Thu, Sept 8th -- Xi'an and travel to Guilin

Sights: Xian City Walls, Great Mosque

After a jam-packed day yesterday we were pleased to have a more relaxed program today. Our first stop was at the imposing Ming dynasty city walls -- 15+ meters high and 12 meters wide at the top -- that completely surround the old city (they are 17 km long). Actually, although they are called "Ming dynasty", like many things in China their actual age is a matter of definition. They were originally built in the Ming (1368-1644) but large stretches had become half-ruined, or even dismantled entirely, prior to being renovated and rebuilt in recent years. So, are they Ming or modern?

And if you think the answer is Ming, what about the Tang imperial palace -- four times larger than the Forbidden City in Beijing -- that has recently been rebuilt north of the city? It was apparently so completely ruined that it was rebuilt from foundation traces and contemporary pictures and documents... one can't talk about renovation here. So, is it new or is it Tang? And in many temples the cult buildings are made of wood with tile roofs... which are regularly rebuilt after destruction by fire or rot. How old are they?

It seems to me that in some ways the question "how old" doesn't really make sense for many things in China, and after a while one gives up asking it and just learns to recognize period styles. At any rate, the Chinese don't seem to worry much about whether or not something is original or rebuilt... the Tang palace mentioned above is a major attraction for Chinese tourists (although apparently not (yet?) for Westerners...).

Interesting side note (or, at any rate, interesting to me) -- I've never been that concerned about the antiquity or lack thereof of things I own. I'm just as happy with a new edition of an old work as I would be with a first edition; it makes no difference for me whether a piece of furniture is antique or a modern reproduction (as long as the quality is the same). I must be Chinese at heart :-).

Returning to the walls... very impressive. We rented bicycles (Madeleine and Koko initially sharing a tandem and much laughter -- they are about the same age) and rode along the top of the wall enjoying the views on the inside and the outside. The walls are surrounded by a wide moat, full of water, set within a beautifully landscaped park... just well done, like many other things seen and glimpsed in Xi'an.

Afterwards we had lunch and then drove to the Great Mosque in the center of the city, which, it turns out, is an Islamic quarter (there are about 40,000 Muslims in Xi'an). Once again, very interesting... although this time less for what it was than for what it wasn't: at first look, one doesn't realize that it is a mosque. Architecturally it is very similar to Daoist and Buddhist temples. And then one notices the occasional piece of Arabic script (among the many Chinese inscriptions), and the absence of figurative sculpture, then one sees the washroom.... Apparently when Islam came to China the then Emperor was unconcerned about the religious choices of his subjects... but he cared a great deal about aesthetics. "You can worship who you want, but you'll do it in my architecture" seems to have been his attitude! Says something quite profound about China, actually.

And then it was time to leave Xi'an and, more difficult, to say goodbye to Koko. We really bonded with her over the course of the two days we spent there -- such a sunny character, full of youthful energy but suprisingly wise in many ways. I think we would have liked Xi'an anyway, but Xi'an with Koko we loved. We exchanged cards, promised to stay in touch, and separated with a few tears on both sides.

The flight to Guilin was delayed an hour or so, as Koko had said it probably would be -- the airline (one of several domestic ones) apparently having a poor reputation for being ontime -- but with books and the iPad we weren't bored. There were many other foreigners on the flight... the first time since Beijing that we had seen more than the occasional Westerner: Xi'an and Guilin are two of the "must see" destinations on any tour of China and tourists often make up a significant proportion of the airline passengers between the two cities. In Guilin we were met by our new local guide, Lily, a Chinese woman in her mid-forties, married to an American from Oregon, who did not impress at first, or, unfortunately, later. We came out of the terminal into the late evening and ran into a stifling wall of hot humidity... Miami in summer, we said to one another. Already we missed Xi'an.

Weds, Sept 7th -- Xi'an

Sights: a government souvenir factory, the Terracotta Warriors, the Shaanxi Province museum, the Great Wild Goose Pagoda temple, and the Tang Dynasty Music and Dance Show. In other words, a very full day!

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....

Tue, Sept 6th -- Taiyuan and travel to Xian

Sights: a noble family complex in the countryside on the way to the Taiyuan airport.

We took our leave of Pingyao and drove north towards the capital of Shanxi province, Taiyuan, where we would catch a plane to Xi'an. We were originally scheduled to visit the Double Pagoda Temple in the center of Taiyuan, but we had seen enough from the train to be less than enthralled by the idea of braving the traffic going into and coming out of the city, and Lidia had read in our guidebook about a large family compound with 300 rooms on the way that one could visit. Our guide, Joan, told us that that compound wasn't so interesting, but that there was another compound nearby that was good... so we went there instead.

And indeed it was very interesting. Such family compounds seem to have been comparable to Roman villas, or stately homes in the English countryside -- noble residences with all the comforts available at the time. And in this case with a fair amount of the original furniture and art collection of the family that had lived there. Very impressive, and devoid of tourists since it doesn't yet seem to have made it into guidebooks or travel agency itineraries. We were also fortunate that there was a TV crew filming a period piece there when we arrived, and they had decked the place out with objects and costumed extras that brought the place to life.

Speaking of film stars, we have discovered that we have one in the family, at least according to the Chinese. People are continually coming up to Madeleine and asking if they can either take a picture of her, or have someone else take a picture of them standing next to her. From time to time Lidia and I are hired on as extras, but most of the time it is just Madi. One theory is that those who ask have never seen foreigners before, and indeed it seems like there are more photo requests in places with few Western tourists, or from Chinese tourists at major sights (such as the Great Wall) who probably have come from untouristed places. However, the focus on Madeleine and the fact that a disproportionate number of the requests come from young Chinese men suggests a more flattering explanation. At least, flattering for Madeleine :-(

The flight from Taiyuan to Xi'an, our first in China, went without a hitch. We were met at the exit from baggage claim by our new guide, Koko.. who looked suspiciously young and was in fact just 23, and, as she told us, the youngest employee of her company! Not a good sign, I thought... but fortunately it turned out that I was totally wrong: Koko was a gem. Pretty good English, very well prepared to show and explain things to us, very funny at times, charming, engaging, said when she didn't know the answer to a question (an infuriating habit of many guides is to give you an answer to any question you ask... regardless of whether or not they actually know the answer!) and then checked on the Internet either right then or later to find out what the answer was. As said, a gem.

And the hotel was good too, and dinner the best so far (finally a good Kung Pao chicken!). China seemed better already....

Mon, Sept 5th -- Pingyao

Sights: Pingyao Old Town, an early bank, a couple of temples, and the town administration complex.

We spent the day walking around Pingyao with our guide, Joan. Pingyao, both Joan and our guidebook told us, is one of the best preserved old towns in China, and, if you can ignore the profusion of souvenir stores and hotels and restaurants along the main streets, I suppose that it is, in that there are very few modern buildings within the old city walls. But well-preserved doesn't mean attractive... unless you are attracted (or at least not bothered) by grime and mess and people spitting, and children pissing in the street and the omnipresent reek of coal smoke!

Soooo... this is probably a good moment to give an interim answer to the key question to be posed about anywhere one visits: would you go there again? And for now, for me, the answer for China is no. I didn't much like Beijing as a city, Datong was objectively pretty ugly, and now I'm not exactly loving Pingyao. The Great Wall and the Temple of Heaven were impressive, and I'm glad I have seen them, but I'm generally not interested in seeing sights a second time. Landscapes such as the American West, the Alps, and the English country-side draw me back time and again, as do beautiful and/or fascinating cities such as Paris, London, or San Francisco. But I haven't yet seen any such beautiful landscapes or cities in China. Early days of course -- we are only a third of the way through -- so let's hope it gets better!

Back to Pingyao: the early bank was quite interesting, especially the map showing the network of branches across China... and further -- they even had a branch in London by the mid-19th Century. The Daoist temple was also amusing, because in contrast with the low-key, no-pressure approach of Buddhist temples it seemed much more, well, Chinese. Incense sticks were pressed into my hands, after lighting them I was led through a triple bow in front of the cult figure, and my fortune was read from a book (in Chinese and English) where I was invited to riffle the pages, choose one, and then was shown how that page contained a good fortune while the pages before and after did not. Nice bit of sleight of hand, whose effect was slightly diminished by being repeated... perhaps to show me that it wasn't chance? And then I was invited to sign a guestbook that listed next to each guest's name the amount they had donated :-).

The town god's temple was interesting, both because I hadn't realized that every town in China had a local god to protect it, and also because there was a small shrine to one side dedicated to the architect who had, during Ming times, designed most of the major town structures (wall, administrator's complex, etc.). A very pragmatic people, the Chinese.

And, at times, quite brutal. The town administrator's complex had three main functions: to store taxes, mete out justice, and house the administrator himself. There was a rather unpleasant display of corporal punishment tools and techniques, kindly divided into two sections -- one for normal crimes and one for those meriting the death penalty. They were, apparently, not content with simply killing the condemned... no, they had various ways of almost indefinitely prolonging agony (one panel proudly told us that they could inflict more than 3000 wounds with a knife before the prisoner succumbed). The jail was in use until the latter part of the 20th Century, although one hopes that punishment techniques had become more humane by that time. One last interesting thing: if judgement went against you in a non-capital case, soldiers would beat you with heavy sticks shaped like oars. If your relatives bribed the soldiers, they would beat you with the flat sides, if not, the edges. As said above, a very pragmatic people, the Chinese.

Lunch was good, dinner was better, and once again we went to bed early.

radio-silent ?

No WiFi in hotel in Chongqing, boat cruise on Yangtze starts tomorrow, may be radio-silent until Sept 15th.

Sun, Sept 4th -- Datong to Pingyao

Travel day to Pingyao.

Up early -- we left the hotel at 7:30AM to catch the train to Pingyao. We probably should have travelled during the night, so as to have an extra day of sightseeing, but when we reviewed the travel agent's itinerary before the trip we didn't realize that "soft sleeper" was a class of travel that could be taken at any time of the day. However, since I have always enjoyed seeing a country from a train, I didn't mind much.

It took almost 8 hours to reach Pingyao, which is towards the southern end of Shanxi province (Datong being at the northern end). Now, Shanxi is big, but it isn't that big -- the train just wasn't that fast. Apparently the same journey can be done in 5 hours by car (but the train is much more comfortable). There is a growing network of high-speed rail lines in China, but they are spreading out from the coast and don't yet link most interior cities.

We went through some hilly and mountainous areas, but for the most part we crossed intensively farmed plains, dotted with grimy and dilapidated-looking villages and small towns. The uneven pace of modernization in China was very evident. In the countryside, except for frequent half-finished interstates (autoroutes / Autobahnen / motorways) there wasn't much sign of progress -- the villages looking like they hadn't changed since imperial times, and the small towns stuck in a gray, dispiriting mid-20th Century communist time warp. The few larger cities along the way, in contrast, seemed to be being developed at a breakneck pace, with forests of cranes throwing up modern buildings and roads in all directions. It is easy to understand why hundreds of millions of people have left the countryside to try their luck in the cities.

As to the land, it was thick flood-plain soil, primarily growing corn. We aren't quite sure what the Chinese do with it all, since it doesn't seem to play a large role in their cuisine as far as we can tell from eating in restaurants, but at least this year there won't be a shortage -- every field was full and green.

We arrived in Pingyao in the middle of the afternoon. Our Datong guide, Joan, had travelled with us (although in a different compartment), and she quickly identified our new driver. Before going to the hotel we visited the Shuanglin Buddhist monastery, which, like every temple and monastery we have seen so far seems to be devoid of monks and priests, and is now primarily being used as a storage place for wooden sculptures and friezes that are unfortunately falling apart. On the plus side there was a gaggle of art students making clay copies, some of them very good, as a way of learning sculpture and the Buddhist tradition in China. They had been there for a week, and perhaps one can hope that somewhere a seed was planted in an artistic temperament that will later lead to better care and maintenance of the country's religious heritage.

Pingyao is a small town of about 100,000, and its outskirts were like those of the small towns we had seen from the train -- dispiriting. Things perked up a little as we got closer to the old town in the center, which is surrounded by an impressive 7km long and 10m high Ming dynasty wall, and the old town itself seems to be being, for the most part, tastefully renovated, although the renovations don't yet seem to have penetrated more than a few steps off the main streets.

Our hotel, the Yide Guesthouse, was a renovated old village house with 18 rooms scattered around a few atmospheric courtyards -- a couple of categories lower than the hotels we had stayed in in Beijing and Datong, but charming and very clean. I took a nap while Lidia and Madeleine went for a short walk, then after a pleasant dinner in the hotel we went to bed early.

Sat,Sept 3rd -- Datong

Sights -- Yungang Grottoes, Heng Shan Hanging Temple... and a meal to forget.

Interesting coincidence in the train the previous evening:  in the compartment next to ours was a French couple of a certain age, who until three or four years ago owned a Mas in Eygalieres.  To add to the unlikelihood, they live in Vichy, which is (they told us) twinned with the town of Bad Tölz in Germany (for those who don't know, our county in Germany is Bad Tölz / Wolfratshausen).  And the most surprising thing?  They weren't Romanian.

We arrived at 9:15PM and were met at the door of our carriage by our new guide, Joan, wearing bright purple pants (very useful -- I quickly got into the habit of ignoring faces and just looking for legs in a crowd when we were with her :-).  Around 30, forthright, proud of her city, speaking good English, and above all knowledgeable, she was a dramatic improvement over our Beijing guide.

As we drove through night-time Datong on our way to our hotel she told us a few things about the city.  3 million people, capital of the Northern Wei dynasty in the mid/late fourth Century, it was an important frontier city (to the north lies Mongolia) during the Ming dynasty (13th-16th Centuries) and was massively fortified then with a 25km long city wall (!).  The wall still exists... and is remarkable... very high and thick and with projecting bastions every hundred and fifty meters or so... it almost doesn't look real.  It appears to be in superb condition -- apparently it has been renovated by the current mayor as part of a larger plan to attract more tourists to the city.  Datong's primary economic activity is coal mining, but the seams are almost worked out (the mines are over 1000 meters deep) and the future will be difficult if they don't diversify.

Our hotel was luxurious and almost brand-new, 28 stories high.  From the top-floor breakfast room the following morning we had a good view over the city and of a long section of the wall.  Massive construction ongoing everywhere as older areas of single story buildings are replaced by 10-20 story appartment blocks and the occasional villa subdivision for the rich (we drove by one that would not have looked out of place in Miami Beach named "Platinum Mansions").  Whether this will prove to have been a wise decision remains to be seen... to be sure many of the older areas look like slums, but in the West we haven't always been happy with the "projects" that have resulted.

Our first sight of the day was a sandstone bluff to the north of the city into which have been carved grottoes filled with a riot of Buddhas.  On the way we drove along and over a large dry riverbed -- apparently they are "mining" water from deep underground and even now, at the end of the rainy season, the rivers and streams are often dry... which doesn't bode well for the future.  This is the Loess plateau -- high (Datong lies at over 1000 meters) and dry, with deep, sandy and friable soils (the Loess) that erode quickly and are carried away by winds to become a bane of life in Beijing and other Eastern cities.

The Yungang grottoes are spectacular, with tens of thousands of figures up to 17 meters in height carved out of sandstone in artificial caves (competently explained by Joan), but for me perhaps even more spectacular was the newly built temple complex between the grand visitors' entrance and the grottoes, complete with lakes, forests (of 30 year old transplanted trees), courtyard after courtyard, and building after building with monumental Buddhas, some still being finished.  The whole thing was done in the last 18 months (the Chinese build faster than anyone else in the world), and while there are already signs that not all of the work is of high quality, overall it isn't bad and one cannot fail to be impressed by the quantity and the intent to make this a first class tourist destination.  The ensemble of old and new is definitely worth a visit... and on the evidence I wouldn't be surprised if the mayor succeeds in his economic diversification efforts.

A side note:  throughout the grottoes there were high-quality metal-stamped information tablets in Chinese and English... well, a sort of English.  This is something that we have seen at various tourist sites:  I'm amazed that they spend so much money on material, but can't find a decent English translator for text.

Another side note:  Lidia wishes me to add at this point that the Yungang caves gave her skin-thingies (goose-bumps, I think :-).  She loved the sculptures and the decoration in the caves, and artistically for her yesterday was the high-point of the trip so far.  There were more details than we saw in most of the Beijing sites, and more cross-links to our cultural traditions (tree of life, angels, etc.), and many of the sculptures were very well done, so it was much more interesting.  

After lunch we drove off into the Heng Shan mountains to visit the Hanging Temple, a small complex of buildings clinging to a cliff face under an overhanging cliff 60 meters above a small river gorge and surrounded by mountains.  Charming and enjoyable.

The same unfortunately cannot be said about dinner in the hotel yesterday evening.  I wasn't very hungry but a poster in the hotel advertizing their Korean/Japanese restaurant showed a nice-looking steak, which after several days of Chinese food was appealing.  Trouble was, only one of the half-dozen serving girls spoke any English (and although she bravely did her best, she didn't speak much).  Nice big menu with many pictures... but no steak.  Finally I found it, without a price.  I asked how much, and was quoted an exorbitant figure. I thought, what the heck, and ordered it anyway, along with some fried rice and a bottle of wine (Lidia ordered a soup and some seaweed, Madeleine had opted to sleep).  A few minutes later the steak arrived... about two mouthfuls worth.  Excellent quality, but, well, not quite what I was hoping for.  90 seconds later the steak had been consumed, 15 minutes after that the wine arrived, followed a quarter of an hour later by the fried rice.  During all this time there was only one other couple in the restaurant, and the serving girls much of the time stood with their faces to the walls interacting with their mobile phones.  I don't see a Michelin star in the restaurant's future....  Construction is clearly easier than education!