Under a Spreading Chestnut Tree...

Know what this is?

In an alley just around the corner from my building in Gangxia, Shenzhen, I saw this setup. It's a shop (of sorts). Can you guess what it is?

• Clue #1: The blackened wall on the left indicates fire.
• Clue #2: That's an old bathtub on the right.
• Clue #3 (this should do it): The hat is covering a chunk of wood with a piece of iron on top.

Forge - bath - anvil.

It's a blacksmith's shop.

Crude but effective. I never saw the smithy at work, but every time I passed there weresigns that he had been there.

By the way, the title of this piece comes from an old poem, called "The VillageBlacksmith," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The title is apropos, no?

The Stone Pagoda Temple, Yangzhou

This beautiful little carved stone pagoda stands in a traffic island near the central intersection of Yangzhou in Jiangsu Province.

According to the plaque nearby, it was part of Mulan Temple. ("Mulan" is a kind of magnolia; it's the same characters as the legendary girl hero that the Disney film Mulan was based on.)

The pagoda was built in the year 838, in the Tang Dynasty, to hold Buddhist relics.(That's the purpose of most pagodas.)

It has five stories and six sides, with (once upon a time) a total of 24 finely carved Buddhas. It was repaired in 1964.

The pagoda is all that remains of Mulan Temple. For this reason, it is generally refered to as "Shi Ta Si": Stone Pagoda Temple.

China, Where I Lived for Eleven Years

Because I lived most of my eleven years in Shenzhen, most of what you'll see here is from Guangdong (Shenzhen mostly, and Guangzhou, and Shaoguan…) I spent a year in Yangzhou, Jiangsu (with not much to show for it considering); a week in a mountain-top temple in Futian; and a day each in Wuhan, Xi'an, and Chongqing. When I first wrote this, I said, "I'll let you know if and when I ever get to Beijing, Shanghai, Tibet, the rest of Xi'an…" But in fact--though I never made it to Tibet--I visiited nearly a hundred cities in China. You can see them on my The Temple Guy pages.

Everything on these pages is © 2009 and 2023 by James Baquet.