A 400 mile day trip to Linyi

 

And that's 400 miles in each direction. And it is actually possible here in China. It was kind of a day trip, but let me explain. On Friday afternoon I set off from Beijing South Railway station and 3 hours and 10 minutes later reached Linyi, a small city of about eleven million people down in Shandong Province, where the snooker-table-like flatness of the Yellow River Plain finally rises into some mountains. But even with the several stations in between, you can make this trip in less than 230 minutes if you cruise at 150mph. And we did. That's my train at the top 

Why Linyi? Well there is a reason. My obsessive summer reading of the Cambridge History of Chinese Science brought me into contact with Sun Bing's Art of War. No, not Sun Tzu', that's much better known, and has clear provenance right back to 300BC (and it's very good, by the way). Sun Bing's was from about 200BC and was quoted and referred to by later writers but later historians sniffed that it could well be an apocryphal mix from other texts, rather than a real book.

Until they found a copy in Linyi in the 1970s. Written on hundreds of bamboo 'slips', it had been buried 2000 years earlier with a clearly well-read Army captain. Or a captain who wanted to seem well-read perhaps.

So my main reason to visit was to see the museum of 'Silver Sparrow Mountain', where the tombs has been unearthed. The modern museum is built around the tomb site, so you can see the actual tombs, made up to look like when they had been found. 

The 'slips' are unprepossessing, just simple bamboo strips with characters written down them, with hundreds of slips laced together to make a bamboo 'book' that you could untill like a scroll.

The next two pictures show some of the original slips in a cabinet and a reconstruction of the scrolls as they were when buried (over 2000 years ago!). Together in the first pic with the very helpful English-speaking Museum guide that they insisted I would need.

No

So after my museum trip and lots of fruitful loafing aimed at serendipity, I finally made my trip back by the other kind of long-distance Chinese train, the glorious 'hard sleeper' trains that let you sleep your way to Beijing in a perfectly comfortable bunk with a duvet 

And now my day trip is over and I'm starting the next tomorrow - this time it's Chongqing. 

But I just loved that in China you can accidentally open a tomb and find more evidence of its cultural longevity and continuity, as well as cock a snook at snobbish historians!