Sacred Mount Tai and Qufu

We decided to do another trip last weekend.  It was to visit Mount Tai and Qufu.  We had been to both places before, but we wanted to go again with a different tour.

Saturday morning, we caught a bus at 9 a.m. that would take us to the train station.  We made it with an hour or so to spare before our train left.  It took us a few minutes to figure out the chart for when the trains leave, we hadn't ridden on one yet this year.  It is a nice way to travel in China.  It was a little over a half hour to travel about 100 miles.

We were met at the train station in Tai'an by the tour guide and two of the other BYU teachers that were going on this trip.  The others were to arrive about 45 minutes later, so we had a little wait.  Kevin, the guide, took us out to the bus so we could sit down.  After the others arrived, we were taken to a local restaurant for a late lunch.

Mount Tai, one of four sacred mountains in China.  Lots of stories about the emperors of China coming here for inspiration.

There was a marathon going on that weekend at Mount Tai, so it was hard to get very close to the place we needed to be.  The bus dropped us off and we had a little walk to get to the visitor center.  Mount Tai is one of the four sacred mountains in China and has a long history as a place for emperors and wise men to visit for inspiration.  There is a Daoist temple near the top.

One way to take supplies up and down the mountain.

We were driven by a shuttle bus to the place where we could get a gondola ride to the top.  It's rather a fun ride.  Can be a little nerve wracking for those that don't trust gondolas or like the heights.

We passed a long, long line of people waiting in line for the gondola ride back down to the shuttle bus.  When we got to where we could go up to see the Daoist temple, the guide pulled us all together and explained that the line for the gondolas was extra long because one of the two gondola lines was down, and that was the one that we had planned to take down.  It was going to be a 4-5 hour wait!  He explained our options as being wait in the line for that long time, or go down by the stairs.  Going down the stairs would take about two hours, but is was very steep with no hand rails or anything to hang onto.  In some places, you would have to turn around and go down backwards because it was so steep!  There were two people that just turned around and got back into the line right away.  There were four of us that decided we would start on the stairs right away and then when the rest of the group that had decided to take the stairs down caught up with us, we could join them.

One of the women had been wearing open toed shoes and her feet were freezing.  It was quite a cold day up on the mountain with the wind chill making it even colder.   She has a skin condition that makes if torture for her to wear closed toed shoes from a fungus or something she picked up in Japan twenty years ago.  She lives in Texas, so going without shoes isn't much of a problem for her there.  Is was a problem at Mount Tai where it is cold and windy.  I also began thinking about what going down over 7000 steps would do to my knee and we decided that we better go stand in line for the four or so hours it would take.

The alternative way down if the gondolas stop working.  And, this was just the 3,000 steps to the shuttle area.  There are over 9,000 steps from bottom to top.  Some people  do it as a right of passage.  

The guide suggested that we talk to the guards and explain about my knee and the woman's feet and see if they could get us through the line faster.  We decided to try that, but the guide left to be with the rest of the group while we tried to make the guards understand what we were asking.  As we were trying to explain to the guards, two Chinese girls that spoke English fairly well, stopped to see how they could help us.  We explained the situation to them and they started talking to the guards.  At first, it didn't seem like the guards were going to give in to us, but the girls kept talking and they eventually took pity on us.  We were so grateful for the small gift of those two girls!

We by-passed all those people who had been standing in line for many hours, keeping our heads down the whole time, and feeling bad that they still had to stand there while we were being escorted to the gondola.

Once we were down to the place where we caught the shuttle buses, we had to wait for all the others.  We found some rocks by the side of the path that we could sit on to wait.  We spent the time getting to know each other  better and talking to people that passed us by.  There were two different couples that came and sat down to talk for some time.  One was a man who was raised in Shanghai, went to the US and married his wife that was from Taiwan.  They currently live in Calgary, Canada, and have for many years.   The other man was also from Shanghai, but his wife was from Hong Kong.  They had both gone separately  to the US for school, met there and lived in the San Francisco area.  It was a pleasant talk with both.  Lots of others that only had a little bit of English asked for have photos taken with us.

The two people that had turned around right away were about an hour behind us.  Then it was another hour or so before the rest of them got down.  They had decided to try and take the gondola after all and the line was starting to move fast then.  The original plan had been to finish on Mount Tai about 5, and then travel to Qufu where our hotel was and have supper there.  Then we would have time to watch a local entertainment show that they put on at the hotel at 8 p.m.  That didn't happen.  Instead, we arrived at the hotel at 9 p.m., had a late supper and  went to our rooms.

David and I got to our room and it was freezing inside!!  China turns off the heat by March 15, whether you need it still or not.  As I went to close the curtains to see if it would make it any warmer, David was talking to the guide to see if we could get the heat turned on in the room.  As  I got to the curtain, I noticed that a wind was blowing the curtain.  I looked for a heat vent, but instead I found the window wide open!  I tried to close the window, but it was stuck and would not close all the way.

After several attempts, David came over and was finally able to get it to close, but now we had an extra cold room and we were cold from our trip on the mountain.  We left our coats, clothes and shoes on until just before we hopped into bed.  When the hotel person came to check on the heat and told us there was no heat in the room, she showed him where an extra comforter was on the shelf that we could use if we weren't warm enough.  Not helpful...

After breakfast the next morning, we hurried out the door to the opening of the gate to Confucius home complex.  They do a ceremony every morning.

Opening the gates ceremony.  This isn't all of it, just two parts of it.

After the ceremony, we quickly went to the area that we needed to go to for tickets.  We were pretty close to the first ones in line. As we were sitting waiting for the guide, an old gentleman with about four teeth left came up to sit near a group of us.  He had an old passport that he carried with him.  He had traveled to many  places and was very proud of the fact.  Sometimes you get beggars that just want money, but he wanted to talk.  Some of them showed him their passports.  Then someone decided that it would be a nice gesture to give him an American dollar bill, so they did.

Confucius scholars waiting to go through the compound gates to go to the graduation type ceremony.

Gates into the compound. I believe they said there were five gates to go through, and each one was for different levels.

As we made our way through the compound, which has a lot of buildings and ancient trees in it, there were a lot of groups of children, elementary and junior high age, touring also.  These groups were so thrilled to see all of these Americans there.  We had lots of pictures taken of us and with us.  They gathered around us in groups and tried to speak the little English some of them knew.  Their chaperones were having a hard time dealing with keeping them all moving along.

The sign says to not touch the tree, but of course everyone touches it. Maybe it only says that in English...

On the roofs of the houses, they have animals that depict the rank of the person who lives in that house.  This is the house of a very important person because they have eight animals.  I have seen as many as twelve, but that was in Beijing.

This juniper tree in the Confucius Compound is 2,500 years old.  They have plaques hanging on each of the trees stating how old they are.  Most are between 200 and 500 years old.  They try preserve them by  putting the metal bands around them and filling in parts that are starting to split.  

This was the family well in that served the Confucius Family.  The plaque was partially destroyed during the cultural revolution.  Confucius family was particularly persecuted during that time because they were teachers.  The last direct line son of Confucius left China to live in Taiwan when Chiang Kai-shek left the country.

The only remaining wall of the house the Confucius grew up in.

This is called the roofline of "frenemies." Keep your friends close and our enemies closer.  They wanted to keep an eye on the people that were their enemies, so they lived close to them to keep an eye on them.  It helped keep balance in the government.   

Just a cute picture of a cute couple in love!

Pomegranate flower.  It is the flower planted for the sons of the family.

Pomegranate tree.  The trunk is so thin and spindly.  

When we finished with Confucius' Compound, we were taken by horse-drawn wagons to make the trip to the cemetery.  Ten of us were put in a closed carriage with one horse pulling us.  By the time that horse got to the cemetery (a distance of about three km), he was pretty tired.

Our wagon going through the gates between the walls to the city.

He was pretty tired by the time we got there.

While we were waiting for the other wagon of our group to get there, we started talking with some junior high age kids.  They were so excited and we had lots of picture taking.  We didn't even know when the rest of the group arrived.  The kids all had to leave and we looked around and we were by ourselves. No group!

David and I started walking in the direction that we were sure they had gone, but we didn't see them.  Fortunately, David had the guide's phone number and called him.  We hurried and caught up.

They had shuttle buses that take you around the cemetery.  You can only be buried there if you are a descendant of Confucius.  They don't allow head stones to be placed there anymore because even though it is a large cemetery,  they will run out of room.  They stopped putting up head stones in 1947.

The guide said these were orchid flowers, but on closer look, they didn't look like orchids.  Sometimes the way the names of things translate, doesn't work very well.

The mounds are the graves.  Each year, the family members will come back on Tomb Sweeping day and add more dirt to the mound to show their respect for their ancestors.  If you see a small mound with fresh dirt, it is where a new grave has been started.

Some of the tombstones that are still left.  Since 1949, you can't put anymore gravestones up.  They are afraid of running out of room to bury all of the ancestors there.  The graveyard is 28 hectares in size.  Pretty big, but when you are talking about over 500 years of ancestors...

We went back to the hotel, checked out of our rooms and had a late lunch.  Then we were taken to the train station to wait for over an hour for our high speed train trip back to Jinan.  It was a very exhausting two days.  Glad to be home.