Koko picked us up after breakfast and we headed off to the Terracotta Warriors (or, in Koko-speak, the "Turtle" Warriors... there were a few words she had difficulty with :-). This is one of several sights around the world that tout themselves as being the Eighth Wonder... but Xi'an really has a good case to make. More than 8000 larger than life-size pottery statues of soldiers have been unearthed at the burial site of Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi -- the first ruler of a united China. But before I talk more about them there is the drive through Xi'an and the government souvenir factory visit to recount.
I like Xi'an! It is furiously modernizing like other large Chinese cities, but here the old seems less run down and the new seems more harmonious. There is a lot of green -- trees and parks -- and the overall impression is of elegant relative prosperity. Very different from Beijing. Perhaps it is just further along the path of modernization, but I don't think that that is the explanation. I may be anthropomorphizing, but it feels to me as if being the capital city of 13 dynasties over 1100 years has left Xi'an with a combination of relaxed self-confidence and good taste that the other cities we have seen so far in China just don't have. Of course, the revenues from the streams of tourists coming to see the Terracotta Warriors probably don't hurt either....
Before we got to the excavation site, we stopped at a dingy-looking building, ostensibly because there one can see scale reproductions of the terracotta warriors being made with the same techniques that were used over two thousand years ago. In reality, of course, it was a shopping opportunity. Our tour company has actually handled that aspect of things pretty well overall -- taking us to a fairly high-class and (important in China!) reputable shop every few days, usually with some sort of educational spin. And despite its dingy exterior the government souvenir shop was actually very good indeed, with some beautiful furniture that, had we had more time and measurements from home, we would have been sorely tempted to buy.
And now, ladies and gentlemen... the Terracotta Warriors! Stunning. First you walk along winding stone paths through beautifully landscaped grounds, then you come upon several large buildings. You go in the first and there, in front of you, in serried ranks in partially excavated pits under an arching roof as big as a football stadium, are thousands of 2+ meter high clay figures. Each figure has a different face, both in features and expression, and there are many different body types. Archaeologists believe that the figures are modelled on real soldiers in the Qin Emperor's army, and they are all lined up facing his tomb mound a few kilometers away, ready to accompany him in the afterlife.
That tomb mound is also fascinating, because despite knowing exactly where it is, and despite having historical accounts testifying to the wonders that are interred within, it has not been excavated. The official reason is that archaeological techniques are insufficiently advanced to guarantee the preservation and protection of what would be unearthed. Apparently the clay figures come out of the ground brightly painted, but almost all of the paint quickly flakes off when exposed to oxygen and humidity, and they want to avoid similar things happening when they open up the tomb. And, who knows, this might indeed be the real reason. But the self-control required of Chinese archaeologists, or, perhaps more likely, their acquiescence when faced with the dictatorial powers invested in the long-tenured site director who refuses to allow the dig to commence, is remarkable.
The Terracotta Warriors were found by chance some 37 years ago by a group of farmers sinking a well. They -- and we -- were very lucky: had the well been 3 meters to one side, it would have missed the pit and the soldiers might still be slumbering underground. Unlike with the emperor's tomb, there were no contemporary accounts of the Warriors that might have led archaeologists to search for them. They actually have no idea how many soldiers are still underground... they have identified over 50 pits... but only a few have been excavated so far. The whole complex, including the tomb mound itself, may be over 50 square kilometers large... the vast majority of which has yet to be explored. The emperor was clearly a world-class megalomaniac. Pretty damn impressive.
On the way back into town to go to the Shaanxi Province museum we stopped for lunch, which was once again very good. Actually, as with shopping opportunities, this is another thing that the tour company has done very well. The tour price includes lunches most days, but rather than pre-ordering fixed "take it or leave it" meals, instead the agency has selected good clean restaurants, set a per-head budget, and then lets us order a la carte from the menu. If we go over the budget, we pay the difference... but the amounts have been so generous that we have, I think, only gone over once... and since we are always trying new things, we usually end up leaving food on the table. It's an excellent system, and we have been very pleased with the quality (and taste!) of almost all of the food we have ordered.
The museum was large, modern, with a good collection and well laid out, but it paled a little in comparison with the sights before and after. The most interesting thing, for me, was how similar the development of Chinese civilization seems to have been to the apparently independent and roughly contemporaneous development of civilization in the Middle East and Meso-America. Why, despite being anatomically modern tool-makers with rituals and art some 50,000 years ago, was it only several thousand years ago that more or less at the same time multiple geographically dispersed groups of humans began putting together the technologies that enable modern civilization (phew! Long sentence...)? Did climatic factors block earlier development (but in places as far apart as Mexico, Egypt, and China?)? Or did it take that long for genetic selection to produce sufficiently sophisticated intelligence (but in parallel in different isolated populations?)? Or were the initial discoveries so unlikely that it took over 40,000 years for someone to make them (in the Middle East), and then subsequently there much more interchange than we know about between the different areas? At any rate, it is an intriguing question....
After the museum came the Great Wild Goose Pagoda -- a delightful Buddhist temple with monks (the first we have seen) and an active community of believers. We climbed the 7 story, 64 meter high pagoda for a great view over the city... which is huge! In fact, despite the temple being at the intersection of several long boulevards (allowing us to see great distances), and despite knowing that the buildings in the sixteen square kilometer old city center were zoned to be much lower than elsewhere, I could not tell in which direction the city center was. As far as one could see, in every direction, there were skyscrapers. Impressive. I think the city has 9 million inhabitants... which isn't large in comparison with Beijing (20+ million) or Chongqing (30+ million), but city population figures are always difficult to compare: sometimes they include vast suburban hinterlands and satellite towns and cities, sometimes they are just the metropolitan core. At any rate, from the top of the pagoda Xi'an seemed no smaller than Beijing. Funny Koko anecdote: at some point she told us that she wouldn't like to live in a big city like Shanghai... :-).
On the way out we passed through the temple gift shop (a standard and unavoidable gauntlet) and, for a change, were captivated. Local artists support the temple by donating paintings and other works that the temple gift shop then sells... and there were some excellent works on display. We ended up buying a beautiful painting of a village in spring-time in what feels to me to be a classic spare style... I'll be interested to hear what you think about it when you see it. We also were given a fascinating short calligraphic demonstration of the development and composition of Chinese characters. Some characters are made up of other, simpler characters. Some "words" or concepts are expressed by multiple separate characters that each have their own meaning but whose meanings are subsumed in the larger "word" (but without obvious boundaries delineating the "word"). And then there are the, to us almost indistinguishable, vowel "tones" (that aren't musical tones) and the fact that despite all these tones so many characters are homophones of one another, and the parallel existence of a (unique?) Pinyin representation (using Latin letters) for each character that Chinese speakers also know.... It was all so interesting that Lidia the linguist has vowed to learn Chinese... or at least enough to have an understanding of how the language works and to say and understand some simple phrases.
The last stop of the long day was at a Las Vegas style custom-built theater where we had dinner and saw a performance of Tang Dynasty music and dance (the Tang was Xi'an's golden age, when for a couple of hundred years it was the largest city in the world). For a change, the food was distinctly unimpressive, being a fixed menu that they had unsuccessfully tried to adapt to Western tastes, but the delightful show more than made up for it. Very graceful dancers, and some virtuoso musicians.
We didn't stay up long after getting back to our hotel around 11PM....
