Sharing the Sunrise

August 30

Ever since the very first emperor of a unified China, China’s emperors have been coming to the sacred mountain of Taishan to commune with the heavens, to pray for a long and prosperous reign. To do so, they went through great expense (they would be accompanied by an entourage of thousands) and hardship (well, all things relative, for an emperor, a pilgrimage to a mountain that you’d have hike up yourself was probably fraught with more adversity than palace life: one early emperor even died on his way home).

Now, with the domestic tourism industry booming in China, this experience once only open to emperors is now available to the masses. Yesterday, we hiked up the mountainside with a huge mass of people. This morning, our hotel, like all the others on the mountaintop, placed a 4:30 AM wakeup call to every single room. The masses rose up. Many, like me, donned the down coats (one size fits all: in other words, humungous), courtesy of Taishan’s hotels. Together, we scaled what little was left of the mountain to scale before reaching the rocky outcropping surrounding the temple on the very top: the prime place to watch the sun rise over the valley below that many mornings, like this one, is obscured by the elusive and exquisite “Cloud Sea.”

For a country of 1.3 billion, more and more of which of late are being squeezed closer and closer together in the country’s overcrowded cities, privacy is hard to come by. So when a person who has grown up without being introduced to the concept of privacy, how will they respond to the privacy made possible by the expanse of nature? What would an American do in the same situation? Probably try to get as far away from civilization and other people as possible. Try to be “at one with nature.” But what about someone from China? Or India? I made a similar observation during my time in India, the world’s 2nd most populous nation: instead of experiencing nature alone, people unaccustomed to privacy seem to want to experience nature as a collective, as part of a gigantic group. Watching the sunrise on top of Taishan was the same. As I explained to my Chinese friends who later asked, “What did you think of the famous Taishan sunrise?” the experience was very… 中國 (Zhong Guo). In other words, very… China.

At first, my fellow CIEE students convened on the hotel’s mountainside balcony and many of us would have been satisfied to see the sunrise from there. Then, once more hotel guests gathered around us, the surrounding group started to move together, up towards the mountaintop temple, and swept us along with them. More and more streams of people from Taishan’s other hotels fed into the river of people, a river that defied gravity by moving up the mountain. The river reached its destination and its contents—hundreds if not a good couple thousand people, all Chinese except for the 33 in our group—scattered across the rocky outcrop just below the mountaintop, a sea of people overlooking the sea of clouds below.

At first, I caught myself thinking, “Look at all these people! Listen to all this noise! And they think this is the ideal way to watch a sacred sunrise?!” Apparently, most of my fellow CIEE students thought the same and climbed up some jagged rocks to get to a place where they could be more isolated. I was about to join them, when I had second thoughts: I’m here first and foremost to experience China. I’m here at 5 AM on this crowded mountaintop in China to experience a sunrise. But I think my higher goal of experiencing China can override my personal preferences when it comes to watching a single sunrise. So I stayed put, my friend Daniel deciding to stay put too, and while the rest of the CIEE group watched from afar, we were soon surrounded on all sides by Chinese tourists, their cell phone cameras at the ready.

Despite my initial cringe at the prospect of taking in this special sunrise surrounded by a mass of chattering Chinese tourists, I was so glad I decided to go against that initial gut feel and join the masses. Ultimately, the Chinese way was much more fun. The people around me joked and laughed, the experience made all the more special because it was shared. There was a collective feeling of suspense as the sun approached the horizon, a collective feeling of joy and wonder when the sun first peeked over the top of the cloud sea. A cheer of appreciation erupted from the crowd, a woman nearby shouting at the top of her lungs, “Tai yang, NI HAO!” (“Hello, Sunshine!”).

Though Daniel and I certainly stuck out from the crowd, we were able to become part of it in a way that the rest of our group—further up the mountain and as far removed from the masses as possible—couldn’t. While my first impulse was to cut the crowd of people out of my pictures, some of the best photos I took during the entire weekend trip are the photos in which I was true to the experience and let the people provide the color to the foreground. OK, from now on, I’ve vowed, no more cutting out the truth from my photos by cropping out the people that happen to be in the way of my camera’s viewfinder. For one, they add interest to the foreground, help round out the composition with a touch of local color. Moreover, I’m in China, for Confucius’ sake. In the most populous nation on earth, it does no good to forget the people.