13th of July. The day prior to our first day of teaching, we were taken to the Ancestral Temple in Foshan.

 

Foshan is a city described as being famous for a great many things. Canton Opera, arts and crafts, masks, silk, ceramics, wood carving. In reality, I’m not sure how famous it is for any of them outside of Foshan, but this temple tranformed the sweltering, dusty, cracked, pop up book city of Foshan into something much older and much greater for me.

 

There were golden gods looming over us, intricate carvings trying to tell us tales we could only guess at, and many paths taking us through a temple that nobody seemed able to understand. Our guides couldn’t tell us how old it was, and everyone else seemed to find our little European party more of a spectacle than Beidi, God of the North, charged with holding back the water from the flood planes of Guangdong, and all his friends.

 

In two large areas at the rear of the temple old men and women played Mah-jong whilst boys in costumes fought with swords, refined their martial arts skills and risked unpleasant bruising with nunchukus.

  

The visitors joined in, then we went for simply brilliant sushi, and played on all the games in the arcade twice, as it was so cheap.

 

I later found out the temple was founded in 1080 as a metallurgist’s guild temple. China seems to be upside down.