On the Road to Shu, China

Life Tips & Miscellaneous  Travel and History Zen Philosophy and History Art and Sport Navigation of this blog

Summary

Travel is an act for human beings to visit new places and experience different cultures and histories. Through travel, people can actually feel historical events and people’s lives by visiting historical places and cultural heritage sites, and can gain a deeper understanding of history and broaden their own perspectives. In this section, we will discuss the historical background of the trip and the places visited based on Ryotaro Shiba’s “Kaido yuku” (On the Road) about this journey and history.

On the Road to Shu, China, Vol. 20

In the previous article, I described the roads of Jiangnan, China. This time, we will discuss the roads of Shu and Yunnan, also in China. Shu was once ruled by Liu Bang and where Zhuge Liang was active.

This trip begins with a trip from Shanghai to Chengdu, the capital of Shu. Shu used to be a steep and difficult place to reach, and the weather is said to be cloudy all year round due to its topography. In Chengdu, after enjoying conversations with locals about ethnic minorities, chili peppers, tofu, etc., we will head to Dujiangyan, the dam that has kept the Chengdu Basin moist for over 2000 years, and admire Li Bing, who built the dam, and his technology. On the way back to Chengdu, we stopped by a farmhouse in a village called Happy People’s Corporation and thought about the similarities with Japanese private houses. In Chengdu, they will visit the Wu Hou Hsi, a shrine dedicated to Zhuge Liang, and think about the “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” and the heroes of Shu. After contemplating the intellectuals of a Confucian nation at the Du Fu Cottage, they will visit the Mangjianglou Park to see the bamboos, which are different from those in Japan, and visit the neighboring Sichuan University.

This trip will begin in Shanghai, where we will stay at the Jinjiang Hotel, one of Shanghai’s most iconic and historic hotels,

Shanghai currently has two airports. Pudong International Airport, where international flights from Japan arrive and depart, is located a short distance from the city, but Ryotaro Shiba and others are thought to have flown to Chengdu from Hongqiao International Airport, where many domestic flights arrive and depart.

Chengdu, the capital of Shu, is about 3 hours and 30 minutes away from Shanghai. Chengdu is a basin surrounded by mountains and covers an area of 6,000 square kilometers (Sichuan Province, where Chengdu is located, is 60,000 square kilometers, slightly larger than Spain), which is about the size of Ibaraki Prefecture in Japan. In ancient China, this area was far from Hanzhong, the center of civilization, and there were no roads on the cliffs, but only “Shujiaozu” (Shu’s plank road), which was built like a shelf over the cliffs.

The mountains, both large and small, and countless water systems create a constant cloud of steam, leading to the saying, “Shu dog bark in the sun. This is because Shu (Sichuan) is surrounded by mountains and often shrouded in fog, so the sun does not shine very often. When it does occasionally appear, dogs are suspicious and bark at it. The proverb is a metaphor for a narrow-minded person who is suspicious of, criticizes, or attacks the fine words and deeds of an outstanding person.

The first time a large number of Han Chinese came to the Shu country was during the reign of Zhuge Kongming of the Three Kingdoms, when Liu Bei Xuande adopted Kongming’s “plan of three halves under heaven” and led his troops here during the ongoing conflict between Wei Cao Cao and Wu Sun Quan.

The suburbs of Chengdu are a good place for crops, with temperatures never falling below zero even in winter and only a few days exceeding 30°C even in mid-summer, and there are places where double cropping and even triple cropping is possible in the south. This large agricultural production is said to be due to the construction of a large dam called “Dujiangyan” during the Qin Dynasty in the 2nd century B.C., when there used to be little water flow in the area.

This ancient large-scale civil engineering project created a large area of 200,000 hectares of irrigated land, which continues to enrich Chengdu to this day.

Sichuan cuisine, one of China’s four major cuisines, is one of the most famous foods in Sichuan, where Chengdu is located. Sichuan cuisine is characterized by seven tastes: sour, spicy, hemp, bitter, sweet, fragrant, and salty.

In Sichuan cuisine, three kinds of spices called “three peppercorns” are used: hot pepper (chili pepper), hot flower pepper (a cousin of sansho), and pepper (kosho). I remember that when I went to work at a factory in coastal China in the past, I could only eat one bite of the noodle dish I had in the factory cafeteria because it was so hot. This was because many of the migrant workers were from inland areas, and the taste was adapted to theirs.

The “mapo doufu” that is so familiar in Japan is also said to be a tofu dish made by an old lady in Chengdu for her workers.

Chengdu is home to 14 ethnic minorities, and Ryotaro Shiba’s trip was a visit to these minorities. (The trip to visit ethnic minorities continued from Chengdu to Kunming.)

In Chengdu, he later visited the Wu Hou Hsi, a shrine dedicated to Zhuge Liang, and thought about the “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” and the heroes of Shu China. Here, Ryotaro Shiba says that Kongming’s politics were not Confucian (laws should be minimal as long as the ruler has a good character), which is a central idea in China, but rather legal (rule according to clear rules), as described in the article “Legalists and Confucians – Order and Liberty“. A famous legend expresses this: “Weep and slay the back of the horse” (when the son of his best friend, general Back, disobeyed the military rule and was defeated in a battle at the Street Pavilion, he slayed the back of the horse according to the military law, which means that no matter how good a person is, he should not be held accountable by bending laws and discipline.

Incidentally, Ryotaro Shiba states that later interpretations of the “Three Kingdoms” were largely based on the novel “Sangokushi Yanyi” written at the end of the 14th Kiyo period, rather than the historical book “Sangokushi” (a historical book with descriptions of the Yamataikoku, also mentioned in “Kaido yuku: The Road to Iki and Tsushima“). For example, the famous “Peach Garden Oath” (the oath of brotherhood sworn by Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei) does not appear in “Records of the Three Kingdoms,” but only in “Yanyi,” and the custom of brotherhood did not exist at the end of the Later Han Dynasty when Liu Bei and others lived, but only much later, during the Song Dynasty. (In ancient times, there was a feudalistic ethic of righteousness between sovereigns and vassals, but there was no ethic of individual relationships, and it was not until the Song dynasty, when the people’s commerce flourished, that such an ethic emerged.)

Later, the group visits a place in the suburbs of Chengdu where Du Fu, a wandering poet of the Sheng Tang Dynasty, used to live for a while.

Du Fu is the greatest poet in Chinese history, and he left more than 1,400 poems and more than 30 prose pieces. Therefore, Ryotaro Shiba wrote

Shanan shaibei minna chunsui (South of the house, north of the house, all in spring water)
Just look at the sunrise of the ophthalmologist’s sword
Hana-daiwa no Zeng-en-gu-gu sweeps away the guests
Pengmun now begins to open to you

This poem is called “Kyakudaru”. This poem is

Spring water floods the south and north of the house. The only thing I see are the omure of the omuri that come day by day. Wildflowers are blooming on the path inside the gate. The poet says, “I don’t sweep the grass because I don’t have any guests, but I will open the gate, which is usually closed, for you for the first time.

The scene is beautifully depicted as a rare visit by a guest amidst the still, melancholy stillness of the spring water. The group then went to Mangjianglou Park to see the bamboos, which are different from those in Japan, visited the adjacent Sichuan University, and left Chengdu.