A chain barrier sags under the weight of hundreds of locks outside a Taoist temple on the trail to Tai Shan in Shandong province.
With our successful climbing of Tai Shan, our adventure in China has more or less come to a close -- albeit a highly fitting one. While I started the day feeling a bit sick to my stomach from some spicy chicken the night before, a few breakfast dumplings and the energy of several thousand of my fellow climbers made me feel a lot better.
It took about five or six hours of climbing interspersed by water and snack breaks -- 6600 steps to 1545 meters above sea level, a vertical climb of over a kilometer. I'm not sure whether climbing Tai Shan is like truly experiencing a microcosm of Chinese culture, as a passage in one of our guidebooks suggests, but it certainly is a phenomenal and fitting adventure for the last day of our trip; from this point forward all of our travel is focused on getting home again.
You're rarely on your own in China, and climbing mountains is certainly no exception. Accompanying us on our ascent were countless pilgrims, several groups of police providing security, hawkers and small businessmen selling all sorts of pilgrimage related items (sticks for walking, incense for burning, water for drinking) and sadly, a few disfigured beggars looking for charity.
The religious significances of the path itself were unfortunately lost on me to a good degree. The entire length of the path to the top there are inscriptions written on the stones and boulders, some of which certain pilgrims would choose to pose next to for photographs. (We also saw this on Huang Shan.) Also red ribbons are sold (two of which Thomas and I bought for 2 Yuan each), and many of these ribbons are tied, along with an offering of money, to a tree or another edifice near one of the various temples that one comes across during the ascent. There was also a custom of engraving a lock with one's name and affixing it to a chain outside one of the temples along the way. You could buy such locks all along the path to the top, the most expensive of which that I saw costing 60 Yuan (About eight dollars.) And then of course there were the massive amounts of incense being offered, some in very large packages costing up to 200 Yuan. Sometimes a pilgrim would light such a large package upon reaching the altar at a specific temple, only to have it removed seconds later to be burned more quickly out of sight.
Inside the temples themselves, the pilgrims would kneel in front of statues of their selected deity, offer more money or sometimes a food item, and then bow, usually several times. It took some time before I realized the seriousness with which some of the pilgrims were making these journeys. While certainly there were a number of climbers who were more interested in the hiking aspect of climbing Tai Shan, I would say a majority of the pilgrims were dedicated Taoists. As one who doesn't take religion all that seriously, it was really something interesting for me to see, and I was happy to have the opportunity to see this aspect of Chinese culture up close.
