Professor Adam Reeves of the Psychology Department recently had the opportunity to visit China and give a talk at Chengdu University. We asked Prof. Reeves to share a little about his travel experience with us.

I visited a Life Sciences department in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan province in southwest China. Chengdu University was founded to develop Chinese electronics and technical abilities, and has many buildings dating back to Mao Tse Tung’s period (the 1950s). It is prestigious, but the life sciences group is relatively new and has to establish itself. One step that the university has been taking, to that end, has been to invite international scholars, such as Pedro Valdes-Sosa from Cuba, an expert in neuroimaging, and Keith Kendrick from England (who discovered how brain oxytocin promotes social bonding), both of who I met for the first time at a delightful supper. I also met some first-rate Chinese scholars such as Yongjie Li, whose papers on the computational modelling of visual perception are well known in my field. So this was a scholar’s holiday, for me!

What with talking to various faculty, PhD, and Master’s students, I had little time to explore the city. However, I did see the old part – which was weakened but not destroyed by the magnitude 8.2 earthquake in 2002, which devastated much of the province but left the city mostly intact, as it sits on a place of hard rock supported by a deep bed of sand, which luckily absorbed much of the initial shock and after-shocks from the earthquake. The old part has been reconstructed where necessary and boasts some incredible Peking Opera, at a much higher standard than the equivalent on Broadway, I would say, numerous indigenous crafts, and a lovely park with incredible Bonsai (a Chinese invention, not Japanese, I was assured). So, a tourist destination for the Chinese, and a few foreigners.

I also saw the world’s longest-lasting major environmental engineering project, one I had learnt about as a child in England but never thought I would see: the Dujiangyan Irrigation Project, which dates back to 256 BC. A brilliant operation, it splits the Minjiang river into two parts, the ‘inner’ river, which waters Chengdu, 50 other cities, and all the surrounding farmland, and the ‘outer’ river, which carries away excess water and prevents flooding. The division was engineered so that the inner river would flow through a man-made gorge with such pressure that all the sand and debris in it would be left behind –thus the water is always clear, no inner-river dredging needed. Three statues of the chief engineer (Li Bing, the provincial governor) were found when part of the outer river was dredged in the last century, and his identity and the verification of his engineering feat are all recorded in ancient script right on one of the statues. There is also a temple where, legend has it, Li Bing subdued an evil dragon to save the enormous, multi-year engineering project. As it has provided excellent irrigation for more than 2000 years without intermission or corrective action, I conclude that the dragon really was put to sleep forever. Looking at our modern engineering works, could any of them last one hundred years, let alone two thousand? And how can I dispute the fabled dragon, in the face of such overwhelming evidence?

Thanks for sharing, Prof. Reeves–we’re glad you had an enjoyable and productive trip!