Taoping, at long last

*posted by Amy*

Taoping 6 July

So we arrived in Taoping today. On the ride out here, we stopped by Duijiangyan, the ancient, but updated in the eighties water works. The dam system diverts water from the Min River, across to the Chengdu plain. The system seemed pretty ingenious, inasmuch as it only needed dredging in one of its three channels. The other ones were cleansed by releasing water across the shoals at various times of the year. After that, we had lunch at a restaurant in the town of Duijiangyan. Lunch was nothing spectacular, and then we piled into the bus for another four hours out to Taoping.

On our way out, we came up the Min river valley, and the most amazing part of the drive, aside from the close resemblance of Chinese drivers to WWII Japnese Bonzai Pilots, was the all the rock slides from last year’s earthquake. Josh, J-bo and I were talking and Josh mentioned something like 30% of the land slid in the valley. You can think about it, and you can try to imagine it, but it will never compare to the sight of seeing it all first hand. I don’t even know how to describe the amount of earth that moved, and the size of boulders that had come down on the road were the size of small houses. And the only other thing that was equally as disturbing was the fact that all the reconstruction is happening here in the same areas that the major slides happened, with the same materials. Everywhere we have been today, we keep passing these blue roofed shed/tents. These are the Chinese equivalent to the FEMA trailer. Every time you see a swarm of the blue roofs, you knew it was displacement happening from 5.12.08. We also saw those numbers, the date of last year’s earthquake, painted on some of the giant boulders that had rolled into the road.

We followed the Min up to Wenchuan, the city closest to the epicenter. Wow. The piles of rubble that were all around town were overwhelming. I mentioned before I was around Seattle for the Ash Wednesday quake, and I saw some of the building damage in Pioneer Square, and that was small potatoes compared to this stuff. You try to take it all in and remember all the images, take pictures, but with each corner you turn, the destruction just continues. You find yourself wanting to take pictures of it all but there has to be a cut-off point. Who am I to pick and chose what get documented and what doesn’t because of convenience? It’s so amazing to see the fact that people are still trying to clean up and rebuild. It seems like a huge effort in futility.

We didn’t stop in Wenchuan, just rolled through and followed the Zagunao river up to Taoping. The road up to Taoping was even worse off than the highway to Wenchuan. To start, our bus almost got high centered on pile of rubble at the beginning of the road. The road got a little better, but not by much, I think it took us close to an hour or so to get twenty kilometers. Slow moving. The village of Taoping is old. The average age of the buildings in the downtown is five hundred years old. Some of them even date back further like two thousand years ago. We also are with the Sichuan University students, who outnumber us three to one. That is silly. But wait there’s more. They are all undergrads, so they look to us to tell them exactly what needs to be done. Their school culture is a little bit different in the fact they don’t question the judgment calls, either. They accept what has been said by the teachers, and that is that. One of several reasons we are here is to study the architecture, and how these buildings have been able to withstand the test of time and and the forces of nature so well. We will visit some other villages tomorrow and see if we can glean some information on what the main differences are/were in the building techniques of different towns. And with that, we are starting tomorrow nice and early, and we’ll be visiting a few towns tomorrow to start the research.

Oh, in my blabbering on ad nauseum about stuff you guys probably don’t care about, Ching has fallen kinda ill. We’ll keep an eye on her, but she had a fever and I heard she was up to 102. That and Prof. Bob had a little intestinal distress, but he only arrived two days ago. I’m not so worried about him, but I’ll probably check in on Ching before bed.