In this once mainly Buddhist and Islamic enclave of Gansu Province in China's remote and rugged west lies a small town that is slowly burying the violence of its recent past and returning to its religious roots.
Hezuo, like so many towns in China's far west, lies off hard, bumpy dirt roads that wend through some of the country's roughest but most beautiful and dramatic mountain terrain.
Like others too, Hezuo is embossed with the upheaval of China's industrial modernization. Active smokestacks veil crisp blue skies in grim sheets of acrid cloud, while cranes erecting cheap, white tile-trim buildings rise above the clutter of nondescript 1970s low-rise blocks.
Despite its ramshackle architecture, Hezuo, nestled in a narrow valley six hours by bus from Xiahe, a more well-known tourist destination, is testament to the durability of the country's cultural traditions in the face of senseless violence.
After decades of oppression by the Chinese Communist Party reached its nadir during the Cultural Revolution, the centuries of Buddhist, Islamic and even Chinese Daoist teachings have made a quiet but triumphant return to this town of about 200,000 residents.
On a recent Sunday, as the smoke from ceremonial dung fires mingled with the echoes of Buddhist chants, streams of multi-ethnic Chinese headed to their respective temples of worship to pay their respects.
"The Muslim faith and this temple is an integral part of life here," Qingzheng Mosque caretaker Ma Bulu said amid the buzz of some 3,000 Chinese Hui gathered for midday prayer.
"This temple was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution and rebuilt in 1980," said Ma, a member of the Hui, China's largest Muslim minority.
"After the reform and opening up of China, things began to change and people began to return to the temple," Ma said.
During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards rampaged through much of the country, pillaging cultural symbols that were deemed as hostile to communism.
Hezuo saw its temples robbed and burned, the small scars of which remain in the form of whitewashed ruins next to the rebuilt Milarepa monastery built in 1678 in the architectural style of the Potala palace.
"A lot of people died, some ran away. Let me tell you this way, there were more than 500 monks here in 1955, now there are only 150," said a 67-year-old Tibetan monk, a witness to the violence.
"Of course, times are different now. Many people suffered then including Chinese," said Xing Jiguang, who was collecting donations for renovations at the Langmiaoshang Temple.
Fifty meters above the mosque on a verdant hill, Langmiaoshang is today filled with Chinese bringing gifts of grains, bananas and apples to the Buddhist deities.
"I'm just coming to pray for my family's safety, for my friend, good grades in school and success in general," said Nico Li, 20, a student at the local teachers' college.
Evidence remains that minorities such as Tibetans and Hui, who even today make up about 60 percent of the local population, suffered more in places like Hezuo.
For one, it was their buildings of worship that were destroyed, while Liaoshangmiao stayed open.
"The temple fell into disrepair but was never closed," Xing said.
Today in Hezuo, residents appear to have the freedom to worship as long it is exercised with caution, and that in itself is a great improvement, they said.
"Things are okay today, much better than before," the monk at Milarepa said with a sigh.
The authorities do not even mind that pictures of the Dalai Lama, the exiled religious leader of Tibet, hang at the ticket sales window and inside the Milarepa.
"In Tibet the pictures are not allowed, but here the government does not care," he said, warning though that "you can't pledge allegiance to the Dalai Lama."
"You can cherish him in your heart and 95 percent of us do, but you have to be careful how you act or otherwise they take you away in handcuffs," he said.
The White House’s decision to take a 9.9 percent stake in Intel Corp is looking like very shrewd business indeed. Since the government bought in at US$20.47 a share last August, the US chipmaker’s surging stock price has delivered the US a US$43 billion return. One of the reasons the investment has so far proved so sound is that the White House has made sure of it. According to The Wall Street Journal, Howard personally pushed deals on Intel’s behalf with some of the most lucrative clients imaginable. They include Nvidia Corp, the company at the heart of the AI
A single photograph can cut through a lot of noise, but it can also be used to misrepresent the truth. At the very least, it can concentrate the mind on something that requires further investigation. On Monday last week, Ma Ying-jeou Foundation CEO Tai Hsia-ling (戴遐齡) and former National Security Council secretary-general King Pu-tsung (金溥聰) held a news conference in which they showed a photograph of former foundation CEO Hsiao Hsu-tsen (蕭旭岑), now Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) deputy chairman. In the image Hsiao is seated next to Xiamen Taiwan Businessmen Association chairman Han Ying-huan (韓螢煥). The two men were holding
I first met Professor Ray Jiing (井迎瑞) as a film and documentary student at Shih Hsin University’s (SHU) Department of Radio Television and Film in 1988. The following year, he went on to become the director of the Chinese Taipei Film Archive — forerunner of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI). Over his eight-year tenure, Jiing rescued and restored over 200 classic Taiwanese films. In 1997, he established the Graduate Institute of Studies in Documentary and Film Archiving at Tainan National University of the Arts (TNNUA), and I joined the program in his third cohort of students. Beyond a
President William Lai Ching-te’s (賴清德) May 20 second-anniversary address was not just a routine policy review; it was damage control. US President Donald Trump’s remarks — that he did not want to see anyone move toward independence and that the delivery of a major Taiwan arms package could depend on the progress of US-China relations — unsettled Taiwan’s public and created an opening for opposition parties to question whether Taiwan was being treated as a bargaining chip in Washington’s dealings with Beijing. Lai’s speech was designed to close that opening. The address covered the expected ground: sovereignty, cross-strait relations, defense spending,
RSS