Day 9 Dazu Stone Carvings

This was primarily a travel day.  The one site scheduled was the Stone Carvings near Dazu.  To get there, we traveled by bus about 5 hours over winding mountain roads.  This was our first time to see the Chinese countryside (other than the short trips we had taken to sites near the cities where we stayed).  The air was hazy (almost foggy), which obscured distance view, but as the day went on, the haze almost disappeared, and we had sunshine in the afternoon.  It was hot and humid.  On the drive, we saw several smaller towns and farming areas.  The small towns often had high rise apartments just as we had seen in the cities, but the rural areas had individual houses (made of concrete as usual) dotted around the countryside fairly close together.  The fields were small, so it was obvious that most of the farmwork was done by hand (no farm machines could operate in those small fields, and I didn't see any tractors).  Rice was the most prevalent crop.  At this season, the rice looked about 12 - 18 inches tall.  There were channels to bring in water to flood the rice fields.  We also saw small fields of corn, fruits, and vegetables.  Pumpkins growing on trellises stood out with bright yellow flowers.  In many places, the hills and mountains were terraced to provide more farmland, but it appeared to me that the terraces were not being used now.  There were some significant mountains along the way.  The road took us through several long tunnels through the mountains. The countryside (other than having rice fields and terraced hills) looked like the countryside in the U.S. southeastern states with tree-covered rolling hills and mountains.

At the Dazu Stone Carvings, we found a beautiful site where images were carved into a sandstone cliff.  These were large carvings -- some were at least 30 feet tall.  The carvings stretched along the cliff for about 1000 feet and into a cave.  Many of them were painted with gold and blue. They depicted different aspects of enlightenment as professed by Buddhism, but they also expressed tenets of Tao and Confucian beliefs.  They had been carved druing the 7th century, and no obvious damage or erosion was noticeable.  To see these, we had to descend by trails and steps to the level of the carvings on the cliff face and eventually climb back out on one of the longest set of stair steps that I remember seeing or climbing.  This was a challenge on such a hot and humid day.  Again, I was struck that a culture would undertake such a project that involved a long-term commitment of time and resources.
From Dazu, we drove on another 2 hours to Chongqing, one of the largest cities in the world (about 30 million).  We stayed in a hotel in the downtown area and had a dinner that, for the first time since the tour began, included western foods. 

Pictures:  Rice Field (taken from moving bus), Judy with students who asked to interview her, Stone Carvings (4).