Heavenly EMei Shan

I noticed right away that Emei Shan is extremely green. One breath of the air and you notice the plentifulness of oxygen. Everywhere, trees, ferns, bamboo, and moss grow. The soil is mineral rich and red, and the 160 days of rain fall ensured what the locals call 'Spring all year' weather. It was a cool 50 or so degrees F, with just a moderate moisture in the air. There was but one color in this universe of Emei it seems; vibrant green. No wonder the tea is so good. It is grown in a mountain called 'Hei Bao' (or Black Shroud) because the teas are literally shade grown in cloud cover. Hei Bao Shan is only 1100 meters, vs. the 3000 or so at the rest of Emei. Small springs trickle downhill, running into the rest of the Yangtze River. Everywhere, songbirds accompany the flutter of numerous butterflies, and swallows with their scissor tales swoop and make zippy turns in the air. It was up in this pristine environment that the Bamboo Green tea calls home. Because there is eternal Spring time, the tea is harvested 8 months of the year!

Darius and I savor some freshly picked Bamboo Green, the tiny needles gently float downward in the vertical glass. Vertical glass, folks, is what is appropriate for this tea. It needs lots of space to dance around in.

Elsewhere today, we did the tourist thing and visited the Le Shan Buddha, the largest statute of a Buddhist icon in the world now that Bamiyan is no longer there. Many of the smaller statutes in the caves around the area were completely defaced, with heads and hands cut off during the Cultural Revolution clean sweeping. The idea was, how can this clay statute of a Buddha protect you but it can't even protect itself? True, but it's not attached to having a head, is it? Now that these statutes don't have heads, who loses out, the enlightened Buddha in nirvana, or us stupid people who need an image of the Buddha to guide us?

Anyway, enough of my rants, here is one of the better preserved caves:

But it seems that Buddhism is experiencing a revival, never mind that the tourist industry here relies on its Buddhist background to thrive. At the very least, I thought, the tour guides have to know the names of the statutes: Manjushri Bodhisattva, Ananda to the right, and there is the Amitabha Buddha to the left there.....

On to the largest Buddha in the world, the Le Shan statute. It was carved out of a mountain cliff facing the Yangtze River in the 3rd century, so it's right around 1700 years old. Darius could not even count that far, but then he grew up and was educated in California. No, indeed it was an awesome sight to behold, and China now understands that you can not buy back time. Once something is destroyed, no reconstruction can ever match the original. Luckily the little Red Guards in the 60's, (the original teenage anarchists of the world) didn't have enough dynamite!