Site 11, August 22-28, Moxi Village, Sichuan Province

August 22
Clear
For the previous few days, the biggest concern occupying Road Manager Yang Jie, aside from treating everyone's illnesses, was how to take care of transportation away from Xichang. The destination was Moxi County, alongside the Dadu River, beneath Gongga Mountain, atop Hailuo Ravine. The route required that they first pass through Daliang Mountain and go to Shimian. Not a driver in the city of Xichang was willing to go to Shimian. The road was under repair; small cars couldn't make the trip for fear of damaging their chassis. Anyhow, Yang Jie rented a small bus and the trip began. Once on the road, they realized why the locals were unwilling to travel this road. It was by far the worst road of the entire Long March, and the bus was the worst they had traveled in. Everyone was turned upside down by the shaking car. If something fell, it would bounce into oblivion. There were no restaurants along the road, only local kids holding onto the vehicle and demanding money. The Long Marchers survived on compressed biscuits. They smoked cheap cigars purchased from the Yi people, and told jokes. Shen Xiaomin slept in the back of the bus, bounced back and forth by the movements of the bus. He claimed to have "broken three ribs" in the process.

The 200-plus kilometer trip lasted more than ten hours. The bus turned a corner, city lights appeared in the distance, and everyone let out a sigh of joy. The city was bright and clean and full of neon lights, against the backdrop of the torrential flow of the Dadu River. The bags were unloaded and three-wheel carts summoned, and the Long Marchers moved directly to a restaurant near the bus station to eat. They drove by a storefront that read "Long March Pharmacy," and Qiu Zhijie jumped out to take a picture. The flash must have awoken the owner: from the store appeared a fiery old woman, screaming "What are you doing taking a picture of my store?" Not wanting a fight, Qiu Zhijie turned and ran. He jumped back into a three-wheel cart and screamed, "Quicker, quicker!" The cart driver didn't move. The woman hopped aboard the cart, grabbed hold of Qiu Zhijie's arm, and insisted that he expose the film. Lu Jie suddenly stuck out his arm and shouted, "The propaganda department of the county party committee has invited us to take these pictures, go find them and voice your grievance!" The woman was terrified, and the carts sped off.

At dinner, Lu Jie introduced an idea that startled everyone: the Long March should stop and rest for three or four weeks. The Long March website, headquartered in Beijing, was already a month behind the actual progress of the March. Busy all day with implementing projects, he and Qiu Zhijie had no time or endurance to write reports each night. In a project like the Long March, realizing projects and publicizing projects were equally important. Furthermore, how should they view the preparatory work for the project, or the connection between the curatorial concept and its implementation on site? What was the relationship between planning and implementation? This they must stop and think about. Everyone had sensed that Lu Jie's scholarly thinking and on-site implementation were drastically different, and that he had grown more and more silent with each passing day. Yao Ruizhong asked in Fujianese if building something up was not precisely for the sake of knocking it down. Lu Jie responded in Mandarin that these were the same, indivisible. Qiu Zhijie thought that a week was enough to supplement and edit the website, but that even three weeks was not nearly enough to insure the quality of the works to be realized in the remaining sites. The discussion ended without a conclusion. Everyone was dazzled by the beautiful nighttime colors of Shimian. They walked slowly back to the hotel along the bank of the Dadu River

August 23
Clear
Yang Jie called for five three-wheeled carts, which were not even enough for the Marchers and their luggage. They occupied eight carts in the end, mightily crossing the Shimian Great Bridge, and boarding a bus on the other side of the Dadu River. This road led directly to Luding. When the Red Army was making this same trek in 1935, they traveled along the east bank of this river on the way to Luding, led by Liu Bocheng and Nie Rongzheng. As the new Long Marchers moved along, they stared at the narrow road the Red Army had taken along the west bank, whispering all the way about what need there was to fight for bridges and boats to cross such a tiny river.

The road along the west bank is often cut off by flooding，and the road along the east bank had been turned into a highway, much of which was in the process of being completed. Signs everywhere read "Be Careful of Falling Rock." After traveling yesterday's harrowing road to Shimian, everyone was happy with today's route.

At noon, the bus turned left at Rainbow Bridge, leaving the west bank of the Dadu River. After thirty minutes of moving among steep precipices and bottomless cliffs, the bus entered Moxi county. The attendants behind the counter of the Long March Hotel were all dressed in Red Army uniforms, and the lobby walls bore Mao's poem "Long March" and portraits of Mao, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin, which had been blown up on a computer. Next door to the hotel was the Long March Supermarket. Further in was the Hailuo Gorge glacial forest of Gongga Mountain, a snowy mountaintop veiled in clouds. The town of Moxi was on a mountain ridge. On May 28, 1935, Mao Zedong and Zhu De made their headquarters in Moxi for a night, holding the Moxi Conference. When they lodged in a Catholic church, Chen Changfeng, one of Mao's bodyguards, ate Western food for the first time in his life.

There are many churches along the route of the Long March, and the Red Army liked to turn churches into their temporary headquarters. Was this out of enmity for imperialist culture? Was it because churches were especially clean? Or was it because of the allure of churches as visual spaces? In the Chinese hinterland, earnest missionaries once worked with all the devotion of the Long Marchers, making a massive trek, passing their beliefs onto people, using medicine to save the poor, trying all the while to subvert the natural order of things. In these mountainous villages, they built countless structures to symbolize the heavenly kingdom, and the church in Moxi was one of these. The Long March would use this as a site to explore the transmission and indoctrination of Christianity, a foreign idea, among Chinese.

At midday, the televisions in the tiny hotel were broadcasting a series about the Long March. Several days earlier, Beijing artist Shi Qing and his assistants had arrived in Moxi, looking to prepare his work. The curators made a lap of the town with Shi Qing, who was already quite familiar with the situation. His installation/performance work The Great Flood would unfold along a north-south axis from Jinhua Temple to the Catholic church. The installation portion of the work was nearly completed on the roof of an unfinished building.

That afternoon, Yao Ruizhong photographed himself upside down in front of the Catholic church, as Qiu Zhijie and Shi Qing visited Bishop Li of the Luding Diocese, Moxi nun Wei Fang, and others. Wei Fang lived in the very room that had once accommodated Zhu De, the priest who had come especially from Kangding to meet with the Long March ranks.

When asked about the similarities between the Red Army and Christianity, Bishop Li answered point for point. A few years prior, trying to verify the authenticity of the "flying war over Luding Bridge" story, he spent a few days walking the route from Anshunchang to Luding along the bank of the Dadu River. "It is possible," he asserted. As to whether he believed that a "Moxi Conference" had taken place in this church, Li was more skeptical. In the materials he had read, at least, there was no direct mention of it. After graduation from the seminary, Li was sent by the church to be the general priest in charge of the entire Kangding area. The locals call him bishop, and he carries himself in a stubborn and diligent manner.

That evening, Yao Ruizhong invited everyone to dinner. The next day he would set off for Luding to take more photos, and then look for a way back to Chengdu in order to head home for Taiwan. Over the past few days, Lu Jie had been in constant contact with the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye. That night, Delvoye sent images of his most recent works over e-mail: x-rays of many different human organs. Everyone worked all night, trying to fit these x-ray images to Chinese style windows, in accordance with their inspection of the church that afternoon.
The Catholic church in Moxi was the same as the many Catholic churches they had passed along their route. The architectural style was already quite indigenous, a blending of Western style church architecture with Southwestern Chinese temple architecture. Its facade looked rather European, but viewed from the side, the three-story bell tower was full of flying eaves. The second floor of the bell tower was square, with European windows on its north and south sides, and round Chinese windows on its east and west. The third floor was octagonal, with crosses adorning the eaves. The entire flavor was bright and strange. Bishop Li told the group that religious rites here were similarly indigenous: during mass, the congregation would play Chinese folk instruments such as the suona horn.

August 24
Clear
Lu Jie and Lisa stayed in their rooms doing deskwork, as Shi Qing supervised the construction of the pier he would use for his performance.

Qiu Zhijie, who had spent the entire night in front of his computer burning CDs of images, hastily boarded a bus for Luding with Yao Ruizhong, Shen Xiaomin, and Jeff.

After Yao Ruizhong had taken his photographs on Luding Bridge, Shen Xiaomin conducted an on-site interview with him, and hurried back to the bus for Moxi. The road from Moxi to Luding was broken in many places. The trip had to be made in daylight, so they had to fix their departure time, knowing they could not turn back after a certain hour.

Everyone made a lap around the town of Luding, and then discovered that they had big problems. They had come to Luding with the goal of finding a place to print blown-up digital images of Wim Delvoye's work. After finally finding a store that could perform the service, they were informed that the job would require four days to complete. It turned out that all jobs of this sort were actually sent to Chengdu, one day journey from here, to be completed; not only Luding, but the entire Kangding area of western Sichuan lacked the required facilities. And buses to Chengdu only ran on odd dates, because the Erlang tunnel was open to traffic in only one direction, depending on the date. This meant that Yao Ruizhong would have to wait in Luding until the next day at 17:00 before boarding a Chengdu bound bus, a very difficult proposition.

Still, they were Long Marchers, and this was their inexorable fate! Not a single tiny sedan was willing to make the trip to Moxi, because leaving at this hour a driver couldn't make it home.

With no other recourse, Qiu Zhijie shook hands with Yao Ruizhong, boarded the back of a motorcycle, and set off for Moxi. They rode against a vicious wind, squinting. Having not slept the previous night, Qiu Zhijie fell asleep leaning on the driver's helmet, surprising him so much that the bike almost flipped. They stopped for a minute to have a smoke. Unable to linger, they kept going, and Qiu Zhijie fell asleep once more. In this way they would move forward and then stop, move forward and stop, until they came to an unfixed piece of the road. The entrance was blocked, and they would have to wait until the sky was dark before moving forward.

Qiu Zhijie realized that a car stuck at the side of the road was the one that had originally set out to take Jeff and Xiaomin back to Moxi. The driver said that those two hadn't wanted to wait all day, and crossed the pass on foot. Qiu Zhijie got busy looking for his two lost comrades, walking the unfixed road, running, unable to find them. After walking five kilometers, he saw a motorcycle and hopped on board, finally realizing that Jeff and Xiaomin had luckily found a vehicle just over the pass and were well on their way to Moxi. At 18:00, Qiu reached Moxi.

The bad news he brought back upset Lu Jie; Wim Delvoye was a world famous artist, and also the most passionate participant in the Long March. Once he had called New York from Belgium and talked about the Long March for four hours. Everyday he hinted at coming to join the March, but unluckily whenever he was ready, the Marchers were not, and vice versa. Lu Jie and he had agreed that his work would be the headline act in Moxi, but now, without a way to blow up his images, this plan was in danger. The only solution was to go to Ya'an the next day - if they were lucky, the images could be blown up in Shimian. But Qiu Zhijie, who knew the most about this technology, could not make the trip. For the last few days, Lu Jie had been curating and Qiu Zhijie organizing on-site implementation. If Qiu Zhijie were to devote another day to this kind of tiny detail, the other works on the site would suffer. This time, Yang Jie summoned up her courage and volunteered. "I'll go!" she said, "Just write down the details very clearly." It looked like this was the only choice, an unexpectedly tragic beginning.

August 25
Cloudy
Yang Jie set out early in the morning, luckily finding a wedding photographer in Shimian who could blow up the images, and luckily able to open the image files that had been burned onto a CD for her. Thrilled, she called Qiu Zhijie's cell phone from Shimian, and had him speak with the storeowner, directing the printing from afar.

Lu Jie and Lisa didn't leave their rooms in Moxi, working like crazy in front of their computers. Lu Jie was worried about the delays on the website. At the same time, he was constantly debating a series of irresolvable questions with Qiu Zhijie over meals: what to do about refining proposals submitted by foreign and domestic artists, which needed time to be nurtured? How to go about connecting with museums and the media? Most important, how could they keep thinking and not merely doing?

The Long March was already half over, and their initial resolve to finish the journey had morphed into a sort of confidence or self-fulfillment. Was there a problem here? They were both doubtful, and they sat in their rooms thinking for a day.

Lisa's computer always had problems, which had a major influence on the amount of international liaison work that could be done. Qiu Zhijie had fixed her computer countless times along the road, and was already a bit scared of the thing. Everyone wondered if it wouldn't just be best to have artist Wang Jianwei bring a new computer from Beijing when he came to meet them at Luding.
Suddenly they heard shouting from outside, "Hurry over and help me a second, I'm back!"
Everyone ran outside, and held up a wounded Yang Jie, her face full of sweat, holding a huge cardboard tube out for the group. "Hurry up and check to see if the images were blown up right!" she urged.
After expending a lot of energy, they figured out what had happened to her.

On the road back to Moxi, there had been a landslide at the same point where yesterday Qiu Zhijie, Jeff, and Xiaomin had left their vehicles and walked. A car had been crushed by falling rock, and the four people in it had died instantly. Yang Jie's car was behind this one, and she was not able to get through the pass for another day. Not wanting to hold up the installation, fearless Yang Jie snuck past the sentinels of the road construction brigade, and climbed over a pile of rocks and through the pass. All the while, she held in one hand a cardboard tube of photos nearly as tall as herself.

Everything else unfolded predictably: the workers screamed to her to come back, they whistled to her; small stones were still falling earthward; Yang Jie moved to step on a rock which fell out from under her, pulling her leg; the workers climbed up to carry her out of the danger zone; the people watching thought she was crazy.

Hearing this story, everyone nodded their heads: this woman was crazy! Now, the crazy woman was sitting on her bed whispering, grimacing in pain, but somehow strangely satisfied, proud to have been wounded for the team. But where could they go to find a doctor or medicine?

That night, in addition to the normal Long March tasks, there was something new: massaging Yang Jie's injured knee.

August 26
Clear
Yang Jie's injured leg looked quite serious, and from this point on, she stumbled along. Lu Jie was even more worried. He and Qiu Zhijie worked until sunrise before sleeping, and just after 9:00, they were awoken by a knock on the door.

A stranger stood at the door, calling himself Xiao Honggang. He had opened a "Glacier Museum of Strange Rocks" in Moxi, and he chattered away about how the Long March contingent needed to go and pay a visit. He said he was a collector of strange rocks, and had specimens from every nearby ravine. He knew of some places that were much more beautiful than Hailuo Ravine, and he wanted to take everyone to see. Qiu Zhijie stood with him at the door, leaning over to hear him in a state of half-sleep. Lu Jie, lying on his bed, couldn't keep himself from laughing.

Finally the man went away. Qiu Zhijie returned to the room and said, "That man is crazy, bothering us like this!" Then he suddenly had an idea. "Lu Jie," he called. Lu Jie had the same idea and laughed. They burst out together, "It's him!" They had thought of giving him Jiang Jie's baby.

Jiang Jie's work for the Long March was entitled Farewell to the Red Army: Remembering the Mothers of Long March. She was interested in the female Red Army soldiers of those years, who gave birth to babies on the road, were not able to keep them, and had to give them up for adoption to the locals. She had sculpted twenty of these babies, and wanted the Long March contingent to give them up for "adoption" to families along the route, helping her to establish contact with the adoptive parents. She would provide expenses if the families would take a picture of themselves with the baby and mail it to her each year on the anniversary of the baby's adoption - its "birthday." The sculpture of course would never grow up, while the family members would grow old by the year, eventually dying. The massive scale of this work, its time span (lasting decades or even forever), and its straddling of space involved history, humanities, geography, gender, family, and personal fate on many levels, went beyond a simple discussion of the female experience of reproduction. In short, the two curators loved this work. But when they received the baby Jiang Jie shipped to them in Kunming, they had a difficult time. Jiang Jie's realist technique was too good, and the curled-up infant looked real, down to the wrinkles in its skin. Would anyone on the route want such a thing?

Yang Jie loved the baby, and had been carrying it along for the last few days, even sleeping with it at night. But Yang Jie was "crazy." Would a regular person want the baby? No one knew. In Moxi, they had been thinking about giving the baby to Sister Wei Fang at the Catholic church, hoping that as a nun, she would have uncommon insight. But suddenly, here in Moxi, Xiao Honggang had appeared from nowhere, and everyone thought he would accept the gift.

In the afternoon, they first inspected Shi Qing's site, and then went to Jinhua Temple and the local retirement home.

Jinhua Temple is in the center of Moxi, on the oldest street, two hundred meters north of the Catholic church which must have marked the south end of town in earlier times. The simple temple is four stories high, with a stele on each floor. The first floor has a horizontal stele discussing "law comes from religion." The second floor has a vertical stele on Jinhua temple. The third floor stele declares the room "Jade Emperor Pavilion." The fourth floor is engraved "Palace without limits," and on the left side of this stele there is a high-pitched horn. The small stone lions outside the entrance sat on round pedestals. The right wall was inscribed "Warmly Welcome the Reading of Scripture for Prayer and Repentance; Celebrate the Birthday of the River Deity." The concepts were fundamentally Daoist, mixed with a bit of Buddhism and the local religion of the Jinhua Spirit. The first floor was devoted to the Jinhua Spirits, the left to the Erlang Spirit, the right to the "River King," with a statue to the god of fortune thrown in. In Chinese villages one can often see strangely intermingled beliefs, and this was another example.

Across from Jinhua Temple was a stage, which according to Uncle Yuan, had not been repaired in three hundred years. The space between the temple and the stage could become an amphitheater capable of holding several hundred people.

Uncle Yuan's real name was Yuan Gongchun, and he was in charge of Moxi's "Setting Sun Red Elderly People's Club." The local government had granted his organization use of this decrepit stage as a site for their activities. He made his job vivid and dramatic. In effect, the management of Jinhua Temple was also that of the Elderly People's, as the temple didn't have any dedicated monks, Uncle Yuan was in charge of that too.

Everyone climbed the Jinhua Temple stage with Uncle Yuan, where a group of old women were dancing. On yellowing pieces of paper hung from the walls were the lyrics to songs written by members of the club to the tune of famous revolutionary songs. "Nanniwan" had been changed into "Sing Hailuo Ravine," and rhymed in Chinese: Gongga Mountain/who fears your ten thousand high soldiers/the workers who built the highway were made of iron/with determination sharp as steel/they wanted to finish that highway/to run it up the glacier/a cement road, flat and wide/a cement road flat and wide/cars moving all along the road/coming and going busily/if you want to take a large car, take a large car/if you want to take a small car, take a small car/this is already not an old city/it has become a little Hong Kong!"

The revolutionary song "Climb the Mountain" had been changed into "Supernatural Moxi": "This is a place for travel/this is the place I was born and raised°/This is an open place/A place were guests can come to rest/On this stretch of open land/We depend of the Party's bright and clear leadership." Some sentences were not beautiful at all, but the local charm had clearly expressed itself on the page.

At this point, a group of young Tibetan girls entered, and Qiu Zhijie asked, "Have you heard of the Long March?"
"Of course!"
"Did the Long March come to Moxi?"
"It came. They had the Moxi Conference. Chairman Mao stayed at the church!"
On this point the young girls were much more confident than Father Li.
Uncle Yuan was exceptionally supportive of the Long March, so it was agreed that the Elderly People's Club's stage would be changed into a space for foreign religion, and would stand in comparison to the local religion manifest in Jinhua Temple. They would set up Wim Delvoye's X-Ray stained glass windows, along with pictures by Liu Dahong and Liu Jing, and Sui Jianguo's Mao Suit Jesus, arranging these in the style of a Christian altar. Uncle Yuan agreed to organize a Elderly People's Club performance of the rewritten revolutionary songs to be filmed by the Long March camera crew. That night, they could project in the theater some videos about the Taiping and Boxer Rebellion and discuss them with the locals as per the curatorial plan. They settled on doing this on the 27th, and Shi Qing's performance would continue to unfold throughout the entire process.

Taking leave of Uncle Yuan, the whole group went over to Xiao Honggang's house. Xiao Honggang answered the phone excitedly and prepared corn porridge for everyone to eat.

Everyone first looked at his collection of strange rocks, which filled three rooms. Each one had been given a title, and one had been named "Long Live the Red Army." Xiao Honggang told everyone: "Look, it resembles the eight-corner hat of the Red Army, here is its face, here is its backpack."

Everyone sat down, and Xiao Honggang's wife (of the Bai nationality) brought out bowls of corn. They gnawed at it and talked at the same time. The Xiao family's three children sat around eavesdropping.

The conversation topics began with the children, moving on to the local population policies, and how Xiao Honggang, married to an elementary school teacher of a minority nationality, had sired a son and two daughters. But what Xiao liked to discuss most was strange rocks, so they talked about strange rocks.
"Are those rocks your work?"
"Yes."
"You gave them all names?"
"Yes."
"In the West, it is the Godfather who gives a child his name, so could we say these rocks are also your children?"

Xiao Honggang laughed out loud, because he really did feel this way.
So they began to talk about how these strange rocks, through the process of being named, turn into abstract sculptures. Then they talked about realist sculpture, and smoothly moved on to open the box containing Jiang Jie's sculpture. Qiu Zhijie began to explain Jiang Jie's work for the family.
"We'll give it to you and it can become your child."
Xiao Honggang's eyes lit up at the suggestion. Everyone advised, "We'll give it a name."
The old man sitting nearby was also an elementary school teacher, Xiao's neighbor, and he slowly and definitely said, "Call her Shuxian."
And so, Jiang Jie's baby sculpture became the fourth child in Xiao Honggang's family, taking the name Xiao Shuxian, and assuming the female gender.

Xiao Honggang diligently filled in a form for Jiang Jie. The entire family took turns holding the baby at the door, and took a family picture. Xiao Honggang carefully opened a glass cabinet, and put the baby among his most treasured rocks.

Saying farewell, everyone said to Xiao Honggang, "We'll be sure to come and visit." After they had walked a few steps, Xiao Honggang caught up to the group, pulled out a few small stones from the Hailuo Ravine glacier, and gave one to each member of the Long March. "I was afraid the big ones would be too hard to carry, so keep these as souvenirs. Next time you come to Hailuo Ravine, come stay with us for a few days."
"Of course," they replied, "we're relatives now."

Toward evening, the wind blew away the clouds that had been covering the mountain peak, and the form of Gongga Mountain suddenly became visible against the blue sky, like a god, shocking to the eyes and the heart.

August 27
Clear
Today was the most important of the Long March's days in Moxi, with many important activities scheduled to take place simultaneously.

In the morning, the group gathered in the amphitheater outside Jinhua Temple. The whole Elderly People's Association was present, with Uncle Yuan directing. The assembled viewers came to help out of their own will, nailing Wim Delvoye's works to the windows. When the sun came out, it shone through the windows as if they were real stained glass, except that the content of these windows was slightly "alternative." They were X-ray images of many different human organs, including skulls, hands, intestines, fetuses, genitalia, and brains. The assembled Han Chinese and Tibetans were not repulsed, but crowded around pointing out, "Here, there's an intestine!" "Here is a pig!" "Look, a spine," "What do you think this is?"

Seven of Sui Jianguo's Mao Suit Jesus sculptures had been hung in a straight line across the front of the stage, reflecting the importance of the number seven in many different religious traditions: the seven days of the Christian creation myth; the seven treasures of the Buddhist cycle; the seven branches of Zen; the seven fairies in Chinese traditional mythology.

Another small Jesus sculpture was placed in the precise center of the stage podium, atop a traditional window design that represented fortune and longevity. Hung along with Liu Dahong's Altar and Liu Jin's photographic series My Spirit Park, the works transformed a traditional Chinese stage into something resembling a Christian church. The Jesus icon merged into the window design, and the traditional temple architecture merged with the stained glass windows. These visual phenomena might be easily construed as classic instances of the postmodern pastiche so common to contemporary art. But as far as the Long Marchers were concerned, there was nothing unusual here; strange things like this were all too common along their route. Wasn't the Catholic church 200 meters down the road just like this?

Across the way, Jinhua Temple had also been re-decorated. The original steles had been covered in a few pieces of red cloth, one with three "Old Poems of Jinhua." The middle poem read, "live by the law, love the country, love your religion." The poem on the right read, "Invincible might becomes apparent." The one on the left read, "Celebrate the birthday of the local deity." The banners hanging from the columns were also new, and the overall appearance of the temple had been remade. Uncle Yuan and company had called the entire village out of their homes, using his method of mustering support for the Long March.

At 10:30 Yuan Gongchun, representing the Gongga Mountain Setting Sun Red Elderly People's Club, read words of welcome to the Long March. At 11:00, the Elderly People's Club members began performing for everyone. Their program had many parts, and many costumes had been lent by the Long March. It turned out that in addition to the rewritten revolutionary songs originally called for in the plan, Uncle Yuan had also arranged for some Tibetan dance, solo dance, fan dance, clapper ballads-in short, the group ran through all of the things they practiced on a daily basis. In the context created by the "Christianized" stage and the folk beliefs of Jinhua Temple, almost everything that happened took on special meaning. The Long Marchers were happy just to have come. As they heard the news, more and more villagers came to join in the hubbub, eventually filling the square.

At midday, the Elderly People's Club set out a huge banquet for the Long March, with meat and fish, in just the way peasants would welcome a passing army into their homes.

At 14:30, the Elderly People's Club organized almost a hundred people to do the Tibetan Guozhuang dance in front of the gate to the Catholic church where Mao is said to have stayed. Moxi is a town with residents of Tibetan, Qiang, Yi, and Han nationality, but people of every nationality know how to do the Tibetan Guozhuang dance. The music played from small speakers in front of the church entrance, and the people who heard the music and went to partake of the dance grew in number. There were several hundred dancers, including some in Tibetan dress and some in street clothes. They kept dancing; there were three layers of people inside and three outside, as festive as if the town were celebrating a holiday. The Long Marchers were extremely excited as they walked around pinning Long March stickers to every arm they could.

In front of Jinhua Temple sat an old woman, using folk medicine to treat Yang Jie's injured leg. She applied medicinal ointments and burned incense, finally even offering incantations. In any case there were no other drugs in this town, and everyone hoped the traditional medicine could really do the job.

To the north, on a site overlooking Jinhua Temple and the commotion in front of the Catholic church, Shi Qing directed the more than ten workers he had hired in the final preparations for his work The Great Flood. The Great Flood took its name from the story in the Bible, and Shi Qing had turned it into a massive and strange mix of installation, performance, and theater. The image of Noah's Ark was exchanged by Shi Qing for a dock built on a high point in the town of Moxi. On the dock sat a tall tower that seemed to converse with the Catholic church's steeple four hundred meters away. The performers were Shi Qing himself and five young Tibetan men, all wearing striped sailor's shirts, waterproof goggles, and carrying transparent plastic air sacs on their backs. These were the modern tools that Shi Qing suggests we prepare in case of a flood. What Shi Qing was looking to save, besides a sheep resting atop the dock, seemed to be a boatload of maize.

On the second floor of the building, i.e. the lower floor of the dock, hung six bamboo cages. In each cage was held a dove, replacing the animals Noah endeavored to save in his ark. But they had been stashed beneath the dock, in a place where they would definitely be drowned.

At 17:00, Shi Qing's performance began.
The performance had five parts, the first of which was a ritual bath. The five performers atop the dock began to wash the sheep, with a few extra performers using the wheelbarrows present on the construction site to bring water to the scene, scurrying back and forth. Water flowed through the cracks of the dock, pouring onto the caged doves below.

When the rite was finished, they pushed over the cornstalks planted on the dock, and walked in a line toward the lamb beneath the tower, feeding the corn to the lamb and then returning to the ranks on the boat.

The performance atop the building ended, and moved toward the town. Six motorcycles had been waiting for some time beneath the building. The performers, wearing goggles, striped shirts, and air sacs hopped on the motorcycles, each one holding a bundle of cornstalks in hand. The sheep also boarded a motorcycle. The motorcycles roared into Moxi on a rampage, attracting the attention of the townspeople. People weren't surprised though, as many strange things had happened in the last few days.

Lu Jie crouched on the back of a motorcycle, carrying three cameras, and changing a roll of film amidst the chaos. Shen Xiaomin's video camera was easily ready for battle, and he filmed from the back of a motorcycle. Only the poor television crew, with their massive equipment, was forced to watch the action from afar.

Qiu Zhijie came along with the six Tibetan girls who had continuously been by his side, running quickly toward the church. They ran quickly in order to be able to shoot the motorcycles' attack on the church square.

The caravan raced through the streets for fifteen minutes, rushing madly toward the Catholic church at 18:15, and running circles through the square. The air sacs and cornstalks rocked back and forth before everyone's eyes. This was an important part of the performance: the charge on the church.

A moment later, the caravan stormed out of the square, and headed for the theater in front of Jinhua Temple.

Shi Qing led a group into the amphitheater, and climbed atop the stage that had been changed into a Christian space. This time, the six Tibetan girls were already waiting at the door of Jinhua Temple across the street.

The "divers" were still carrying cornstalks, and they filed out of the stage/Christian space, walked towards Jinhua Temple, and gave the cornstalks to the girls. These were the foodstuffs they had saved from the dock of The Great Flood, and they were to be given to later generations. The presentations were made in the traditional Tibetan manner. The entire atmosphere changed from the chaos of the motorcycle attack back into the solemnity of the ritual bath with which the performance began.

It was already dusk by this point, and a group of elderly people squatted by the temple entrance reading the Buddhist scriptures. This was their daily homework.

The Great Flood drew its heft from its vivid theatricality, and its intermingling of religious and folk symbols, and local and imported legends. It combined modern rescue equipment with a timeless sense of fear, mixing them together in a chaotic, confusing narrative. It was fictitious and realistic, experience and performance, theater and ritual.

There was not enough time to think this over in detail, as the next event was just about to begin. The sky was gradually getting dark, and this evening they would project the movie Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Shi Qing's CD-ROM Salvation and Apocalypse, Qiu Zhijie's CD-ROM The West, and some materials about the Boxer Uprising. Because Uncle Yuan had publicized this with signs around town as an activity of the Elderly People's Club, as soon as it grew dark, four or five hundred people arrived.

The two largest peasant uprisings in China during the 19th Century, the Taiping and Boxer rebellions, had to do with Christianity. The former claimed to stem from the egalitarian thought of Christian teachings, while the latter burned down churches with slogans of resistance to foreign beliefs. From the early cultural exchanges of the Tang Dynasty on, the transmission of Christianity in China proceeded slowly. In the late Ming, Matteo Ricci and others used natural sciences to attract Chinese intellectuals and began to convert on a large scale. This sort of missionary activity grew more intense as the "national door" swung open in the wake of the Opium Wars, penetrating to China's innermost reaches, leading finally to the anti-religious "Brotherhood of the Heavenly Fists," or Boxers. One could say that Christian transmission has been a deep influence on China's modernization process. The problems faced by this set of foreign ideas when placed in the Chinese context form an interesting point of contrast with another set of imported ideas-Marxism.

This was the reason for screening this set of materials in Moxi. The gathered viewers in the Jinhua amphitheater eagerly debated with the Long Marchers, not leaving until after midnight. At this point, the Marchers, busy from a long day's work, finally sat down to eat.

August 28
Clear
Having completed their hard work at Moxi, Lu Jie took Lisa and Jeff on a little trip into Hailuo Ravine Glacier. It was the first day of rest in almost two months on the road, and Lu Jie took the opportunity to relax.

Yang Jie's leg was not doing much better; yesterday's indigenous treatment had not improved the situation, and she was left to rest in her hotel room.

"Qu Guangci" took on a personal favor for Qiu Zhijie, and went to take rubbings of fortune telling poems at Jinhua Temple.

Shen Xiaomin went first to Luding with Qiu Zhijie and the camera crew. Their mission was to find a few blind people in the town, with the hope that they would take part in tomorrow's Long March Happening "Blind Man Crossing the Bridge."

Luding is a tiny town, and as soon as the townspeople heard their wish, they said that there was only one blind man in town. They quickly found him, a blind masseur named Little Deng. Once they had explained to him what they would need him to do tomorrow, Deng agreed immediately.

Qiu Zhijie and Shen Xiaomin still thought one blind man was too few; they wanted a group. They went to the government offices and asked the mayor whether there was a handicapped alliance in town. It turned out that the mayor was also the chief of the handicapped alliance, and he confirmed that indeed there was only one blind man in town.

The secretary of the county party committee and the director of the Revolutionary Memorial Museum were exceptionally supportive of the Long March. They allowed Long Marchers to cross Luding Bridge for free, not collecting the RMB 5 fee charged of tourists, treating them like locals, who were also allowed to cross for free.

back