Wutaishan to Taiyuan

Wutaishan (五台山) is one of the four Buddhist mountains in China. Accessible via a long detour off the Datong to Taiyuan road, the route winds upwards through the mountains on its way to the pass at the Northern peak of Wutaishan and then descends into the village of Taihuai (台怀). There are five mountain peaks around here and the fresh air and alpine scenery in the mountains is a refreshing change to the polluted cities around. Many temples here survived the Cultural Revolution due to the remoteness of the village and they display some fine and ancient architecture in a village that has been a Buddhist centre since at least the year 58, during the the reign of Emperor MingDi. Taihuai is a quiet, peaceful place with monks wandering the streets, while tour buses hop around everywhere carrying groups of Chinese tourists from site to site.

There are too many temples to go into detail, but I visited a few, climbed up 1080 steps which I thought was just one or two flights, to the Dailuo Peak. There was a small temple just up the steps, which I was aiming for, but as I ascended I realised there were more and more and more steps and many, many people heading up this way because it turned out to be going to the Shancai Temple near the peak of the mountain. I could no turn back then, so carried on up with the occasional friendly companion who wanted to be with the strange, exciting foreigner.

Overall, the fresh air is nice, but apart from the temples in the centre, everything is far apart and it would take some time and effort to get to any of the five peaks, yet alone one of them. There is little else to see or do once you have seen a few temples, so after two half days in Taihuai, I felt it was enough and found a bus onto Taiyuan (太原) , a necessary stopping point to change transport before heading to my next destination, Pingyao (平遥).


Left: The white stupa at Tayuan Si, is the symbol of Taihuai village.
Centre: On the way up to Dailuo Peak, I found this man making stele carvings.
Right: Twin Pagodas at Shuangta Temple, the symbol of Taiyuan.

The minibus driver was a complete idiot driver, I have been in some pretty wild bus journeys before, but this guy was worse than any other I have experienced. Lucky I think I have grown accustomed to it and was not too bothered most of the time, but his regular driving on the wrong side of the road to pass cars waiting at a red light so we could just carry on and weaving in and out of vehicles on either side was a bit stupid. He was probably a driver grown up on computer simulations who cannot distinguish between games and real-life. But, we got to Taiyuan in one piece and was dropped at the train station. Train tickets are apparently notoriously difficult to get hold of for this journey, so I didn't try. There were no buses from the train station concourse area to Pingyao, none from the nearby long-distance bus station as it was not considered a long-distance trip and they in fact left from a station in Southern Taiyuan. I also could not find any shared cars heading that way, so I stayed a night there. This spare evening time gave me a chance to read something about Taiyuan and decided in the morning I would go and see its famous twin pagodas at Shangta Si (双塔寺 ,Twin Pagoda Temple).

It was worth the effort, it was a lovely sunny day and the temperature was good, it felt like Spring at last. The flowers and trees had begun to flower and meant the area with wandering verandas and pavilions was a colourful scene. I climbed the thirteen floors of one of the towers but sadly the view was poor, the windows became smaller with each floor you ascended, the inside of the tower became narrower, so the windows became gradually further away and on the thirteenth floor, there was a mini window at the end of a mini-tunnel, which I would have to have crawled a metre or two into to reach the small window and get a view. Good exercise but a waste of time. With the springtime weather I jumped into the town centre briefly and found the main square had a few drink/eating stalls so sat outside in the sun with a drink, first time this year it's been warm enough where I have been and how nice that is to do.

Actually managed to get a train ticket to Pingyao in the morning which was better that heading out to the southern station so was pleased with that and had an interesting journey chatting with an old man and a couple of young, cool, trendy Chinese, while surrounded by intrigued, or is it just nosey, onlookers. The train though was absolutely packed, especially around where I was sitting, seriously overbooked with wuzuo (no seat) tickets, so in the end was not so bad to get off when we reached Pingyao and I did so with a couple of new words added to my Chinese vocabulary.