Author: Eric Perez
Today, we got to see two major highlights of the trip for me so far. The first being the Grand Canal Museum and the second being the ancient iron lion statue in the town of Cangzhou! To be completely honest, I knew very little about the Grand Canal and basically nothing about the Cangzhou lion before today, so pretty much everything I got to see was such a surprise and such a new experience, it was really memorable!
Right when we arrived at the Grand Canal Museum, we walked into this enormous entryway that was adorned from floor to ceiling with gorgeous stone carvings of all of the various regional cultures from across China. Our tour guide explained to us that both the wall and the museum were meant to reflect the path of the Canal, from the north of China in Beijing all the way to the south! So as we traveled along the museum path, we were able to see several regional cultures highlighted with impressively detailed still life’s, recreations of traditional scenes of work and leisure, and numerous cultural artifacts.
Looking up there was a winding dark blue panel with makeshift stars and lights that was supposed to symbolize the canal itself. To me, some of the most impressive exhibits we saw were a wax sculpture recreation of characters from the Beijing opera and a long handmade panel of silk embroidery!
We even got to see a sneak peak of the Iron Lion statue that we would visit later on in the day when we passed by a clay recreation of the statue surrounded by several life sized sculptures of various traditional Chinese martial art styles! Everything we saw in the Grand Canal was so colorful and intricate. It really made me question how much we tend to gloss over the diversity of Asian cultures in general in the United States, when there is so much regional diversity even within one single country like China.
Afterwards, we drove the rest of the way to Cangzhou, where we were able to enter the Old Relics Park. On the walk over to the lion, we came across a few sculptures that Bill was able to explain to us. It turned out that a few of them were characters from iconic Chinese literature! We got to learn about traditional Chinese stories like The Outlaws of the Marsh and Journey to the West. Journey to the West in particular was super intriguing to me because of how the story centered around the popular Chinese imagination of its historical neighbor, India.
As we learned more about Cangzhou’s history as The Lion City, this history of contact with China’s neighbors like India continued to be an ongoing theme, which was just fascinating, since I just hadn’t really considered how complex and ancient that relationship must be. On the way up to the Iron Lion, we got to see a ton of lion art made throughout the centuries by local artists who got their inspiration from living in the shadow of this massive ancient monument to the lion. We learned that many of them came to view the lion as a symbol of the ferocity and power of the common people. Unlike the dragon or the phoenix, which were associated with royalty, the lion was seen as an invincible beast that was still accessible to everyday people. Because lions didn’t exist in China, people only heard of them in stories, through contact with India and Africa, so the mythology of the lion kept getting built up more and more. One of the funniest parts for all of us was that a lot of the lion art didn’t look very much like lions at all! Our guides explained that this was because very few people had seen lions before, so they had to come up with imaginary representations.
Once we actually got to see the Iron Lion, it just took all of our breaths away. Even with how ancient it is, it still had such an immense presence and energy. Looking up at it made me wonder how so many generations of local people must have felt looking up at the same statue, perhaps even in a more impressive state. How must they have felt, gazing up at a mythical animal that was older than any living memory, older than their grandparents or even their grandparents’ grandparents, wondering where it must have come from and what it must mean, but knowing nothing even remotely like it could be recreated by themselves. I feel like it almost shot me back through time, in that way. It reminded me of another possible theory of the Iron Lion’s origins, the idea that it was made in tribute to the Bodhisattva Manjusri, who’s seen as the spirit of transcendental wisdom, and depicted as a woman riding on a blue lion.
I thought this was another really cool way that this experience must have been shaped by China’s ancient connections to its neighbors, India especially. I’m sure that contact with these new, foreign ideas must have added such a layer of mystery and inspiration f or the ancient people who created the statue, and to me it just drove home how interconnected the world really has been for so long, and how meaningful it really is to get to know a new culture with a truly open mind.
