The Terra Cotta Warriors
It’s important to make sure that the top of the water bottle in the pack is screwed on tight. We almost ruined some Archival Souvenirs when it spilled. The Rough Guide was partly soaked; but pulling apart each of the last two hundred pages gently by hand in the parking lot in the sun is a pretty good excuse not to go into the Silk Demonstration Factory Store and listen to the story of how silk is made and how you can take some home for a few hundred yuan per meter. They could have made a sale if they had had a couple of yards of the right color but there wasn’t that much of a selection of fabric bolts, compared to stores in the US. I assured the lady that all the silk I would buy at home would be from China so they would get their money. Why they want US currency instead of silk I don’t know. The silk is a lot prettier.
It seems that if you have two worms in a cocoon it is used for quilting, but if there’s only one worm, it becomes thread. A single cocoon makes 1200 meters of 8 ply thread. Unbelievable that a little worm can spit out so much.
The excuse I use never to buy shirts is that the pockets are never sewed on so that the pattern of the fabric on the pockets lines up with the pattern on the rest of the shirt. People usually take some pains to make the pattern line up where possible on other parts of the shirt, but almost never on the pockets. It’s weird. You take this fine expensive silk and then make it look stupid by having a randomly positioned pocket pattern. It really doesn’t matter but you can put the onus on them for your not buying things, and they can’t put it to cheapness. I like that the Chinese word for “stuff” is “dongxi”, i.e. east-west.
The practice of wrecking nice material with bad workmanship extends to the gift shop of the Terra Cotta Warrior museum. There you can purchase, for $50,000 US or more, a full size jade replica of a terra cotta warrior, but the delicacy of carving is no greater than you find in the little clay creatures in every shop in town.
The unexpected highlight of the trip to see the Terra Cotta Warriors was getting our souvenir book signed by the farmer who originally discovered them while digging a well in 1974. The guide book indicates that he doesn’t show up all the time. You aren’t allowed to photograph him, in case you should discover that he is a stand in. He has great big glasses that make him look like a Pixar character. His calligraphy is done with a magic marker. He must be tired by now.
The hall in which the warriors have been reconstructed is impressive in itself, particularly when you consider that they didn’t really have the option of sinking any part of the foundation into the funerary structure itself. Also, most of the tumulus has not been excavated. The air pollution generated by coal fires and exhaling tourists could well end up destroying the statues that have been put on display, it is good that some are being saved for a future, cleaner time.
After the Terra Cotta Army visit, and the water damaged silk factory visit, we were taken to Hua Qing Hot Springs, another site (like the Ming Tombs) which would not be nearly so famous if it were not within easy reach of a site with genuine tourist pull. The Hua Qing Hot Springs are a Tang Dynasty imperial resort. It has intermittent history. In July of 756, the powerful concubine Yang Guifei was sacrificed to put down a rebellion, and in December 1936, Chiang Kai-shek was prevailed upon by his own generals to suspend his war against Mao and unite in an anti-Japanese front. In between those dates, the springs maintained a constant temperature of 43°C. For one yuan you can run your fingers in it.
After a rush hour drive back to town, and a brief rest, Tom got us ringside seats at an after dinner theater of Tang inspired dance and music. The dinner was dumplings, somewhat worse for wear owing to having to be carted up four stories and distributed among hundreds of foreign tourists. The theater is the sort that I found intolerably stupid when I was little and merely find stupid now as my intolerator is worn out from Yahoo News. The feathered hats would not be out of place anywhere on the Strip, and I doubt that there were flashing lights in the eyes of monster masks during the Tang Dynasty. Maybe there were. Directors have always been creative. When the musicians were in front it was interesting to hear them play. They are not unskillful. But the dancers were accompanied by music that reminded you that even during the Tang Dynasty, factory presets were the easy solution.
Whenever I hear a singing commercial, I visualize the recording session and the doo wop girls singing the praises of Washington Mutual Bank or OnStar. What did they think they would attain, when they were 14 and entering upon drama club? I feel certain they imagined themselves at the Lincoln Center, not singing the blues about Coffee. These dancers, they realized a while ago they wouldn’t be on the A list of Olympic cheerleaders and acrobats. But still they manage to make a career of it, like the farmer-painters who never became Grandma Moses, and they must be happy for that.
The next day the tour called for biking with Tom around the top of the City Wall (13.7 km, not all the bricks are smooth, and the bikes have one gear), and being taken to the Shaanxi history museum, and later to the Wild Goose Pagoda. The Shaanxi museum has a collection of artifacts from the Tang Dynasty, when Xi’An was capital of various fractions of China. It is well captioned in English. Solid gold bowls and perfect celadon pots are described as having been found in hoards in fields and in villages. The whole place sounds like Rome, where every gardening project is in danger of being suspended while an inventory is made of a newly discovered imperial bedroom. The museum itself is the project of Zhou En-Lai. Wikipedia says it the style is evocative of Tang Dynasty architecture but it looks more like a state college with a couple of flourishes.
The Great Wild Goose Pagoda is closed since the Sichuan earthquake. This afforded more time to explore the modern temple which surrounds the base of it. There’s an incredible carved jade mural of the life of Buddha, carved wood murals of the life of Xuanzang, and modern buildings to house Buddhist scholarly functions. It’s nice to know that people are still building and carving fancy stuff for future generations to tour the ruins of.
Xuanzang traveled from Xi’An to India in the 7th century A.D., 600 years before Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, 1200 years before Richard Burton, 1300 years before Tony Wheeler. He brought back loads of Buddhist texts, whose translations put Chinese Buddhism on a much firmer foundation than it had previously been. He also wrote a story of his travels, which really puts into perspective the ATM machine that stole $300 from me in Beijing; although it’s hard to know how I could have applied to the machine the Buddhist precepts with which Xuanzang dissuaded robbers in the Gobi Desert. Non-attachment, I guess, but that seems so flip.
We had signed up for a three day tour of Xi’An, which included four meals. Most of the meals our guide did not eat with us, which is a shame; but I have to keep reminding myself that hanging out with tourists is overtime for him.  But the last day, after the tour was over, we met up with another guide friend of his named Phoenix, and had noodles and kebabs for dinner again in the Muslim quarter, at a place which was somewhat less observant and served beer to several parties of noisy locals. And so to Xining.