The Confucius Temple Tour: a 20 minute stroll to the gift shop

This tour of the Confucius Temple started out as something quite different. I was all set to go on a walking tour through an old neighbourhood of Shanghai with a guide from Shanghai Flaneur, a company who look like they are doing some interesting work around urbanism in Shanghai. Arriving at Laoximen, the nearest subway stop, I witnessed a rain storm of biblical proportions. It was raining so hard the water was bouncing high off the pavement and a growing crowd of us cowered inside the exit hall watching this impressive downpour. After a quarter of an hour its violence abated, it settled into a regular patter and I made a run for it. 

I realised I had forgotten my phone so could neither message the guide nor check a map to see how exactly to get to the Confucius Temple our meeting point. I asked people on the street. The first looked at me like I was from the planet Mars while the second pointed over the road and to the right, setting me on the correct track. I arrived dripping and a little late to see a group of five Westerners standing in a tight circle of umbrellas.

When I stepped forward and joined them, the guide explained that the tour was cancelled due to too many people not showing up. The rain had come, she said, at just the wrong moment and put people off. If I were her I would have gone ahead with the tour, but then again I am from the UK and if we stopped doing things whenever there was a shower we'd never get anything done. Huddling from the drips, she explained a little about the route we would have taken and the content of the tour. It seemed to be essentially a historically themed tour that would have introduced us to a poorer neighbourhood where it was still possible to see some of the older patterns of Shanghai's urban organisation and historical buildings before they either get the Xintiandi treatment or erased completely. In any case, once the rain eased they scattered and I headed into the Confucius Temple. I happened to have a guide to the place on my Kindle so out it came.

I had the place to myself as the rain deterring pretty much all visitors. A young woman emerged from a side building, approached me and said she was a volunteer who'd be happy to show me round. I got to take a tour after all, a private tour at that, and the Kindle went back in the pocket. She was from Guangxi and gave me a pretty standard sleepy sort of tour of the buildings and grounds which was over and done with in 20 minutes flat. The basic message was that Confucius was a great teacher who had 3000 disciples and his writings were, as she put it, "the Chinese bible." The Confucian classroom was striking as its layout was practically identical to the Xiamen University classrooms that I have taught in. From this I had to conclude that this traditional form of education and interactive performance activities have rather different spatial demands. This being China, the tour would not have been complete without a visit to the gift shop where I was introduced to another woman who tried to hard-sell me jade, paintings and antiques. I gave her just enough time to allow her to save face but not a moment more to encourage her, said thank you and bolted. I would not have been able to make so swift and graceful an exit previously, so I must be learning something here in China, though I'm not sure that these lessons are precisely Confucian.

That, I thought, was it but in the afternoon I went to the end-point of the Shanghai Flaneur tour as I was due to start another tour with Shanghai Greeters from there. My guide messaged me to say her road was flooded and she could not get out of her apartment, which seemed strange as it was now just fine where I was but this is a big city so who knows. I instead had a go at threading together the route that I would have been taken on had the morning's tour gone ahead. It was indeed an interesting tumbledown neighbourhood and a very different face of Shanghai. I explored it not through the lens of historical urban development, however, but instead through my pet interest of quick-fixes. This area was a treasure trove of them; I particularly liked the looped washing lines that crossed from one side of the street to the other. Cleary they were not going to be of much use today.

Finding my way back to my start point of the temple, I saw visitors had begun to trickle in and approach the keyhole-esque ticket windows. This place, I felt, was not nearly as prestigious as I had imagined it to be, the glitz is all over at the City God Temple. It really does need some sort of interpretation to bring it to life as there isn't a huge amount to see but, due to the authoritarian culture that presently surrounds Confucian teachings, it is unlikely that anything very radical or interactive will be done anytime soon. Still, I imagine that if you were to delve inside of The Analects, you could probably find justification for presenting its contents in a much more dynamic way. It is good to remember that these teachings were, at one time, a radical break with tradition. If it really is "the Chinese Bible" then interpretation, surely, is key.

The Longshan Temple Tour: a fortune teller predicts more of the same

I was in Taipei attending a conference on urban heritage and on day four, once we had all got a bit tired of listening to one another speak, a tour was laid on to break things up a little. We took a bus ride out from the conference centre to Lungshan or Longshan Temple, it seems to be spelt both ways.

We were divided into three groups each led by different guides from the Institute of Modern History. My group's guide's approach to guiding us round the temple was to first point at things and ask us what we thought it was and to then go on to explain it if, as it often did, her questions drew blanks. This made for a more interactive tour than that of the stereotypical "on your right is..." style of guide. She was trying to awaken our curiosity rather than dampen it.

We would have been guessing a long time, however, around some of the features of the temple. She needed to explain how these two red blocks of wood could be used to tell your fortune.

She was keen to point out the depictions of the Dutch on this incense burner. Compared to  the guide who showed me around Nanputuo Temple, the closest equivalent space I have been guided around to this, she was a far more secular sort of guide. She did not present herself as a believer and try to convert us, she presented herself as an expert in the customs and architecture. This was all fine but it took the edge off it.  

There were a number of different gods in the temple, or statues of them in case, and a busy throng of people circling around, stopping in front of one or another, depending on what they were praying for. I recognised one of the gods as Mazu, a sea god also popular in Xiamen, and here we stopped in front of another, where she showed us a fertility offering that had been left. This was a working temple that people came to, first and foremost, to pray and a tourist attraction, only secondly.

The tour became more interactive again when we came to a god who you could pray in front of in order to meet your future love. It was mostly popular with the young women but a few guys were busy tossing red blocks of wood too, and an older lady as well. Hope springs eternal.

After the inevitable group photos on the temple steps which I read to be the end, the tour unexpectedly sparked back into life. One of the other two guides led the lot of us to an adjacent alley that sold Chinese medicinal herbs. This being a Sunday afternoon, there was little action so we heard about what we would have seen if we had come any other day of the week. In this case it felt like a second best but there are places I can think of where that's not the case. The City of London, for example, is bustling and contemporary during the week but like a ghost town on Sundays making the multiple layers of history more visible. As it was, we looked at a lot of plastic sheets and imagined exotic items arranged behind them.

We walked round the corner and into a gallery that proudly displayed this poster sporting an  unfortunate piece of English as a second language typography. The exhibition was a student show of paintings and design. If I had tried to explain, they would probably have thought I was a pervert, so I simply said nothing.

The final leg was led by the other guide which gave me the chance to compare the three of them. They all wore the same id tags and were employed by the same institution meaning there were some similarities in their basic tone and content. However, I realised that my original guide was the most talkative of the three. While it is often thought that the location is meant to be the point of interest and the guide simply there to bring it to life, I rather feel things are the other way round in reality. I'd rather listen to an incredible guide in a boring place than a boring guide in an incredible place. Of course, in reality things are rarely so polarised and it is easier to build the brand identity of a location or institution than that of an individual tour guide. The best guides tend to rise through these systems, anyhow, and the freaks get weeded out yet, it does also mean that the status quo is often what is most rewarded. That indeed was my enduring feeling with this tour: there was nothing wrong with it, it was perfectly professional and even friendly yet, it was also entirely predictable. It was, finally, a tour of the temple not of the guide's learning, imagination or personality, even if I did catch a glimpse of all of these. If I could use those two red wooden blocks to read the future of Longshan Temple, I rather suspect their message would be that nothing much was going to change anytime soon. 

The Nanputuo Tour: a Buddhist Temple jam packed with Chinese tourists

Nanputuo Temple is a large and internationally significant Buddhist temple in Xiamen, South East China. It is both very old and, at the same time, disconcertingly modern; it originated over 1000 years ago with a monk holing up in a cave, has grown over the years and today  features a great deal of more recent construction. My guide was a temple volunteer who offered visitors free tours. She gave the tour in Mandarin, which was racing away far quicker than I could ever hope to hold onto, so I was fortunate to have translation. My last proper visit to a Buddhist temple was a weeklong stay at a Tibetan retreat incongrously located in Pocklington, a village outside of York. That was some twenty years ago and ended badly. It marked the end of my flirtation with Buddhism and also precipitated a split with my girlfriend who I went with and who was having a spiritual experience there. Was karma finally bringing me back round to them today or was I going to be just another tourist looking at the exotic statues and intricate pavilions?  

Because it was the spring festival week, a national holiday throughout China, the tourists were out in force. It was shoulder to should stuff through much of the tour as Xiamen is a top internal tourist destination and Nanputuo one of the city's principal attractions. Here two tourists have stopped to listen to the guide explain the history of a pavilion and take a good look at the tall pale foreigner at the same time. 

She led us around in a clockwise direction. She explained that you should always visit the temple in this way as to go anti-clockwise was against the natural order. I rather liked the fact that the form of the tour was, at least in part, shaped by Buddhist beliefs. Another one of these was that we were not to walk on any of the portals, we had to step over them instead. The contents of her tour were mostly a mix of stories about the history of the site, some Buddhist beliefs and the lives of the monks and masters. A few times I asked her questions and she notionally answered them but in her own way and quickly brought us back to the script she had prepared. She was going to give the tour she wanted to give and not an open-ended enquiry into the life, culture and politics of the site that I might have wished for.

My partner, Sophie, was translating the tour for me and there was a big difference in the way the guide regarded her to how she addressed me. It often happens that when I take tours in China and I am accompanied by a translator, the guide speaks directly to me and the translator then repeats the information in English. Here, the guide concentrated her attention on Sophie and I was mostly a witness to this exchange, which got paused from time to time so that I could get the highlights. 

When we came to the original Nanputuo cave where a monk once lived, our guide showed us how to pray and how to bow. These involved a very specific series of hand gestures, each of which had a significance, and which together made an elegant chain of movements bringing you to the ground and back up. Here I came to feel that perhaps the main purpose the guide put on the tour was that it might serve as a vehicle to rekindle the faith in visitors. She didn't seem so concerned about me as I was foreigner which, strangely, I was quite relived by. I was free to make of the whole thing whatever I wished.

This was one of the more interesting places we stopped at. The guide explained that during the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s, the temple was closed but believers would walk up the mountain to a concrete barrier that had been put up behind which was this giant rock carving. Beside the barrier visitors would say a silent prayer and then move on, a way of discretely practicing their faith during a period when it was prohibited. Nowadays the temple is not suppressed, on the contrary it is flourishing, although I did notice a large police presence. When I asked the guide why they were here she told us their presence was due to the site being of national significance and being so popular with visitors.

We finished up in the newer and much quieter study centre and charity foundation wing of the temple. Here, Buddhist monks made there way around the fragrant gardens lined with osmanthus bushes. They walked in an unhurried manner that was in complete contrast to the tourist scrum taking place a few hundred meters away. Looking at them, I thought, if I were going to choose a place to be a monk I'd probably chose here rather than up some remote frozen mountain, their life looked rather good. 

With a smile, our guide bid us farewell and disappeared back into the swell of people and clouds of incense hovering around the front gate. She made no appeal for a donation, the tour existed as something in its own right and this leant her tour greater weight as the words and practice really were in line with one another. She did not make too hard an effort to translate the site's world to us, which is what most tours do, she simply offered us an hour-long sample of it while slotting us through the crowds point to point. I've noticed that Samye Ling Monastery in Scotland offers tours that similarly extend the idea of a tour into including Buddhist practices such as meditation, so it is quite possible there is a pattern here. If I compare these with most tours of Christian churches that I have been on, the church tends to take a more touristic point of view and accepts that people might well be more interested in the stained glass windows than God.

The Shadow Walk: a dawn to dusk procession through Xiamen, Southern China

This Shadow Walk was inspired by a previous walk of mine, The Sun Walk, which I undertook over ten years ago in London. The idea behind that walk to was spend a full day walking in the direction of the sun. This shadow walk was to be its companion piece: I would start the walk at dawn and when the first light cast my shadow onto the ground, I would walk in the direction my shadow pointed towards. At 6.45 AM I was standing expectantly, waiting for this moment, but there were no shadows to speak of.

Waiting for the sun, I watched people coming and going to make incense offerings outside Nanputuo Temple, my starting point. I had seen this ritual many times before but something seemed unusually focussed about it today. I then realised what was different. The tourists had not yet arrived.

Still the sun refused to shine. My rhythm was being dictated by the clouds; I noticed the turtles for the first time. They were in no hurry and set a good example to follow.

A while later, loud chanting started up from within the temple. I went over to listen and, just a moment later, the sun broke through and lit my westward path. 

This gave the impetus to start moving and within three minutes I was already walking down an alleyway I had never noticed before in an area I thought I knew. Using this new system to navigate through the city made me realise that I had unconsciously developed a very incomplete idea of this neighbourhood which I had mistaken for its reality. New alleys, shops and apartment compounds were springing up all around me. After an all too brief spell, the clouds thickened once again and I was left without a shadow to guide my path. I held my course following my original path as best I could.

In the absence of a clear shadow to guide me, I allowed my curiosity to also lead me and it brought me to a second temple, this one in full swing. I decided to take this co-incidence as a blessing. Whilst I was not conducting this walk within any religious framework, attuning myself to both the natural light cycle and the human activity cycle of the city, made it feel as if I were sensitising myself to a larger force, all the same.

In the absence of shadow, I carried the memory of the morning's rays and walked with them up Hong Shan Park. This was going to be a long day of walking but, given that it was just two days till the Winter solstice, it was about as short a day's dawn to dusk walk as it would be possible to do without heading far north to lands of diminishing daylight. Rather than emerging into a frozen sliver of sub-arctic light then, I was walking on a mild winter's day when the temperature was around 20 degrees in the afternoon. A better proposition all round, I feel.

I came across a group of street sweepers making their brooms. I have a longstanding interest in quick-fixes and at first these brooms can look like just that: something cobbled together with a few odds and ends. Looking at how deliberate this operation was, however, made it all too clear to me that this was an older technique that had been modified to incorporate some modern materials. They fixed these thin bamboo branches, still bearing leaves, around broom handles with a length of wire. I could have stayed and watched a good while longer, but I had a shadow to follow. 

The cracks in the city's texture where one era's compounds finish and another's begin were interesting no man's lands. The connecting tissues, such as this water pipe, must hold some stories. 

Some stretches of the walk took me down long soulless streets but at times I also entered maze like neighbourhoods of semi-improvised housing. I say semi-improvised because, in spite of these places' tumble-down home-made feel, they looked like they had been established for many years, held a considerable number of people and had electricity and water. Walking through these hidden quarters, tucked above main roads, I was the object of attention: children would follow me in groups, run ahead to see the face of the foreigner then run back to their friends and report back.

The sun reappeared momentarily and reset my direction. Dim but discernible it was a necessary adjustment.

I noticed that single men were common in the city but women sitting down by themselves were rare.

With no direct sunlight nor shadow to speak of, I headed into a mall to see if 'the shadow' might be found in underground consumer retail units. I had tended to regard the recent Ai Wei Wei lego story as another act of self-promotion on the part of China's most famous artist overseas. Seeing this lego education centre, however, made me reconsider this and wonder if there was not some substance to his point which basically amounted to lego were refusing to sell him their product and were effectively doing the Chinese government's work because the company was more interested in expanding into the Chinese market and did not want to upset the authorities by being associated with dissident art. 

I arrived at a third temple, this one still a building site. A clump of surly looking workmen eating instant noodles glanced up from their bowls, registered me, then sunk their heads back over their food and continued eating in silence. 

The temple was placed on one of the many small steep mountains that punctuate the city. Difficult to build on, these outcrops mostly remain wild, forested places, this one also acting as a park. Following my shadow's direction meant that I came across these mountains much more than I am accustomed to in daily life in the city; they acted as genuine obstacles whereas they are usually easily rendered meaningless by road or tunnel. This task, then, restored a more representative geography to my imaginary city. What's more, it also made me aware of another feature of these mountains: their military bases. I came across working military installations on a number of mountains, these easily defended compounds most probably being a legacy of the city being on the frontline with republican Taiwan. Going about my daily life in the city it is very easy to ignore the fact that there remains this military presence. It required this walk to jog my habits and reveal this side of Xiamen.

I did not want to give up on the idea of being led by something outside of myself so I came up with the strategy of studying the clouds for a hint of sun, such as the light patch in the sky above. Putting this at my back, I then walked away from in. Whilst less evocative than embracing the shadow, walking away from the light did prove an effective approach.

I realised I have spent too little time in Huli District to get a complete picture of the city. It is a newer area where the housing is cheaper and more industry is to be found. I passed a man who was standing beside an opened fire hydrant, a large hexagonal key lying on the ground. He was mixing cement in paint buckets, not for the first time, I imagine. Nobody, save me, gave it a moment's attention.

The further north into Huli District I walked, the more I passed groups of men playing cards, sometimes with money flung down besides the game too. Seeing group after group of men huddled like this, sometimes with a crowd surrounding them, I realised I very rarely see people playing cards in my part of the city. This left me wondering if cards is a more blue collar pastime in China.

While I was now walking into completely unfamiliar terrain, every now and then I'd cross infrastructure, such as the train track, which offered clues as to where I might be. Rather than helping me gain my bearings, however, this only confused me further. One system of mapping was interfering with the other and the two did not want to be synthesised.

I plunged into a neighbourhood that was being demolished, a process that did not look entirely harmonious. Here my presence was not merely unusual, I received a number of suspicious looks. This was a place to keep on walking.

A four legged walker had already been this way, only he had been heading in the opposite direction. Towards the sun perhaps?

Coming towards the end of the day's walk, I ran into a restaurant staff's motivational dance routine led by their manager. The song, a Chinese cover of Dschinghis Khan, West Germany's Eurovision 1979 effort, is a particularly good one for the job. The lacklustre dancing somehow chimed with my heavy legs and I was more on the side of the staff than the boss up front trying to get them moving. I would like to imagine this song being covered by singers right across Asia and Eastern Europe in all the languages that fall within the boundaries of the once vast Mongol empire.

And this is what the walk looks like if the different points are plotted on a map and a line run between them to show the general sweep of its movement. The walk had too many disparate elements to allow it to be easily reduced to any one single narrative. That, perhaps, was its defining feature: it opened my eyes to the breadth of the life in the city. With more light, perhaps the theme of shadows would have imposed itself more strongly. When walking towards the sun, some 12 years ago, this action offered a sense of hope and adventure. Walking on a cloudy day in a foreign country and having to question the form of the action and nature of what I was seeing, offered far more dilemmas than sensuous experiences. That is valuable too, but it did make the walk less sharp edged. Finally, what this day on the move told me is that it is worth continuing devising new strategies to cross and interact with the city. With each different way of approaching it, the city reveals itself anew and only out of this myriad of perspectives may a more comprehensive image of it slowly crystallise.