-sen is something of a hero here, which is understandable if you know his role in the establishment of modern China. I've been to no fewer that four memorials dedicated to him in four different cities. The first was the Sun Yat-sen Museum here in Hong Kong that Black Castle Tours took us to the weekend between the first and second weeks of instruction here. It was his Hong Kong residence turned into a museum of his comprehensive history and the founding of the Republic of China. The second was the Sun Yat-sen Memorial in Taipei, which was a big gray building with an orange roof that paled in impressiveness in comparison with the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial also in Taipei. The third was of the same name in Guangzhou. It had a large courtyard in front and a statue in his likeness, but we decided not to go inside because of the cost.

This fourth one that I went to in Nanjing was both a museum and a mausoleum. While it was not impressive like the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial in Taipei was by sheer size, it was impressive in the sheer walk it took to get there. I walked at a decent pace for a good ten minutes to get through the first gate, at which point there were stairs going all the way up. Though it was a long walk up, the views from the top were impressive.

Behind the memorial to Sun Yat-sen was his coffin place into the ground with a circular viewing area around it. It's like Napoleon's tomb in Paris, except much less grand, white, and surrounded by one level of viewing instead of two.

Continuing on in the day, we headed off to the Gate of China (中华门/中華門), which was just that--a gate. It was well restored though and decked out with Ming-Dynasty flags and porcelain Ming Dynasty guards. It formed part of the old city wall of Nanjing, of which much remains.

Along the way I introduced my friends to the sugarcoated seedy red fruits that I do not know the name of. They were being sold by street vendors at the intersection one of the major universities in Nanjing. It was so good to them that they wanted more on the way back. But when we got there, we saw the guy we first bought them from running away across the street. Then we could see why. The police came and take the other street vendor's goods away from her, throwing them into the back of the truck. There was no force used and no charges pressed, just quick and clean action.

No we still wanted the fruit candy things, so we crossed the street and found the guy who had gone and hid. He went into an alley and was sticking his head out looking for the police. We waited for him to come back out with his food to sell, and we pounced on the opportunity to buy some. Apparently he was frightened, but it all turned out okay with everybody getting what they wanted.

Next was Confucius temple (夫子庙/夫子廟), which I directed us to more for the neighborhood then the actual temple, which we didn’t end up going into. In this neighborhood was most noticeably a large shopping area full of hagglers and cotton candy (which my friends insisted calling candy floss, which I imagined was sugary dental floss that dissolved in your mouth).

The area was also notable for being the regional location for the civil servant examinations back in the day. Nanjing (南京) is capital of Jiangsu (江苏/江蘇) province, which includes the notable city of Suzhou (苏州/蘇州), which I visited two years ago. Not far away is Hangzhou (杭州), another literati gathering point famous for its scenery, which I visited on the same trip in 2007. This examination center was where these gentlemen would have received their qualifications after a long examination and subsequently been inducted into the bureaucracy.

This particular Confucius Temple was not particularly well known though. Since there was an entrance fee, a statue of Confucius in the entry court was obscured by a tasteful barrier so that you can’t see inside without paying.

To end the day, and the bulk of the trip, we had dinner at Papa Johns (来到棒!约翰), which like Pizza Hut, is a lot fancier in China (and apparently much of the rest of the world) than in the United States, where it’s just pizza delivery and take-out.

Class Roundup: Chinese Society

Traditional Chinese Society ended yesterday, with my first final during finals week(s) and my fourth final overall. Being my first one during finals it was officiated in an authoritarian manner that I’m only used to for standardized tests. The professor had the exams on our desks when we came in then read verbatim off of an instruction sheet provided to him by the university. I know that it was provided to him because he laughed when he read aloud that you are allowed to have calculators out (since the only number we dealt with was the number of souls that a person has).

Out our class of twelve, I was given seat number twelve. For the large classroom, we were all squished onto the left side rather than spread out over the room, as would have been sensible from an administrator’s standpoint.

After we were read out loud the directions, the professor, who already had us down by name, seeing that he taught all the tutorials and the class was really small, had to verify all of our identities by means of our student identification cards.

I didn’t think the final examination was too hard. To study, I did all the readings again and went over our class discussions of the topics—both those online and those in the classroom. He specifically said not to stress specific details—so I didn’t.

We were given seven questions based on various topics that we covered in class and we had two hours to answer two of those questions in an extended in-class essay format. And I feel I answered those two questions well and completely, despite the fact that I was the first to finish. (I usually finish somewhere in the middle, though the fact that I finished first may be because I was the only native English speaker in the class.) We’ll see how I did.

Other assessments for this class included the weekly journal, online discussions, and project.

The weekly journal entries only had to be two hundred words long each, and I usually went past that. Many of my classmates, realizing that you can’t really say much in two hundred words went well over four times that. This blog has already added up to over one hundred thousand words, so I’ll attest to the fact that you can’t say much in two hundred words. We were to write on the topic of traditional Chinese society that we were covering that week. Whereas other classmates treated the entries as anthropological research assignments, I did less of that and instead had personal reflections on the topics. Often, I would through in the line or two about how I feel we’re exoticizing the subject too much, but I’ve talked about that a lot already.

The online discussions I contributed to more often than not. Some people had contributions several times a week. It was also apparent that some people had not contributed once to the discussions. I always tried to interact with other students on these online discussions rather than only summarizing articles as was prevalent at the beginning of the semester.

I can’t remember if I talked about the term project, but it consisted of a two thousand-word (field) research paper accompanied by a presentation to be made during tutorial. On the syllabus, it said that it was due week seven. To that effect, I got it done before the week seven tutorial, ready to present. I was the only one in the tutorial that had anything to show, not that the professor was expecting it. That week he decided to schedule in everybody’s presentations, and when it came to me, I asked if I could do it that day, since it was already done. He (reluctantly) said yes and I got it over with—meaning that I unintentionally lectured for forty minutes.

My topic was on the (Christian) religious beliefs of HKU students. My sample size was small, as he only required about ten interviews. Overall, my results fell in line with Hong Kong SAR statistics. I noted that I didn’t encounter as many self-described Christians as I imagined. My professor made the note (that I didn’t see) that the number of self-described Buddhists was higher at HKU than in Hong Kong SAR statistics. I felt that my report was well-researched and well-written.

On a different note about the same class, I’m planning on petitioning to have this course qualify for my minor in the Study of Religion for my degree back at UCSD. The undergraduate advisor told me I couldn’t because nothing in the syllabus mentioned directly “religion,” so I had to rebut by saying that religion in the modern, scholarly sense ultimately refers to one’s overall view on the world and what things are significant and how those things are significant. In addition, there is a class called “Chinese Society” at UCSD that has the same course description as the course I was about to take, and it happens to fulfill the requirement without petition. She then forwarded my request for preapproval to the director or the program, who decided that I did have a case and that I did receive preapproval. So hopefully everything falls in line.

Please Don't Touch

To satisfy my non-western fine arts class for my Eleanor Roosevelt College general education requirements, I thought what better place to take such a class than outside the west? I thought it was a good idea; it was actually one suggested to us by our college at UCSD. And it really was a good idea—just not in the way I imagined.

I had a highly romanticized vision of what taking a non-western fine arts class in a non-western country, so to speak, was going to be like. I couldn’t really say what I expected, but this class was definitely not it. All that can be said is that I’m probably getting more out of such a class here than I would back home.

I actually don’t mean to go negative, because I genuinely like the class (though I had to go to the art museum across the harbor early yesterday to look at a handscroll for a research paper due Friday). Ultimately, it’s an art history class, so it is research and text based with a lot of critical analysis (though thankfully in a socio-historical setting).

So far, we’ve talked about Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Buddhism art, as well as Chinese Folk Religion art such as the banners used in funeral processions (yeah, I forgot the academic name). For Indian Buddhism, we went into stupas and depictions of the Buddha, how we know that the figure is a Buddha, and so on. Regarding Japanese Buddhism, we went over architecture and the implications on art that Buddhism and Shintoism had in their meeting and mixing. For Chinese art we covered works commissioned by emperors as well as handscrolls and aspects of calligraphy.

There were these two weeks where we had a real hands-on application for the class that seems to have pretty much served as the highlight of the class. For one lecture, we met at the Hong Kong Museum of Art where the professor meticulously went over several pieces related to the focus of the class. For one tutorial we got to practice Chinese calligraphy and painting with the same brush (which turns out is much, much harder than it looks). For another tutorial, we went to the art museum on campus where the curator set up a room for us where we got to see some of the more ancient stuff up close and actually get to handle some of the less expensive ceramic pieces.

Besides the papers and the memorization of particular artists names as well as identification of particular pieces, the class is shaping up to be a really good choice.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
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