We went shopping to buy a mobile phone Shining girl had spotted before. She checked on the internet to see if the price was as good as she thought and also looked at the features and decided it was a bargain. We went back to the department store where we saw it and bought it. The staff were very helpful and set it up in English for her.
After that we went to the agency that got us the hotel room and asked about a bus trip around several sights. The price was charged for the bus and guide and we were to pay separately for the attractions we wanted to see. This suited me as I didn’t want to see the “Tomb of Qin Shi Huang” again. It is a model based on old manuscripts and might well be very inaccurate. I’m not usually very thrilled by models as I would rather see a few pieces of the real thing. We booked to go the next morning.
Touring is surprisingly tiring and we rested a while before going out again at night. The agent had suggested we go to Da Yan Ta at 8.00pm and I gathered there was a concert on. After a Pizza Hut pizza we took a taxi which dropped us by the square behind the temple. It was clear we were in the right spot as a large crowd of people was milling around and we strolled among them heading for the back wall of Da Yan Ta. On the wall were concert sized speakers so we stayed in that area. We waited and nothing much was happening but everyone seemed to be anticipating something. I asked a tall young woman in a uniform what was happening and she told me there was going to be a concert at nine o’clock. There were fireworks in the near distance at about a quarter to nine.
At 9.00pm water began to flow over the whole length of the wall and everyone cheered. A couple of minutes later “The Waltz of the Blue Danube” played over the loudspeakers and several hundred waterspouts fountained up over the length of the square and danced in time to the music! In Beijing BMW had shown me sets of pipes in a large pool that she said were a musical fountain and I guessed the water created music as it rushed through them but the reality is more beautiful. Music played for about an hour, and the jets synchronised to it were varied in strength and lit by changing coloured lights to create the dancing effect. It is a massive display, the biggest in China, with hundreds of jets the length of what is a large public square.
The pipes of this fountain are underground and the water spurts from ground level. Dozens of people took advantage of this to get relief from the warm weather and get thoroughly soaked. It was great fun and it would have been nice to join them if I didn’t have the camera, documents, blah blah blah…
Da Yan Ta, by the way, was the home temple of the monk who set out from China at the Emperor’s request to bring copies of the Buddhist scriptures back to China. His adventures were put into writing in the fanciful and somewhat allegorical work known in English as ‘The Journey to the West’. Some of you would have seen the TV show ‘Monkey’ based on this work. The book is one of the four classic novels of China.