Some second thoughts on rocks

In front of the International Hotel of Luya Mountain, where we stayed in Ningwu county, North China's Shanxi province, stands a large stone sculpture.

When I first passed it, I didn't give it a thought. But, when I looked at it from the other side, I had to pause and take a closer look.

From the street, it looks like an ancient Chinese garden decoration, a massive chunk of red, marbled rock that looks sort of like a bull (if you have the right set of eyes and a little imagination), but the real surprise comes when you see the back of the sculpture, which has a series of miniature carvings of different scenes from the surrounding mountains.

So, what looks so natural at first is really the work of a millennium or three of historical craftsmanship, a polishing job so thick that it removes the rough edges to show a larger form.

Not far away, at the Malun Grassland at the top of Luya Mountain, there is a large, open pasture that hides itself in the folds and the forests of the mountains and which has its own bulls not unlike the statue in the city.

I walked up to the pasture on a stone-lined trail that wove through a forest of tall, pencil-thin conifers, thinking about how this area once must have been the breeding ground of war horses during the Tang Dynasty (618-907).

As I emerged from the forest near the pasture, I transitioned onto a planked walkway that ran its way like a crazy expressway through the pasture.

Up there next to the sky, the land was open on all sides and, where war horses once ran, cows now meander pensively and graze as a roadside attraction and tourists take pictures and have picnics.

The large, open space has mountains in the distance and is quiet except for the occasional yells of Chinese tourists, which, a fellow traveler informed me is done to clear the area of the occasional ghosts who might be lingering about, something that seems to make sense when you walk through so much history.

By Ryan Thorpe, from the US, who is a senior lecturer at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

(China Daily 09/09/2016 page19)