Day 2 in China: we hit the road even earlier today because we traveled further north to a town called Bailu (the “#1 township for love” according to a billboard). This town was under major reconstruction to repair the damage from the earthquake and they decided to turn it into some sort of fake Disneyland/Ching dynasty resort. As we drove in, we passed endless rows of blue and white temporary earthquake housing with people still living in them even three years later.


Our first stop in town was at the site of another unlucky middle school. In this case they were luckier than they could have been because the fault cut right between two buildings and did not collapse either one, just a small building that crossed the fault. So what was once a flat courtyard is now a big ramp.
(people walking up a ramp that used to be a flat courtyard)

The Chinese geologists dug a trench here as well to look for traces of previous earthquakes and again found a 3000-year recurrence interval and offsets for the 2008 earthquake of about 2 meters. Once again they are seizing the opportunity for tourism and they are building an earthquake museum (of course it is right across the fault…hmm…) where there will be a big shake table people can stand on to experience an earthquake.

We then walked around the town on the hill across the river. The old part of town is over there, it was heavily damaged. But what was most interesting was the new construction. They were reconstructing this old town into a cross between Disneyland and a Ching dynasty historical park. They had built a “castle” and some buildings straight out of Paris and/or Cinderella. Also some beautiful buildings in architecture from the Ching dynasty for hotels. They didn’t really mix well together, I would have left off the Cinderella themed buildings because the Ching dynasty style buildings are beautiful, with wood trim and elaborate wooden screens over the windows.



It’s amazing how they were building things though, much of it was by hand. Labor is cheap in China, as we all know. There was some machinery, like a tractor sized cement mixer and some trucks carrying things around, but there were also women carrying buckets of cement up the hill on their shoulders with a bucket hanging on each side of a shoulder yoke. Much of construction is done by hand, I even saw a group of men paving a wide road with hand trowels in another city.



The public toilet in that town was the most disgusting place I had ever been in my life. Public toilets in the part of China I was in at least, tended to have no doors and walls only a few feet high, much less privacy than we’re accustomed to. They never have western toilets because I hear that Chinese people think it’s gross to sit on toilet seats in public rest rooms, so they are either the French style squatting toilets, or long troughs that flow between the stalls that you have to squat over and when you look down you see everything flowing past from the other stalls. Not the most elegant situation. To make it worse, the bathrooms are usually disgusting, but the one in Bailu was the worst. I won’t describe it, but will just show the picture and just say that I now understand why it’s so important to take ones shoes off when going inside someone’s house in China.


Another interesting thing about this town was the bird cage hanging outside practically every shop and house containing a singing bird of some type. I asked one of the Chinese grad students about this and he said they have them for the tourists. People in Chengdu don’t see birds very often in the city because there aren’t any trees for them, he said, so they like to see them in the countryside. After that, I noticed the strange quietness around the city streets of Chengdu. No pigeons!! No junkos, finches or other city birds that thrive on trash in US cities that also can be lacking trees. I don’t really know why there weren’t many birds in the city, but I do know that we had pigeon served at our fancy welcome banquet. And they included the roasted heads, beak and all, on the plate so that we knew it was fancy expensive pigeon and not something cheaper. I had trouble eating that one, how could I with those cooked and sauce-covered eyes staring at me.

Moving on. We left Bailu and drove a long way through farmlands where a crop of something that looked like chives was being harvested by hand and piled on bicycles, three-wheeled trucks and in hand carried baskets to be taken (I assume) to market. We stopped in a town called Mianzhu where they are famous for making liquor, which was apparent from the brewing scent that permeated every inch of the town. We had lunch here, but they didn’t give us any of their famous liquor with lunch unfortunately, though we had some of the strong stuff later. It is called Baijiu (white brew), and is too strong to drink plain for my liking, but tastes like smarties sugar candies a bit and is really nice when mixed with medicinal Chinese herb brews.

Where we stopped for lunch, the earthquake damage was not apparent, but we drove just a bit further and all of a sudden we had reached a ghost town of earthquake destruction, it seems like there must have been really localized site amplification of the ground shaking for this terrible damage to be right near areas that did not seem that bad-off. At this site there is a clock tower that stopped exactly at 2:28 when the earthquake happened and still stands there today. I was walking slowly and snapping pictures of it and nearly walked into an open manhole on the sidewalk. I wonder how many earthquake relic tourists they catch in that trap each year.


Thousands of people were killed in this area, as was a massive statue of the ruler of the Han dynasty riding a horse. His head rolled off and was lying on the ground next to him along with some other giant heads.


Finally we left for our last stop of the pre-conference field trip to another small tourist village called Jinhua. Here the fault scarp was uplifted a mere 0.7m. What was more impressive was how small this fault scarp was compared to the towering cliffs several hundred meters high on either side of the valley. And how this small amount of uplift could be so powerful to cripple a huge factory complex nearby and turn it into yet another earthquake relic tourist site. (see seismologists joking around with a curious local in the field at the last stop)



There were many factories in this valley, just the one closest to the fault seemed to be crippled and still twisted and damaged with trees starting to grow on the roofs. Some further away that we drove past reminded me of what it must have been like in the early industrial-era factory towns in the eastern US. There was a big factory, and then not so far away a small town that was obviously built just for people to live in who work in the factory. Another thing I noticed here and in other places we drove through, most houses had small thermal solar heaters on their roofs as well as cisterns to collect rainwater. Why aren’t those more ubiquitous in the US? They make so much sense. Even if you can’t heat water completely through thermal solar, just partial heating can save a lot of energy.

We returned that night to Chengdu and moved to a new fancier hotel located in a garden along the river. There were live musicians playing in the huge marble coated lobby and a woman whose job it was to press the elevator button and indicate which elevator to use with a slight bow and outstretched hand. I shared a room with a graduate student at MIT who was from China originally and she was really nice. Our room was fancy, with slippers that were laid out for us each afternoon, a view of the river and a pair of gas masks. One curious feature was a window into the bathroom right where one would like to have a mirror.

That evening a few of us went for a stroll in the gardens around the hotel with its elaborate statues, living pagodas made out of vines, pigeon coops, colorful lights and water features. We tried to stroll on the path along the river, but the stench of sewage was overwhelming. Not the kind of waterway I would want to swim in. Regardless, it was a beautiful evening and I was so happy to be able to walk outside and be warm in the evening. It will be a few months before that happens in Seattle :)