MAY 1st HOLIDAY, Part FOUR of ABOUT SEVEN: Linxia (临夏）

The group splintered after returning to Lanzhou from the village; several folks heading back to Beijing, a few doing some local sightseeing, and the four of us, Dan, Rachel, Alan and myself, trying to see if we could make it out to Xiahe, an autonomous Tibetan region which was rumored to be closed off to tourists. We hadn't originally planned to visit Linxia, but decided at the last minute to stop there on the way.

Observing the workers enjoying a leisurely game of badminton in the largely deserted bus station, it becomes apparent that Linxia is not exactly a popular tourist destination. Although once a major terminus on the Asian Silk Road, Linxia has since lost much of its strategic economic importance. Still it remains a bustling market town, full of the antiquated charm of primitive person-to-person exchange, and has also become an important regional center for Hui Muslims. Besides, the four of us were looking much less for touristic experiences than for new views into modern-day China. And we got them...

A bicycle cart of fresh produce on the way to the market, and a man looking to sell a nice healthy sheep. (He told Rachel he would sell it to her for 1000RMB, but she declined).

A large outdoor market that spread out from both sides of an overpass. We went wandering around here for a few hours. I happened to miss out on visiting the slaughterhouse section, for which I am grateful, but I did see quite a few men emerging from the market with pelts tinged with fresh, red blood. Thankfully, there were plenty of other things to see.

Like this man, I very much enjoy having a goat companion along when shopping for accessories.

The motorcycle market.

I don't know if these guys were buying or selling, but I have a rule that if people blatantly stare at me and do so to an excessive degree, I will go straight up to them and take their picture (something I usually won't do out of respect for people's privacy). Usually it causes them to look away, but these dudes were unfazed by my retaliatory efforts.

There were also some services for sale in the market, like, (ouch!) dentistry. This woman had a fearsome collection of extracted teeth on the table in front of her.

An assortment of typical Linxia hats, some for sun, some for style, and some for religious identification.

Can you find one of each in the picture?

After perusing the market for a few hours and taking a short siesta in our strange hotel, we took a taxi out to Wanshou Temple （万寿观), a Taoist complex composed of seven levels extending up a steep hillside.

The temple itself wasn't enormously impressive, largely because the whole thing was almost completely destroyed in the Cultural Revolution and rebuilding only started in earnest a few years ago. There was no sense of history there and it didn't feel like a holy place or even a working temple.... but it was a nice climb anyway.

From the hillside, we could see some of what seemed to be the real working temples on the cliffs opposite.

Working on what was actually a very steep roof.

The pagoda and everything else at the top was all newly built, using revenue that we learned came from local government officials, most likely interested in restoring the old glories of their town.

We spent the last several hours of the day wandering the streets looking for local mosques. In the end we visited three mosques, from a tiny inauspicious one down a narrow alley, to a large, imposing, newly-built structure with a large Arabic school underneath. The caretakers and students of Islam that we met inside were unfailingly polite and surprisingly willing to answer questions from four white strangers that had wandered into their houses of worship. Less surprisingly, they seemed reticent, or at the very least uncomfortable talking about the attitude of the central government towards religious faith and its expressions. This was a theme that would continue into the next day, though in radically different circumstances.