Wednesday, Aug 15, 2018
Xian
Viewing the Emperor’s Terracotta Army And So Much More
Xian was amazing. All I had expected to find was a small, one-horse town that leapt to global prominence following the discovery of thousands of buried terracotta warriors. In fact, as we discovered, it offered far far more.
When we alighted from the train, half an hour ahead of schedule, we found a taxi outside the station and for 30 yuan, the cabbie dropped us to the Skytel Hotel in the heart of the city at 7.00 am. It was the best hotel we’d had so far—they gave us a free upgrade at check-in. We soon found out that there was a tour in English that would take visitors to see the terracotta warriors starting in the lobby at 9.000 am. We could have taken public transport and ‘done’ the sight the hard way. But, by this time, we were ready to do some brainless travel—to have someone else do the thinking for us and to shepherd us from one site to the next—as had been the case when we had toured the Great Wall. Hence, we decided to sign up for the tour for 490 yuan each. It would meet in the lobby in an hour. This left us enough time to have showers, change clothes and get ready for another day of strenuous sightseeing.
When we got inside, we loved our room. It was spacious, clean, well-wired and had great views of the city. Plus you could not beat its location—in was in the very midst of the shopping heart of the city. We were surrounded by department stores, super markets and restaurants. Thrilled with our choice of hotel (also obtained through hotels.com), we had fab showers and watched some English TV after what seemed like ages. CNN was available as was a network called CGTV—China Global Television Network. It actually gave international news with regards to China. At 8.30 am, we went outside to pick up Frappuccinos and a packaged bread-like roll with some cheese and meat filling that made a delicious breakfast and then we were back at the hotel and ready to join the rest of the participants of the tour who had assembled in the lobby. For 490 yuan each, it included transport by coach back and forth to 3 sites, entry fees and an English speaking guide who called herself Chai-Jing but told us to call her Chelsea, if we found it too hard to remember her Chinese name!
Tour of Terra-cotta Warriors:
The first stop on our tour, as we circled the ancient city and took in its restored walls, was a Terra-cotta factory—really an excuse to sell us handicrafts. This is the sort of stop we have come to expect on all conducted tours world-wide. The guides get a ‘cut’—a commission—from the store owners when they bring bus-loads over. Chelsea made a pretty penny as many people from our coach succumbed and bought the wares that included warriors in various sizes and guises, plus every other Chinese handicraft of which you can think: silk embroidered panels and screens, lacquered screens, ceramics in every shape and form, rosewood furniture, jewelry in jade and amber, gorgeous jade carvings, etc. You name it, this store had it. We moved from what looked like one large warehouse to the next as we admired the wares.
Then, on our way to the series of Museum buildings that now house the terracotta warriors, we got caught up in a terrific traffic jam on the highway. The summer holidays have brought the Chinese out in hordes to visit their places of interest with their children and elderly relatives. Three generations of Chinese tourists traveled together to make happy family memories. The situation was so bad that when we were a mile away from the entrance, Chai-Jing asked if we would be prepared to walk it—as we would reach there faster. We readily agreed as we had become fed up of sitting in traffic.
When we reached the site, about a half hour later, we found out that the entry fee was 130 Yuan per head. At the guide’s instruction, we made our way, as group, to Pit No. 1 which is the most interesting of the lot. The guide explained that some 8000 warriors have been excavated to date. They were created in the reign of Emperor Qing Shi Hwang to protect his mausoleum. Although the site of his mausoleum has been identified, it not yet been opened because it is said to be surrounded by rivers of mercury. Because mercury is highly toxic, no modern-day archeologist wants to pioneer the effort of exposing it to the world. Although the warriors were made and laid in the ground centuries ago, they remained unknown to the world until they were found in 1976 by a farmer named Yang Ji De who was ploughing his field and found some terracotta pieces. He thought they were gold bits so he hid them until a passing scholar happened to have a look at them and told him they were terracotta. The scholar suspected, by the finesse of the craftsmanship, that they were of some significance and serious digging began at and around the site. The treasure trove was discovered and, in 1986, the site was opened to the public—making it one of the world’s most recent wonders.
Although visitors have been arriving at the site for the past thirty odd years, it was only in recent times that a proper Museum was designed and built to house them. Today, hangar-like structures built directly over them, protect the pits and still allow the public to see the sculptures in situ. As we moved from one pit to the next, we received lots of information about them: there are generals, archers (standing and kneeling), middle-ranking officers, soldiers, etc. Most of these can be seen in Pit No. 1. The size of the pits and the number of excavated sculptures are so overwhelming that they take one’s breath away. We learned that when they are just removed from the earth, the figures still sport the colors with which they were painted after being molded. However, exposure to the air causes the colors to deteriorate very quickly and bring them to the uniform pinkish shade that they all sport. Hence, a decision has been taken to stop excavating them in an attempt to preserve their integrity.
We also learned that successive invasions through the centuries caused large numbers of the figures to be broken deliberately in an effort to erase the memory of the emperor who had commissioned them. Hence, many of them are being excavated in a damaged state. These warriors are placed in what is referred to as a ‘hospital’ where conservationists are working round the clock to restore them to their original glory. This is a long-term project that will take many decades and the efforts of a large army of contemporary people. But the Chinese government is so proud of this haul that they have invested enormous sums in conserving them, showing them off to their best advantage and publicizing them by loaning them out to museums around the world. About ten years ago, on a trip to London with my friend Amy Tobin, we had been fortunate enough to see about a dozen of them at the British Museum—together with a team of four horses (for there are horses a-plenty to be found, also a part of the army).
You encircle the vast hangar so as to see the figures from every angle. It is a very stirring sight and, as in the case of the Great Wall, you have to wonder and be awed at the scale of the human achievement that, so many centuries ago, conceived of his project and made it possible. Today, it is all highly commercialized and large numbers of people make their living off this attraction—from scientists and archeologists to vendors of handicrafts for replicas are available in sets in every imaginable size and material. All that said, I must also comment on the crowds that were simply colossal. In a country in which we were so impressed by the level of organization of public transport and crowd-control, we were really fatigued by the amount of people pushing forward for a closer glimpse. There were literally thousands of people pouring into the pits in huge tour groups. It would have been better to regulate the number of people sent into each pit. This would result in long lines, no doubt, but at least one would not feel suffocated inside. They did not even have pedestal fans in the pits and the temperature was simply gruesome.
When we reached Pit No. 2, we found it to be much deeper. This pit is referred to as ‘the command center’ because it features commanding officers who stand facing each other. They are still being excavated but as exposure to air immediately changes the colors with which they have been painted, they have stopped removing them from the earth. When we moved on to Pit No. 3 we found horses and two chariots—one with a rider and another in a closed sort of carriage. These vignettes have been displayed in glass cases—the throngs pushing in for a good look and a shot at taking a picture was so intense that I literally could stay there for less than a minute before I began to feel seriously claustrophobic. The guide explained that only one vignette is original—the other is a replica whose original is in the Shanghai Expo Museum. In Pit No. 2, some of the originals are in glass cases.
Thousands of people pour in every minute—indeed it is one of China’s biggest attractions. But I repeat—at one of the country’s most lucrative attractions and at a place that we thought would become one of the highlights of our travels, the crowd and the heat were simply dreadful. We have never seen or experienced anything like this—it was truly awful. Many of the people in our group commented on the fact that any kind of emergency would create a stampede that would seriously endanger lives. Everyone said how impossible it was to stay inside the Pits beyond a few minutes. We were not hurried through the place. In fact, we were given about 2 hours to see the whole site which is now a well-documented museum that is superbly curated. But by the time we had seen all the buildings, we were ready for a long cold drink and a good meal.
Family Style Banquet Lunch in Xian:
Lunch was in a Chinese restaurant to which we had to walk for another mile. This was utterly crazy as most of us were ready to drop with fatigue by that point. Still, the food was excellent and we enjoyed a really scrumptious variety of dishes that kept coming—in the same way as the banquet that was served to us, family style, as at Jinshanling Great Wall, a few days ago. About 10 of us sat around a table with a Lazy Susan in the center. A large variety of very tasty dishes were served with watermelon for dessert.
Meeting the Celebrity ‘Discoverer’-Farmer:
Unexpectedly and quite wonderfully, after lunch, when we were exiting the restaurant, we found an elderly man sitting with a pile of books near the exit. He turned out to be the author of a book that he was selling, signing and sealing with his personal seal—very much in the Chinese style. It turned out he was the farmer Yang Shi De who had found the terracotta warriors while ploughing his field. Then much younger, of course, today he is bent, old and physically challenged. He has obviously made a packet on the sale of his book and on posing with tourists for he will not pose for a picture with visitors unless they buy his book. However, anyone is welcome to take his picture and we took several. Can you imagine the thrill of actually being in the presence of the man who had found the haul and made national and international history? I have to admit that I was simply blown away by the privilege.
We did not have time to see the Emperor’s Tomb and Garden as the traffic at the beginning had pushed our entire schedule behind. Paula, one on the women in our group, was unhappy about it and began asking the rest of the group what they thought about not completing the tour. We had two Indian girls in our group who had a flight to catch and there was need to hurry back so they could make it. Everyone was annoyed but Paula was not willing to let it slide. She rallied a few of us around to make a complaint in our hotel lobby. In compensation, the manager who was around and the guide decided to give us a discount to get to the high speed train station tomorrow for our train ride to Luoyang as the tour operator also runs a private taxi service from our hotel. It seemed a fair compensation to us and agreeing to pay just 25 yuan each (as opposed to 50), we settled our complaint.
Buying some items from a supermarket:
We returned to our hotel by 5.00 pm. As we had the evening free, we found out where a supermarket was so that I could buy a shower curtain for the Bombay studio I will be renting. I also picked up a vegetable peeler, a grater and a pair of scissors. I wanted to get a set of stainless steel silverware as well, but as they had no knife, I did not buy it.
Off to Bell Tower and Drum Tower and Muslim Quarter for Dinner:
By this time, we had made the exciting discovery that apart from being the base for an excursion to see the terracotta warriors, Xian marked the end of the famous Silk Route of medieval times that traced its trajectory from Xian and other parts of China through Mongolia and then to Tibet, northern India, modern-day Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Turkey and eventually Italy. It was the same land route that Marco Polo had famously traced in the 1300s when he had traveled from his home in Genoa, Italy, to Xian in China. As it had thrived during those days when silk, tea and other commodities had rendered the world globalized, so too today, Xian is a flourishing commercial center with a wealth of department stores, supermarkets, malls and the like. These are posh and glamorous and attract a wide clientele with obviously deep pockets. Our hotel was simply surrounded by avid shoppers and we joined them in the evening as we went in search of dinner.
Having heard about Xian’s famous Muslim Quarter (a result of the vast number of immigrants who had settled in this part of China right from the days of the Silk Route), and of its exceptional cuisine, we decided to dine there. We did not know what to expect, but taking directions from the staff at the Reception, we set out to find a meal. The area is reportedly filled with Chinese Muslims who sport white skull caps and use flamboyant sales techniques as they hawk their skewered lamb kebabs and grilled calamari (octopus).
En route to the Muslim Quarter (which was only a 15 minute walk from our hotel), we passed by the superb Bell Tower that was stunningly illuminated in the midst of a traffic island around which cars and buses circled continuously. And then five mins later, the Drum Tower came into sight—also similarly illuminated. These two ancient buildings that are striking at night date from medieval times.
Following directions, we made our way behind the Drum Tower to the Muslim Quarter. When we reached there, we had the shock of our lives: it was basically a giant street market with food being sold on the pavement by vendors who vied with each other to attract patrons. The lights and the noise and the crowds had to be seen to be believed. We did not expect anything like this and, once again, we felt overwhelmed. The place was just jammed. In fact, the so-called ‘Quarter’ is a narrow street lined on both sides with eateries and street food—there are kebabs galore but also ice-candy and other strange foods such as ‘chikki’ made with nuts and sesame seeds.
We were not interested in standing on the street and eating. Having had visions of enjoying a nice sit-down dinner, we looked and found a restaurant that offered seating. It was literally a 3-storeyed place and although we went to the very top looking for a table, there were simply no seats to be found. Luckily for us, just as we were leaving, a family got up to go and we promptly darted into their vacated seats. We then sat down with much relief, after a very tiring day, to enjoy lamb kebabs (that were so superbly spiced and seasoned that they were probably the best skewered boti kebabs I have ever eaten). Lonely Planet also recommended a typical specialty of the house: a huge bowl of mutton broth with glass noodles, sliced mutton and crumbled pita bread in it. We actually wished we had decided to share one of those bowls as it was so enormous that we could only eat about half each. The waitresses were most amused by our foreignness and went out of their way to take special care of us. Llew struggled through the use of chopsticks and asked for a fork and spoon everywhere—only to be told that they had none. By the end of our travels in China, both of us had vastly improved our chopstick-eating skills.
As we made out way out of the Muslim Quarter, we passed through the shouting hordes again. Deeply overwhelmed, we could not wait to get out. We realized that doing this trip ourselves was introducing us to a whole lot of local and folk experiences that we would never have had on a conducted or package tour. This way, we were immersing ourselves fully into the Chinese lifestyle and were getting a very authentic perspective of their own slices of life.
It was with relief that we returned to our hotel and went straight to bed after what had been another superbly adventurous day for us.
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