Tales of an artsfish traveler, Anhui Province China
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My other half works for an airline so I have often taken advantage of the low cost standby flights in order to feed my wanderlust. Below are a few thoughts from my wanderings……….
The sun is hot in Anhui Province, China. Wandering through the winding passages of the Ming village, I glance at the cobbled path beneath my feet. Red-papered good fortune calligraphy graces the doors, left from the new year in February. Now, in August, they are slightly faded to pink, a testament to the attentive August sun. The uneven stones on the path below sometimes trick my feet as I wander, distracted by the magical quality of a village frozen in time some hundred years back. Entering glorious wooden carved courtyards, the illusion is occasionally and charmingly broken by a small appliance plugged into an innocuous outlet.
Gazing upward to countless but hopefully endless courtyards, I see intricate carvings of a complex and undeniably beautiful culture. I am an aesthetic voyeur, an intruder, but smiles welcome me wherever I turn.
Unexplainable to me, all or most of the carved faces are defaced, removed from the finely worked wood. The fragrance of the wood permeates the village, an incense of time trapped in limbo. Why, why are the faces gone, erased, removed by human hands? I see hundreds this way before I find someone who is able to tell me in my language; The villagers, ordered by Mao to destroy the beauty, could not. To save themselves, and their extraordinary carved panels - they took away only the faces and left the rest, telling the messengers to Mao that they had in fact, been good revolutionaries, destroying the old, welcoming the new. Thank you Anhui.
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