Sorrow in Dujiangyan

The tale of my Sichuan travels is written as a continuous story and starts on the entry "In Chengdu" on Nov. 5th, 2008. For context and continuity, feel free to start back at that point and read on forward first if you have not already done so.

The driver drops everyone else off, and agrees to give us a small tour of the damaged areas. Dujiangyan, is a much bigger city than Maoxian or Wenchuan, but it looks like it was much more affected by the earthquake. There were many more damaged and unusable buildings:











But by no means a dead town – there were plenty of lively places as well:







There were also rebuilding efforts are also underway:



After the tour, the driver drops us off near Dujiangyan Park, the park that contains the world famous UNESCO World Heritage Site: The Dujiangyan Irrigation Project. Near the entrance, people were trying to sell all sorts of things – maps, food (corn on the cob, tofu, black rice, etc), toys, and newspapers. There was even someone trying to sell DVDs of the day of the earthquake. At first, I was repulsed by the fact someone was trying to make money off of the disaster, but then realized that it is precisely because of the disaster that people are trying to make money with whatever they can. And selling DVDs of the disaster not only brings immediately financial benefits, but also spreads awareness of the incident and allows people to better remember what happened here. And so I bought a DVD before we headed over to the riverside to have lunch at a restaurant.

However, our lunch was not a peaceful one. Every few minutes, someone would come by asking if we wanted to buy stuff. An old lady tried to get me to buy a map for the longest time. I felt bad, but I didn’t want to buy the map, and if I started buying even things I didn't want, I was sure I would be swarmed with more vendors pushing me to buy more things. We ignored her and kept eating, but she would not leave. Next came a newspaper vendor who was selling newspapers for many times the value printed on the newspaper. We declined this one as well. After that, other vendors also dropped by trying to sell Larry toys or tea leaves. None of this was around in 2004 when I visited Dujiangyan, when it was a much more prosperous city. Recent hardships have forced people to try to aggressively sell to tourists, which have made Dujiangyan somewhat more unpleasant.