I had less really impressive photos in my second semester. I guess I did most of the cool touristy stuff so I didn't have as much good materiel. I remember I had way more food and drink photos.
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I wasn't planning on taking another trip this semester but my Neo-Confucian Philsophy professor set up a rather neat sounding trip to Hangzhou for this weekend. It will be a short trip, two days one night, and a very cheap trip, but it should be cool. Hangzhou is a city in Zhejiang Provence noted for its famous West Lake (西湖), Neo-Confucian philosophers, and increasing importance as a center of eCommerce. Wikipedia also says an extension of the Kaifeng Jews formally lived in Hangzhou but now there is no remains of the Hangzhou Jewish community.
So I got a request to write a blog post about the Jews of Kaifeng. While I have written about Sino-Judaic stuff before I have avoided the Jews of Kaifeng largely because I didn't feel like I knew much about them and that I have never been to Kaifeng. Since I have brought them up a few times I guess I should say something about the small but important community of ethnically Chinese Jews. I would like to note though that basically everything I know on this topic is from the research and work of Prof. Xu Xin (徐新) of the University of Nanjing (南京大学), he is a far better source for this type of thing than I am and all of his work in the field of Jewish Studies is extremely interesting.
While the vast majority of China's Jews, particularly within the last 100 years, are ethnically foreign (the Chinese tend to lump all whiteish foreigners together) this has not always been the case. In the days of the silk road, Jews, probably for Persia, made their way over to China as merchants and traders. Like the Hui people, the ethnically Chinese Muslims who make my favorite noodles, some Jews decided to stay in China, marrying Chinese women becoming less and less Persian and more and more Chinese. What is interesting about the Jews of Kaifeng though is while they became more and more Chinese they stayed as Jewish as they began for quite a long time. In Prof. Xin's book The Jews of Kaifeng he described the Kaifeng Jewish Community's synagogue with its bilingual Chinese/Hebrew inscriptions asking the one Jewish G-d to bless the Chinese Emperor and explaining how to use the teachings of Confucius to help forfill the 10 Commandments Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai. During the community's golden age in the Sung Dynasty, the Jews of Kaifeng produced several graduates of China's intensive civil service exams and were as pillars of the community. Unfortunately, China's increasing isolation and a series of catastrophes that wrecked the once great city of Kaifeng destroyed the Jewish community there. Fortunately, a good deal of scholarship was done on the community before they disappeared. Some Chinese missionaries believed that the Old Testament was incomplete, because it fails to mention Jesus and the New Testament quotes several Old Testament passages that don't seem to actually be in the Old Testament at all, so were hoping the Kaifeng Jews, being a relatively isolated community for most of their history, would have these lost sections. To their displeasure, they found that the Kaifeng Jews were Jew Jews, using the same Old Testament the Jews of Europe and the Middle East were using even after a long period of isolation from those communities. By the 19th Century, the Kaifeng Jews almost totally forgot their heritage; the knowledge of Hebrew and Torah died with their last Rabbi. Still to this day there is a Teaching Torah Lane in Kaifeng (it was formally called the Lane of the Sinew Removing Religion, another Chinese reference to Jews) marking the site of the community's former synagogue. Some of the Kaifeng Jews never forgot their roots however, remembering that they are different from the majority Han Chinese and, unlike most Chinese, avoided eating pork. The small community of about 100 people is having a mini-renaissance with increased interest in their community from the Jewish world and China's new infatuation with the Jews following the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the People's Republic of China and the State of Israel. Last year, a few Kaifeng Jews even made Aliyah to the State of Israel. While their story might be strange, Am Yisrael Chai Zai Zhongguo. Yesterday, my Chinese Civilization class took a field trip to the Shanghai Museum located at People’s Square. Most Chinese provinces (including provincial level cities like Shanghai and Beijing) have very impressive museums. Shanghai’s Museum is one of the more impressive of the bunch though. Furthermore, it is relatively easy to get in and it’s free so all the better. Getting there was no problem, each of us was able to get there on our own using the subway during morning rush hour. I did get a bit lost after I was let out since the subway exit I wanted to use was closed. I actually went to the Shanghai Museum once before with my Mom, but we were only able to do the top three floors. This time I got to do the final, first, floor and got to go over some of my professor’s favorite items. It was cool to get basically a private tour (while the class has about 17 students, only 8 of us were on the trip) of the museum with a top academic. My favorite pieces are still the camel ceramics, the camels are just so expressive you really get the sense for how little they actually want to be doing anything. My class and I also got to see the bronzes and sculpture exhibits on the first floor. The Shanghai Museum probably has the best collection of ancient Chinese bronzes on Earth. The exhibit takes up half of the first floor and includes countless bronze bells, food vessels, wine vessels, and some weapons. The sculpture exhibit felt kind of like the museums of South East Asia (Vietnam and Thailand mostly, particularly the National Gallery in Hanoi and the little museum at the Temple of the Jade Buddha in Chiang Rai) with the large number of old Buddhist sculptures. Interestingly enough, the Buddha and his close disciples are actually depicted as Indian, not Chinese. The historic Buddha was an Indian Prince before he became a religious figure so this does makes some sense. It is just interesting to compare the depictions of the Buddha as Indian in Chinese art (like he actually was) with the depictions of Jesus as European in Western art (which he wasn’t). Though, I noticed that most modern Buddhist temples tend to have a standard depiction (which does vary with Buddhist tradition somewhat) of the Buddha which doesn’t really line up with any possible human depiction. I sincerely doubt the Buddha had metallic gold spiky hair and skin (like how the Thai depict him) or had snow white skin with gold hair (like some of the Norther Thai and the Burmese depict him). While Jesus’s ethnicity does seem to change depending on the tradition creating the image, he is usually shown as at least human looking.
After the Museum, we had lunch ad LobsterXChicken that serves, unsurprisingly, lobster which they claimed was American, Hainanese chicken (海南鸡), and steak (I guess LobsterXChickenXSteak was a bit too long of a name). I previously mentioned that the small island province of Hainan is nationally known for their chicken and chicken product. I actually really liked the chicken, it was a bit plain but it had enough taste on its own that it really didn’t need much extra. The lobster half I got was alright, it was a bit small, pregnant, had a thousand island sauce, and had the small claw. I guess I can’t complain too much about 15USD lobster and chicken. Funnyly enough, the cups at LobsterXChicken said “FUCK YEAH” on them so I guess they don’t get many native English speaking customers despite trying to look American. Once we finished eating, we took a 20 minute walk to the Shanghai Confucian Temple. The Confucian Temple seems to be one of the older buildings in the city. Most of Shanghai’s historic architecture seem to be from the Century of Humiliation or relegated to the small water towns on the outskirts of the city so it was nice to see something old in the city proper. While the grounds were nice, there didn’t seem to be any worshipers, most of the people at the temple looked like tourists. I think going to temple is a tourist thing for many urban, non-religious Chinese. While there were offerings to 孔子 I didn't see anyone actually making an offering. The Temple did have an impressive collection of rocks since Confucian scholars are super into fancy rocks (my professor called the curvy rocks). I am not sure where this compulsion to collect rocks came from, but any proper Confucian Temple should have a court yard displaying their rock collection. Some of the rocks on display at the Shanghai Confucian were very nice, they had a bolder from Anhui province that they said looked like a crying dragon and tiger which must have been quite the project to get to Shanghai back in the day. I can state that classrooms now and classrooms in the 1400s are actually quite similar. There is a lectern where the teacher stands facing desks for students. The only difference was the desks were shorter since they had those Chinese kneeling chairs and all the furniture was a bit nicer than what Livingston High School or Juniata College bought for their classrooms. Overall the Temple and the Museum was a nice trip. I am a bit tired from all the walking and standing though. |
AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
November 2021
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