Hezuo, China - In this once mainly Buddhist and Islamic enclave of Gansu province in China’s remote and rugged west, lies a small town that is slowly burying the violence of its recent past and returning to its religious roots. Hezuo, like so many towns in China’s far west, lies off hard, bumpy dirt roads that wend through some of the country roughest but most beautiful and dramatic mountain terrain. Like others too, Hezuo is embossed with the upheaval of China’s industrial modernisation. Active smokestacks veil crisp blue skies in grim sheets of acrid cloud, while cranes erecting cheap, white tile-trim buildings rise above the clutter of nondescript 1970s low-rise blocks.
Despite its ramshackle architecture, Hezuo, nestled in a narrow valley six hours by bus from Xiahe, a more well-known tourist destination, is testament to the durability of the country’s cultural traditions in the face of senseless violence. After decades of oppression by China’s ruling communist party reached its nadir during the Cultural Revolution, the centuries of Buddhist, Islamic and even Chinese Daoist teachings have made a quiet but triumphant return to this town of some 200,000 residents. On a recent Sunday, as the smoke from ceremonial dung fires mingled with the echoes of Buddhist chants, streams of multi-ethnic Chinese headed to their respective temples of worship to pay their respects.
“The Muslim faith and this temple is an integral part of life here,” Ma Bulu, caretaker of Qingzheng Mosque said amid the buzz of some 3,000 Chinese Hui gathered for midday prayer. “This temple was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution and rebuilt in 1980,” said Ma, a member of the Hui, the country’s largest Muslim minority.
“After the reform and opening up of China things began to change and people began to return to the temple,” said Ma, as a small band of boys with walnut-colored skin and white skullcaps, laughed nearby. During China’s Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, when at the command of Mao Zedong, one of the 20th century’s most tyrannical dictators, Red Guards rampaged through much of the country, pillaging cultural symbols that were deemed as not representative of communist heroes Mao and Marx.
Throughout China temples and mosques were vandalised, and objects of worship and religious scriptures vanquished. Hezuo saw its temples robbed and burned, the small scars of which remain in the form of whitewashed ruins next to the rebuilt Milarepa monastery built in 1678 in the Potala palace architectural style.
“A lot of people died, some ran away. Let me tell you this way, there were more than 500 monks here in 1955, now there are only 150,” said a 67-year-old Tibetan monk, who was witness to the violence.
It is estimated that during the Cultural Revolution, which was meant to stoke the fires of communist revolution while wiping out all pernicious foreign and ancient Chinese influences, claimed some 500,000 lives. The number of deaths is thought to be much higher by Chinese and Western academics but they are hard to calculate because the party has never allowed formal investigations into this tragic phase of its history.
“There are some archives that historians can’t reach, that’s why (the research) of contemporary Chinese history is weak,” said Su Zhiliang, history professor at Shanghai Normal University, who writes high school textbooks.
Personal histories are thus largely left to anecdote and those then young enough to provide testimony, but many are reluctant to drudge up the past.
“Of course, times are different now. Many people suffered then including Chinese,” Xing Jiguang, who was collecting donations for renovations at the Langmiaoshang Temple, said. Fifty metres above the mosque on a verdant hill, Langmiaoshang is today filled with Chinese bringing gifts of grains, bananas and apples to the various Buddhist deities. “I’m just coming to pray for my family’s safety, for my friend, good grades in school and success in general,” said Nico Li, 20, a student at the local teachers’ college, who said she vaguely knew about the Cultural Revolution.
Evidence remains that minorities such as Tibetans and Hui, easily identifiable by their non-Han Chinese features and who even today make up about 60 percent of the population, suffered more in places like Hezuo.
For one, it was their buildings of worship that were destroyed, while Liaoshangmiao stayed open.
“The temple fell into disrepair but was never closed,” said Xing. Today in Hezuo residents appear to have the freedom to worship, as long it is exercised with caution, and that in itself is a great improvement, according to residents.
“Things are okay today, much better than before,” the monk at Milarepa said with a sigh.
Authorities do not even mind that pictures of the Dalai Lama, the exiled religious leader of Tibet, hang at the ticket sales window and inside the Milarepa.
“In Tibet the pictures are not allowed, but here the government does not care,” the monk said, but warned, “you can’t pledge your allegiance to the Dalai Lama.”
“You can cherish him in your heart and 95 percent of us do, but you have to be careful how you act or otherwise they take you away in handcuffs,” he said.