"an amateur historian's cultural trip"
Some interesting comments extracted below:
(About an altercation provoked by a stranger trying to cut in line) While Confucianism brings family members extremely close to each other, and also friends to some extent, this religion or philosophy alienates strangers, i.e. people of no family or friend relationship, beyond indifference and sometimes to the extent of hostility.
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(About scenery of the Three Gorges for landscape painting) What puzzles me and the people I ask everywhere is that these stunningly beautiful mountains and thousand-feet high cliffs never went into ancient painters' vision, even though famous poets in the Tang dynasty wrote about them. This can't be explained in the same way that Jiuzhaigou or Guilin of natural beauty no less than that of the three gorges was also not in ancient paintings, because the latter were either physically inaccessible in ancient times, or rarely stepped on due to occupation of a non-Han civilization.
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(On viewing the exhibition of the Sino-Japanese War) Not all feuds are created equal. Forty years after the Korean war, Chinese and American then pilots could meet and chat about their air fights as if they were playing a game. During the 1979 China-Vietnam war, soldiers reportedly exchanged canned food during the intermission of a battle or perhaps lunch time. But the two belligerents of the Sino-Japanese war would never come to terms in this life or the next, as if a threshold of human indignation was surpassed.
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(On visiting Dazu Rock Carvings) unlike Christianity or Islam, Buddhism does not exclude other religions, and the Chinese religions or doctrines care even less whether you worship another god or God privately or publicly.
