June 8 - Leshan Buddha and Ebony Museum

The guide had a car and driver for us today.  We were the only ones of our group that didn’t go on to Tibet.  Leshan is a city that is about a two-and-a-half-hour drive south of Chengdu.  It boasts that it has the largest Buddha in the world.  I think he said 71 meters tall.  We were afraid that the line to go see it would be really long, but not so long that we needed to start any earlier than 9 a.m.

The drive to Leshan was a little boring, but I had a book to read, so it didn’t bother me much.   When we arrived at the place to get on the boat, there wasn’t much of a line.  Our guide had us go stand in line while he went to get the tickets for the boat ride.  While we were waiting in line, an old guy beckoned to David to follow him and David started to go.  I yelled for David to come back because it didn’t seem right that it wasn’t our guide.  He came back, but the man went on, so we waited for our guide. 

The river in LeShan has a place where three rivers come together.  The rivers are the Dadu, the Qingyi, and the Minjiang rivers.  We only had to wait to get on the boat for about ten minutes.  The guide was afraid that it would be an hour.  We got on the boat and they had us go right up to the top open deck. When we got to the part of the river where the three currents came together, the boat started rocking.  It hurts my leg to have to try and balance on it, so I was in a fair amount of pain by the time we got through that rough current.  That was where the boat capsized that prompted the creation of the Buddha.  All hands were drowned, so a Buddhist Monk took collections to create the Buddha.  It took 90 years to build.

As we rounded the corner and started seeing how huge this Buddha was, I could easily believe it was the largest Buddha in the world!  

This is a gate that leads down to the river.

This isn't the largest Buddha, but it was pretty big.

If you want to get up and personal with the Buddha, you can walk down this stairs.  Most people were just going on the boats like us, but plenty were going down the stairway that was cut into the sandstone rock.

Giant Buddha.  Largest in the world.  71 meters tall (almost 233 feet).  Took 90 years to build.  

This guy stands on the other side of the giant Buddha.

Once you have seen the Buddha, you climb back up to the top of the mountain this way.

After getting off the boat, the driver took us to a small local restaurant to eat.  They made some fresh dumplings for us that tasted really good!  We weren’t terribly hungry, so after we finished with those, the guide gave us some suggestions of things we could do with the time we had left before we went back to Chengdu to catch the plane home.  We decided to go to the Summer Palace and Ebony Museum in Leshan. 

Ebony is a wood that is so dense that it doesn’t float but sinks to the bottom of the river.  The Chinese find it in the riverbeds and use it for carvings and designs.  We saw some fascinating artwork at the museum.  There was also a museum of the Chinese Zodiac and a replica of the Summer Palace that used to be in that area.  

This giant lion greeted us when we entered the museum.  He is basically one log of ebony with some parts (like his tail) glued into it.  You can hardly tell that it is not a part of the original log.  He had a twin brother on the other side that looked just as welcoming as this one did.

I loved this beautiful door (and the man standing beside it).  I took one picture and our guide wanted to see it.  She said something in Chinese the our guide, Echo, interpreted as, "It looks like an old time movie photo."  It was rather funny .  I don't remember if this was her photo that she took after, or the one that I took.  I think it was the lighting.

These statues commemorate the grandfathers of Feng Shui.

This is our Chinese guide in the museum.  She was always so kind and considerate of me and my cane.  We were friends by the time the tour was finished.  It's not a very good picture of her though.

Our guide at the museum had some of these flowers hanging around her neck.  I was very curious about them and asked what flower they were.  She took one off and tried to hang it on my shirt, but I didn't have a button to hang it on, so she put it on my purse.  They wear these flowers because they emit a natural insecticide that keeps the mosquitoes off of you.  I like them and the way they smelled wasn't bad either.

This dear was made of a piece of ebony.  There were a few pieces added to it, like part of its face, but mostly it was one piece of wood.

This ebony carving has the dragon and the phoenix.  The dragon represents the king and the phoenix represents the queen.

This peacock has been brought to you by the roots of an ebony tree that was found buried in the river.

Ebony carving of a village on the mountain.

This carving tells the story of one of the three most famous books in China.  Journey to the West, A Dream of Red Mansions  and one that I don't remember the name of now.

This part of the museum is a replica of the summer palace that was once destroyed.  It has the signs of the Chinese Zodiac in it.

These roots of the persimmon tree were in the shapes of some of the Chinese characters so they put them together on the board.  I assume that it is a poem or something.

We left the museum at 2:45 figuring that we would be able to be at the airport by 5 p.m., however, there was a lot of construction going on, and it made it slow going.  Several times, the driver thought we were on a road that would take us to the airport, only to have it blocked and we would have to back track and find another way.  

This ancient instrument was used to predict the weather.  I couldn't get an answer as to how it did that.  Maybe if it was wet it was raining, if it was hot it was sunny, if it was cold and wet it was snowing.

This is an ancient seismograph to predict earthquakes.  In each of the dragon's mouths, there is a marble. If the marble drops, there is an earthquake happening.

We arrived at the airport at 6 p.m. and our flight was taking off at 7!  Our guide took us in, talked to the people at the ticket desk, and they took us in front of three other people.  I felt bad but didn’t want to miss that flight! 

Next was security. Our guide took us to the VIP security line and talked to the guard on duty to allow us to go through there, and to let him come with us as far as the place to be scanned.  We made it to the gate we needed to be at and had ten minutes to sit down before we had to get in line for the bus that would take us to the airplane.  We arrived without problems in Jinan, took a taxi home and crawled into bed.

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