Sichuan History Highlights

Ms Waterman
(teacher)

Today we visited the Du Jiang Yan irrigation system. The name means “capital river wier” and the system was built by Li Bing during the Qing dynasty 2,200 years ago to unify 6 competing states. It took 25 years for Li Bing to build it and it was built without any concrete piping (and still has none today!). We walked with Maya to see the different parts of the system which filters water for 7 million hectares in Sichuan. Since the rainy season doesn’t start until July, the river was relatively calm and we could walk across the floor of the human-made canal.

We spent the rainy afternoon outside at Mt. Qingcheng, a mountain with 36 peaks which is also the center of Daoism in China. Daoism (or Taoism), as the girls reminded me, is focused on human’s worship of nature and search for harmony with nature. The pavilions we passed were all made of and decorated with natural materials - wood, bark, and moss. We noticed that there are trees growing through some of the temple roofs, and Maya told us that Daoists seek harmony with nature in all ways, including in their construction. The park was very peaceful even though there were many other visitors. We could hear birdsong and at several points, I smelled jasmine flowers but couldn’t locate them.

Despite the drizzle and general mistiness, we walked up part of the mountain, took a cable car, and walked again until we reached the temple at the top of the mountain. The temple is one of 72 temples on the mountain and Maya showed us the correct way to bow and pray before the statue of Laozi (also called Tai Shan Laozi), the first man to worship Daoism in the Sichuan region. We couldn’t see anything at all as a view from the temple, but it was beautiful with the clouds and rain. We slipped and slid down the many steps to reach the bottom of the mountain where we collapsed gratefully into the car to drive back to Chengdu. Liz and Iona have step-trackers and apparently we walked 20,000 steps (about 8 miles!) today!