Night Train to Louyang

Thursday, Nov. 19

We had a last visit on Wudang Mountain to the Prince Palace. It wasn't built for a prince nor is it a palace. This area of the temple complex was named because the brightest children were educated here - ostensibly to become government officials (princes). It's really a large dormitory (palace) with a temple. They built the main street to follow the contour of the mountain.

Wudang is like a shanshui painting. The mountains don't rise above the treeline, so they're all capped with evergreens. Mists roll in alternately obscuring and revealing the landscape and when they're thick the peaks look like islands in a sea of vapor. The temples are built as part of the mountain rather than trying to dominate it. In fact, the whole of human occupation is insignificant to the enormity and majesty of the nature surrounding it.

We took a night train to Louyang, but arrived shortly after dark. The train was easily as old as me and it had this old-world charm. If it were at night, you might walk by a cabin and find a gypsy telling a businessman's fortune in one car. In another, a man wearing a linen suit would be seducing a young wife while her new husband sleeps in the bunk above. Another car might have grifters - men with crooked smiles and women with bright, flowing skirts - playing a game of chance. A missionary couple with too much luggage and a secret, a man who smokes cigars so you can't tell his sweat smells like stone, a linguist with an unnerving twitch carrying a sheathed sword he never lets go of, a preteen Chinese girl dressed for a party with a bow in her hair but with her fingertips chewed up, a big Texan with a big hat and a big mouth travelling with his Hungarian accountant (half his size, who looks suspiciously like a bodyguard), a woman says her name is Spring but she has three personalities named April, May and June...

Sadly, none of these people were on our train. Maybe they got on at our stop, but our leg the ride was largely banal - full of cigarette smoke and an overactive radiator. We did get to see this sign, though: