Late one afternoon, our giant charter bus rolled into a quiet town two hours northeast of Xian to explore life outside the urban centers in China. What we found was, in my opinion, a level of hospitality unmatched thus far in our travels. After finishing a delicious dinner prepared by a group of local women, we took a slow stroll to the town’s only Christian church, escorted by the cunzhang, "village head."
Walking down a major Beijing thoroughfare in search of a subway station, I passed a mustached man of olive-colored skin on a flatbed tricycle loaded with che, a sweet snack made of peanuts and fruit. He asked if I wanted to buy some, and offered a free sample. The man spoke Chinese with a heavy accent, and I realized he was not an ethnic Chinese, but a Uighur, one of China’s ethnic and religious minorities.
For a generation raised on MTV rather than Mao Zedong Thought, Buddhism, along with other traditional Chinese ideologies such as Confucianism and Taoism, offers young people a way to reconnect with their Chinese identity in the face of increasing globalization.
In a small corner of one of China's most famous Taoist temples, Meng Zhi Lin tunes up his gu qin, a seven-stringed Chinese instrument.
“The tone is very low, so I’ll close the window,” Meng says through our interpreter.
The gu qin is not so much a musical instrument but a tool through which you practice and know the knowledge of heaven, he explains.
Ten years ago Meng Zhi Lin turned his back on modern life and sought isolation in the mountains, abandoning everything except his gu qin.
