Lei Xue is an associate professor of art history in the School of Visual, Performing and Design Arts within the College of Liberal Arts, where he teaches about Chinese and Japanese art. In September 2024, he joined a research trip in China to document centuries-old inscriptions carved into the mountainside.
Where were you?
We were in a mountainous area of Shandong Province in China, a coastal province just across from the Korean peninsula.
What language is spoken there?
Mandarin, but kind of a local dialect, a strong accent that was sometimes hard for me to understand.
What was the focus of your work?
This whole project is to focus on the sixth-century inscriptions carved on the mountains that were created by the Daoists. They had them carved on those mountains in the hope that those words, those inscriptions, would transform this mountainous landscape into a sort of simulation of paradise, where they believed the immortals resided. So, in this way, they hoped to use this simulation to meet those immortals, and then achieve immortality themselves.
It’s a very religious place; they are like religious poems engraved on these limestone rocks about the appearance of the immortals and describing the landscape around the mountain. For myself, having read about this place — I could imagine it, but when you get there and see it in person, it blows your mind how this poem has been carved up on this natural rock. You really believe why the sixth-century people did that. That’s something you can’t really get from reading books or looking at slides.
We did 3D scans, using a cell phone most of the time, to document the inscriptions, their geographic location, their form and the environment. Then we hired a specialist to fly a drone and document the whole topography of the mountain. Eventually, we’ll create a full digital model. I joined the team as a specialist of Chinese calligraphy. This site has been an important historical location, and has been named a cultural heritage site by the Chinese government. Our job is to more fully document the site while also making this data we collected available online for everybody to access.
When was your trip?
I was there for 10 days in September.
Who were your closest local colleagues?
This is an international collaboration; the project was initiated by INALCO (the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales), a major university in Paris specializing in international studies. The whole project is funded by the French government. I joined the team, and we also have a colleague from a Chinese university, and then we worked with the local officials. I think I was the only person from the U.S., though I hope in the future we can bring our students out there for fieldwork.
What’s the biggest challenge of working there?
The hardest thing is to find the right person for you. A very important thing in China to do anything is “guanxi” — kind of a personal network or connections that lead you to the next person. Of course, there are official channels that you can ask, but it depends on the person: Can they help you get access to the particular sites or not? The reason behind that is often very obscure and unpredictable, so it really depends on luck. We were lucky this time to make our work go very smoothly, but the unpredictability is the most challenging.
What’s the best food you ate there?
We had a big giant green onion. The local people, they don’t eat it in like a salad; they just grab it and eat it (like a carrot), and it’s surprisingly delicious. Not that spicy, not that strong, quite sweet actually. They eat it more like a snack.
What’s the most non-touristy thing you got to experience?
To find some inscriptions, we had to leave the paved path where other visitors were, and struggle through tangled bushes and dense trees. In that moment, GPS did not really help. Even our guide got lost a couple of times.
What’s something you’ll take back to Oregon with you?
These trips are always making me think about my teaching at OSU, and how to convey this experience that you get on-site there — this environmental, spatial experience — in the classroom and in my teaching. And how to engage my students in a different project to relate to life experience. That’s something I will take back to campus.
What was the biggest surprise for you there?
I brought a lot of instant coffee with me; we need to work the whole day, so we need coffee. But surprisingly, even in those cheap hotels we stayed in those rural areas, they had fresh-brewed coffee in the lobby. Twenty years ago, it was even hard to find coffee in a big city, so these days I was so surprised to find coffee everywhere. Happy surprised!
What did you miss most from Oregon?
For me, it was OK; I went back to my home country. But for my French colleagues, they missed a lot of their cheese and baguettes. I was very sorry for them. You can find coffee everywhere, but not cheese, not to mention French cheese.
What advice would you give others who might travel there?
Not just for this region, but to China in general, I think the most important thing to know is that China has become an almost entirely cashless society: You use phones to pay everything. In many places, even in rural areas, people may not accept cash, so you need to download WeChat (an all-purpose Chinese app) on your phone. The good news is that as of two years ago, the app now accepts American credit cards.
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