Sachs Covered Bridge; Adams County, PA

Sachs Covered Bridge; Adams County, PA
Sachs Covered Bridge; Adams County, PA

Friday, March 22, 2019

White Horse Temple--Luoyang, Henan Province, China

In the 1990s I visited the White Horse Temple with my students at the Zhengzhou Textile Institute during Luoyang's Peony Festival. Founded in 68 AD, the temple is regarded as the first Buddhist temple in China. We also saw the Longmen Grottoes.

On the large incense burner, running vertically it says White Horse Temple (traditional Chinese characters--白馬; simplified-- 白马)



I decided to go to China to take a break from my graduate school program in political science at the University of Michigan since living in China would help me learn about the country, which was one of my specialties. I picked Henan Province because I'd shared an apartment in Kansas with Chinese from Henan and few foreigners  lived there. I was so caught up being with my students and Chinese colleagues that I didn't see another native speaker of English until about 1/2 year had gone by. When a teacher from Britain who was at another college knocked on my door, I was stunned. I wish I'd taken more pictures without identifiable people so that I could share them without violating someone's privacy.

I loved spending time in the department office helping my Chinese colleagues or in the classroom talking with my students when they were studying. (College students in China tend to have a home classroom where they study, although some like to go to the library or their dorms.)

4 comments:

Hongjie Ping said...

Thanks for your post! And it is so cool that you point out the different Chinese characters on the large incense burner, traditional and simplified. But I have no idea why you call the classroom is a home classroom, you mentioned it in the last sentence with parentheses.

Chuck Ditzler said...

By "home classroom" I mean a room that is a regular classroom for students. For many of the students I taught in China, they stayed together in the same room for most classes. It was also the room where they could study. Has this changed?

Hongjie Ping said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Hongjie Ping said...

Oh, regarding how Chinese college students attend their classes, there are some changes on campus now. Students typically would be assigned to different classrooms according to their courses selected online in advance.