Temple to temple

This post is way overdue - I went to Suzhou over two weeks ago, eek. And then the internet wouldn't load my photos for days on end.

Anywho, Suzhou is a "small" city (five million people ish) half an hour from Shanghai by high-speed train - 300 km/h - so fun! It was a thriving cultured centre of commerce when Shanghai was still a hokey fishing village hundreds of years ago, apparently. It's famous for its private gardens, and for silk production.

First up the silk - Rosemary and I went to a silk workshop set up for tourists, but with signs in such severe Chinglish we had to figure out the silk-making process for ourselves.

Step 1. Early Treatment: First water to a certain temperature, then a reasonable amount of pure alkali, and then the silk cocoons into the water soak.
[Soak the cocoons, with silkworm still inside, in alkali]
Step 2. Boiled the Cocoon: After soak the silk cocoons, using steam to steamed about the need steamed 1-2 hours.
[Boil the cocoons in alkali for 2 hours]
Step 3. Rinse: The cooked silk cocoons, into normal atmosphere temperature of the water repeatedly rinse to become white cocoon. Rinse prevent knead to avoid cocoon mixed around.
[Rinse without mashing up the silkworm inside the cocoon]
Step 4. Pell and Pull The Cocoon: The cocoons into rinse. Overturn the cocoons. Wipe off the chrysalis and sundries. After pulling in the water and sets to a small device of the bow shape. Overlapping sets of ten cocoon, As a small piece. Then overlapping sets of seven small piece and put on the big device of bow shape.
[Flip the dead silkworms out of the cocoon, and stretch the cocoons over an arch-shaped wooden frame, then over a bigger frame. Stretch10 cocoons at a time over the frames]
Step 5. Nature Dry: Nature dry the every small piece.
[Dry the 10 stretched cocoons]

This is what it looks like - from prune-sized cocoons to half-moon shaped piles of pulled silk. Now this isn't to make silk thread, it's to make China's delicious pulled-silk duvets - they sew together the dried stretch silk to make duvets lighter than air and warmer than down. Very, very tempted. And the postage to NZ won't be much, right?

Another part of the workshop showed silk cloth making, but without even a Chinglish sign to explain. But here are some cocoons in water with the miniscule threads being drawn off them.

The workshop sold silk duvet covers for your pulled-silk duvet. Shame they printed such a gorgeous luxury fabric into hideous monstrosities:

Spew!

We visited a temple in the middle of the city, the "Temple of Mystery", a Taoist temple jam-packed with dozens of golden statues of various gods, both peaceful and war-mongering.

 

 

This guy has arms coming out of his eyes, with eyes on the hands, woooar!

Ribbon and flag offerings at the base of the gods

Outside people were praying and chucking incense into troughs. Like, heaps of incense. These old ladies had plastic shopping bags full of incense that they didn't bother to unwrap before throwing them onto the ashes. Which were very pretty, and it smelled wonderful.

After 1949 religion was banned in China, but in the past decade or so there's been a loosening up. Confucianism (not technically a religion, but a life philosophy) and Buddhism are particularly approved, as they teach followers not to rock the boat, essentially. Christianity is gaining popularity, but all sermons are read by a Communist Party official before being used in church services. Additionally, services must only be held at the designated times at churches - in China, any unauthorised gathering of more than ten people is illegal.

I don't know how Taoism fits into this - I don't even really understand what the religion is about. From the temple it seemed to have similarities to Hinduism, with its many gods who seemed to relate to different areas of life - we even saw a six-armed god like a Hindu god.

So then we visited the Garden of the Blue Wave. Chinese gardens are very different to Western gardens - they're very sparse, no flowers, just greenery and rocks and waterways. They were supposed to mimic nature, and look like a wild space. The garden we visited was woven between lots of pretty buildings, gazebos and fishing spots on the canal.

 

 

Chinglish strikes Blue Wave garden

Bus stops, Suzhou style. This is a very tall pagoda with lots of giant tour buses parked outside, we couldn't face the crowds and happened to spot a sign tucked into an alleyway promising "blind massage". In China, massage is a key career option for blind people. "Mmm, foot massage," I thought. So we found ourselves in a family's front room, getting a half-hour full-body massage for $6, noice. He didn't touch my feet though, grr. Chinese massage is totally different to whatever style we do in New Zealand - you stay fully clothed, and they drape a sheet over your whole body and massage over that. The masseur man (not blind.. he was wearing glasses though?) did quite a lot of acupressure type-stuff, a lot of it pleasant, some of it not, like rubbing my temples like crazy with heaps of force for about a whole minute, and also almost pulling my head off, I was quite afraid. But afterwards I felt amazing.

And.... then we got bubble tea and tootled off home to the big smoke.