XI'AN - 西安

School field trips are awesome and much too rare. How come we never get to have them in graduate school? (I'm not counting last year's jaunt to Nashville, Indiana, though the company couldn't be beat). Although our trip was kind of disorganized and rushed and included only one night in Xi'an, being able to walk/wobble through the train cars and see almost all of my fellow students and our teachers and administrators, eating noodles, drinking beer, playing Uno, or just shooting the shit with random Chinese folks was an event of its own. Also, I got to see the freaking Terracotta Army! NEAT!

I wish I had more historically relevant material on the 兵马佣 (bing ma yong), but I'm sure you can all find that yourself. What I can give you is some exciting first-hand pictures. I'm sure this won't have been the first time any of you have ever see Emperor Qin's Army of Terracotta Warriors, but who knew they were housed in what appears to be a giant Olympic Swimming Stadium? I honestly kind of expected that they were still underground like the Egyptian tombs I visited in Cairo a long time ago.

There are indeed thousands of them, most still buried, and it's true what they say about how every single human figure and horse is different from every other - different facial expressions, physicality, hairstyle, etcetera. It really is, as an older American gentleman near me whispered into the microphone of his camcorder as he slowly, slowly, slowly panned across the length of the hall: "truly incredible". I pity his poor family and friends. They've got an awfully slow ride ahead of them.

The whole place also had a very distinct smell, rather like you would expect an old, cold, pottery studio to smell, but still surprising to encounter.

Here are some of the still partially buried figures, notable not only for their archaeological value and for illustrating how much work has already gone into reconstruction, but also for their rich metaphorical content, seeming to emerge from the clay all crumbling, broken, and headless.

I'd make a terrible historian as I am far too mushy-headed to labor over careful analyses of dynastic balances of power and would much rather ruminate over the magnificent creepiness of this great monument to human pride and cruelty. The most affecting part of seeing the Terracotta Army for me was the way all these thousands of soldiers, representing who knows how many thousands of hours of labor all faced forwards, marching ahead in place towards nothing at all, towards a stone wall...

There is of course a great intimacy with history that you cannot escape in such a place, and here that history includes the tragic and macabre stories of those craftsmen and horses who built the army and were buried alive with it. This may be one reason why the place is so compelling and affecting, but I think that regardless of whether you know anything about the history of the site (and I know very little), both its sheer scale and all those careful renderings of soldiers in battle formation give some sense of the futility of war and empire and man's desire for immortality. Or something like that.

Damn. Leave it to the Chinese to construct elaborate conceptual art in the guise of burial grandeur more than 2,000 years ahead of its time!

I don't remember what I was thinking here -perhaps considering the possibility of a Terracotta Warrior Halloween costume or wondering if someone nearby had a nip of whiskey for me?

Aside from the three main pits, there was also a modest museum on the grounds, as well as some warriors removed from the rest to enable a closer look.

Having arrived in the morning, we spent several hours enjoying the halls and exhibits and were then delivered to a dismal lunch of bleached rice and wheat products, fatty starchy meat, and oily vegetables. Our next stop was the Huaqing Pools 花清池, a favorite retreat for Tang dynasty-era emperors and their concubines.

Unfortunately I didn't understand much of what the guide was saying and the pools themselves were rather unimpressive looking without the historical background.

The scenery was nice though.

And the adjacent Huaqing gardens, constructed somewhere in the 1930s, were tranquil in a very typical Chinese way, a style which I might add, is complemented perfectly by ice cream.

From the pools, we were shepherded back to the actual city of Xi'an, which is some distance from the Terracotta Army but holds its own draws. Though probably half the size of Beijing, Xi'an is a massive city, and a surprisingly pleasant one at that. With a population almost equal to that of New York, it has a flashy downtown with lots of upscale housing, shopping,

and, from the looks of it, an exciting night life:


The phrase at the bottom of the sign reads "Friend-making clubhouse at half past eight". Unfortunately I never got around to taking a picture of the "Hot Dance Club" near our hotel, and worse, I never got to go.

One of my classmates made the apt comparison that Xi'an is a little like the Chicago of China. It doesn't get as much attention as the coast but has a glorious history and a lot to offer and always seems to be the exception made when the center of the country is written off as backward and boring. It is also the capital of the province of Shaanxi and the best part of it.

And now, because I am lazy, an excerpt from Lonely Planet China:

For more than two millennia, over a dozen dynasties rose and fell in Shaanxi... Two centuries before Homer penned the Iliad and the Odyssey (and Rome was founded), five centuries prior to the Buddha's enlightenment, Xi'an was already a classic world city.

The old city wall still stands solidly in the center of the city and we were taken there to explore a little on our own when we got back into town.

It is actually possible to bicycle all the way around the wall, which would have been fun, but there wasn't really time. So we just wandered around.

We saw these huge kites in a few places in Xi'an. They went on for ages and rose impressively high into the sky, looking quite beautiful and a little lonely.

Here are my dear classmates Mo Ran/摸然/Bernie and Ding Ding/丁丁/Michael hanging out at the wall. I have no idea what the hell they are doing in this photo, but don't they look like charming fellows?

For dinner, Jessica and I made our way to the Muslim quarter with a few other classmates. This was her fifth visit to Xi'an and so I elected her tour leader for all times that we were not with the group. She took us to a Xinjiang restaurant on this street, 北院门 (bei yuan men) which had some of the best food I've had since coming to China: perfectly spiced noodles, garlicky naan-like bread, lamb skewers for the meat eaters and a few other things I devoured in hungry haste and cannot now remember.

We went back to the same restaurant for lunch the next day and spent more time exploring the street and nearby areas. The night before had been the first day of Ramadan and as we wandered down the market alleyways we kept running into a cluster composed mostly of men and children who would set upon a table prepared with food, devour it with much gusto and noise and then quickly move on to the next. I have no idea what the significance of it was, but it was apparent everyone was having a grand old time.

It was nice to get the cultural experiences out of the way though, so we could spend the next afternoon doing a little consuming.

No, I didn't buy any birds.

Nor did I buy any calligraphy brushes, but don't they look appealing?

We did spend quite a while at the dried fruit market where we found some natural, unsulphured pineapples, dates, persimmons, kiwis, apricots, and mysterious others. We also saw a rather nasty fight break out between a few of the vendors and spread to a larger group. As far as we saw only guy ended up with a badly swollen face but we didn't stick around to watch.

I dropped a couple of hundred RMB at this teashop overlooking the fruit market. I bought another nice fat brick of Pu'er like I did the first time I visited a tea shop in China, but this time I got to talk teas with the shopkeeper (who Jessica knew from a previous visit) and not rely on a translator. We lingered tasting jasmine pearls, oolongs, white bai hao, lychee black tea, flowering peonies, and chatting with our small friend here in the yellow sweater. Small children in China get bundled up in padded clothes in the winter and it causes them to waddle around like tiny, cushioned linebackers. I wish they made those quilted clothes in my size. I could have used them on the train ride home...