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The Shaolin Temple
Tuesday, July 19, 2005-8:21 PM
The Shaolin Temple near Zhengzhou in Henan province is run like the military. Thousands of Chinese teenagers and even a handful of foreigners train here so that they can balance their entire weight on a spearhead, break metal bars with their heads, and throw tiny projectiles through thick sheets of glass.
The tour book warned me that the tour buses to Shaolin Temple make what should be a two hour bus ride from Zhengzhou to the temple a five or six hour ordeal by making lots of little stops on the way.
That's exactly what they did, and it was really pissing me off.
Not only do the entrance fees to these second-rate temples add up, they're also an incredible waste of energy that would have otherwise been spent exploring what I came to see, Shaolin Temple.
I refused to go into either of the first two sites we stopped at and even skipped lunch. Instead, I explored the area on foot and waited at the bus. Finally, at the Daoist nunnery, they tricked me.
The tour group sold the last two tickets, the tickets to the Shaolin Temple and the nunnery together. I was so exhausted from trying to decipher the tour guides Chinese that I just gave up and bought the tickets from him.
Not only was his Chinese difficult to understand, he also seemed to make everything more complicated than it had to be. Every sentence was a long sentence. Every simple question had a bewildering answer.
After they wasted my entire morning, we arrive at Shaolin Temple at around 1:30 in the afternoon. The entrance ticket included one Shaolin Kung Fu performance.
The performance took place in a small auditorium in the Martial Arts Gallery. Around 30 or 40 teenagers and adolescents dressed in traditional Shaolin Temple attire put on a half an hour show.
It was fast and furious. They had swords, spears, whips, and things that I don't know the name of. The jumped, kicked, punched, flipped, rolled, and crawled.
I imagine most of the effectiveness of their techniques during actual combat would actual be more the result of intimidation than anything else. Sitting in the front row I was keenly aware that if I got in a brawl with one of these monks, I wasn't gonna stand a chance.
The rest of the day I explored the temple itself and the monastery. I was too tired to pay as much attention to all the details as I should have. I know I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow.
On the way back to the bus, I saw the students practicing, hundreds of them dressed in athletic uniforms on dirt fields with coaches pushing them to their limits.
This is what high school athletics looks like in China.
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