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Updated: June 26, 2025
It was early June when I started on the next stage of my journey, a three days' trip down the Min River to Chia-ting.
I was told how the gleeful faces turned to horror as the flood swept on like a moving wall, and overwhelmed twelve thousand souls." While in Chia-ting I crossed the river one day to see the great Buddha from near by, but it is very difficult to get a good view of the image.
The variety of pose and expression in these fifty-odd life-size images was extraordinary, and some of them were wonderfully good, but the workmen handled them without respect as they cleaned and painted. It is a Chinese proverb that says, "The image-maker does not worship the gods; he knows what they are made of." There is one drawback to the delights of Chia-ting, and that is the climate.
The "tailless one" had come walking up the gangplank, quietly returned under cover of darkness. The men were immensely pleased, and said it was all due to me; the people were afraid to steal from a foreigner. Three days after leaving Chia-ting, we came in sight of Suifu, most picturesquely set on a rocky slope at the junction of the Min and the Yangtse.
Two missionaries going down the river to Chia-ting, at the junction of the Min and the Ta Tu invited me to take a turn at rafting, and I was glad to go with them for a few li. The Ya Ho joins the Ta Tu just west of Chia-ting, the fall from Ya-chou being about six hundred and fifty feet in a distance of ninety miles.
Porters bearing loads of about sixty pounds were hurrying up the valley, often travelling only by night to save their precious burden from the burning sun's rays which would cause too rapid development. Their destination was Chia-ting, which lies on the Min River at the eastern edge of a great plain, the home of the so-called "pai-la shu," or "white wax tree," a species of ash.
The sun was sinking as I went on board the "wu-pan" or native boat lying in the stream outside the South Gate, and after carefully counting heads to make sure that the crew were all there, and that we were carrying no unauthorized passengers, we pushed off and the current took us rapidly out of sight of Chengtu. The trip to Chia-ting was very delightful.
Often a promontory was crowned with one of the many-storied white "chuman" pagodas of Szechuan, while in the face of a cliff I could now and then discern openings which I knew were the famous, mysterious cave-dwellings of a bygone time and an unknown people found all about Chia-ting.
On the northwest the city rises to nearly three hundred feet above the level, and standing on the wall one looks down upon a sea of living green from which rise temple and pagoda, or west across Chia-ting plain, perhaps the loveliest and most fertile spot in the Chinese Eden, and then farther west still to where on the horizon towers Omei Shan, the Holy of Holies of Buddhist China, often, alas, shrouded in mist from base to summit, for this is a land of clouds and rain and floods.
Each night we tied up near some village where the cook and boat people could go a-marketing, generally coming back after an hour with one vegetable or two. As the river was high, we made good speed, and on the morning of the third day after starting, the picturesque red bluffs opposite Chia-ting came in sight.
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