A first-person view of 'New China, Old River'
 

BELFAST (Aug 9): About five years ago, as the College Board was preparing to add an Advanced Placement exam in World History to its list of offerings, Molly Ross and I launched a team-taught Advanced Placement course for sophomores at Belfast Area High School.

 

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This course, which we named “Global Studies,” surveys world history and world literature from the third millennium B.C. to the present, and it equips students with the skills and knowledge needed for success on the AP World History exam.

As part of our preparation for teaching this course, Ross and I applied for and were accepted into a five-day seminar at Bowdoin College titled, “Views of the East: Teaching China and Japan in American Schools.”

This seminar is offered annually to educators in Maine and elsewhere and is funded by the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia, the Five College Center for East Asian Studies and the Freeman Foundation, in conjunction with (in Maine) the Maine Humanities Council.

The Shen Nung Xi River is a tributary of the Yangtze River, which is the longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world. (Photo by William Murphy)

Successful completion of the seminar’s requirements makes one eligible to apply for a study-tour. Last February, inspired by images of the Yangtze River, the longest river in Asia and the third-longest in the world (after the Nile and the Amazon), I applied for this summer’s China study-tour, titled, “New China, Old River: Culture, History, and Economic Rebirth along the Banks of the Yangtze,” and eventually won the opportunity to tour and study China in the company of 22 other teachers from the Northeast and one from Atlanta.

After a preparatory weekend seminar at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., in May, we departed June 26, from Boston, traveled to Shanghai, the water town of Zhouzhuang and Yichang, where we boarded a cruise ship shaped like a dragon and sailed up the Yangtze River four nights and three days through the Three Gorges, and disembarked at Chongqing, China’s largest city.

From there we drove by bus to Leshan to view the world’s largest surviving Buddha sculpture, then to the holy mountain of Emeishan, and then to Kangding in Tibet.

Leshan Giant Buddha, the largest stone sculpture of Buddha in the world, is at the confluence of the Minjiang, Dadu and Qingyi rivers. (Photo by William Murphy)

After visiting the Nanwu Lamasery, we drove to China’s urban paradise, the city of Chengdu, where we were introduced to students and teachers from Southwest Transportation University.

After touring the Chengdu area for three days with the students, visiting the cottage of Du Fu, China’s most beloved poet, the World Wildlife Fund’s Panda Breeding Center, and the Sichuan Opera, we flew to Beijing, explored Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven, and the Dandelion School, where I taught, with the help of Rebecca White from George Stevens Academy, a group of migrant middle-school students a lesson on lobster fishing on the coast of Maine.

A panda at the World Wildlife Fund’s Panda Breeding Center. (Photo by William Murphy)

Then, July 17 we flew — over Siberia, the polar ice cap, and the Queen Elizabeth Islands — back to Chicago and Boston.

A Buddhist monastery on Mt. Emeishan — one of four Buddhist sacred mountains of China. Emei Shan means 'Delicate Eyebrow Mountain' — two facing peaks 'look like the delicate eyebrows of a Chinese classic beauty.' (Photo by William Murphy)

This is merely a rough outline of the itinerary, but if it can help the reader appreciate the near-epic scope of this tour, then it will have served its purpose.

China is not only vast and crowded (1.3 billion people live in this nation), it is also wonderfully diverse. There are 56 separate minorities living within China’s border. There are great cities like Shanghai, its skyline dominated by space-age architecture and its alleys corrupted by medieval poverty, the Jetsons on one side of the Huangpo River in the Pudong, Dante’s Inferno on the other, down the Nanjing Road.

There is Sichuan Province, with its landscape of abundance, its striking agricultural fertility. Every square foot of land produces food: rice, eggplant, tea, melons, peaches, plums and fish. The rooftops of every home are green with vegetables and grains, and the farmers plant their crops right down to the edge of the road.

William Murphy climbs the Great Wall at Juyongguan. (Image courtesy of William Murphy)

Where we in the U.S. would expect a parking place or a breakdown lane, the Chinese plant corn, peppers, and squash.

As I tried to comprehend the vast, industrial sublime of the Three Gorges Hydroelectric Project on the Yangtze, I noticed a Buddhist temple on a misty mountain peak in the background. It was perched so high, so capriciously on this wild and craggy summit that it seemed inaccessible, yet clearly it could not be so. Someone carrying food and water had to be able to reach that temple; no doubt there was a path that could be followed if one climbed with patience and with care.

In Tibet, I traveled in a rented station wagon, its insides adorned with numerous bright red Buddhist good-luck charms, up a much-neglected, nerve-rattling switchback mountain road that took us through the slums of Kanding, along precipitous cliff edges, to a 12,000-foot-high, pristine lake preserved for its beauty and its power to refresh the contemplative soul. Tibetan prayer flags fluttered in the wind over a cedar plank walkway that skirted the edge of the lake.

I saw the moat around the red walls of the Forbidden City, its construction begun during the Ming Dynasty and finished by the emperor Zhong He in 1420. Twenty-four emperors lived in this palace, and now a huge portrait of Mao Zedong adorns the wall over the entrance.

Inside the Forbidden City in Beijing. It is surrounded by a moat and high wall. The Buddhist Lamasery is in the background. (Photo by William Murphy)

I saw the untold energy of unrestrained capitalism living symbiotically with the remnants of authoritarian communism.

One walks out of the turmoil of the street and the market into the peace and silence of a Buddhist monastery.

One climbs for three hours to the top of the Great Wall, and finds a vendor selling T-shirts and postcards.

The young women who have majored in English in the universities set their hopes on marrying young men with engineering degrees, so they can live comfortably in the city and not have to return to the subsistence farms where their families live in the rural provinces.

William Murphy in Tiananmen Square where students, intellectuals and activists protested in 1989. (Image courtesy of William Murphy)

I saw everywhere the rich and the poor, the modern and the traditional, the technological and the agricultural, the yak herders and the stockbrokers.

On the streets of Beijing you can buy a snack of black scorpions roasted on a stick or a 2008 Olympic T-shirt emblazoned with the motto, “One World/One Dream” in Chinese and in English. I skipped the scorpions but bought the T-shirts for my kids.

But somehow, it is all united into one nation, one culture and one river, the vast and turbulent Yangtze. It flows down out of the western mountains of Tibet to Shanghai. The Great Canal flows south out of the Summer Palace, connecting the two great cities of the coastal plain, Beijing in the north and Shanghai in the south.

All the cultural, ethnic and economic tributaries flow into the Yangtze, and the river mixes all the complex diversity that is China into one national identity. China and the great river are one.

William Murphy may be reached at bmurphy@gwi.net.