SingaBorcherts: China Trip

When you last saw us, we were on a high speed train taking us from Chengdu to Xi'an.

We made it to our hostel in the mid-afternoon, so decided to get to know our neighborhood by exploring Xi'an's Muslim Quarter. Xi'an was the effective terminus of the Silk Road, and so has strong cultural influences from the merchants who visited the city for millennia. The longer we live in Asia and get to know the depth of history here, the more it feels like the main narrative of humanity exists on an axis between Damascus and Xi'an, and all of the Western history we're familiar with is low-stakes current events on the fringes of civilization.

Our destination in the Muslim Quarter was the Huajue Mosque. Built approximately 600 years ago, it is the largest mosque in China and still an active place of worship. The mosque follows the traditional Chinese temple pattern of courtyards, gates, and pagodas atop sacred tortoises. However the walls are inscribed with Arabic prayers and the final great hall that would have normally contained a giant Buddha statue is instead laid out with prayer rugs facing west.

Quiet and serene. Unlike the rest of the Muslim quarter.

A philosophical debate in Mandarin. I assume.

So what was in the rest of the Muslim Quarter? A tourist market of a type that can be recognized anywhere in the world (think London's Camden Market, Athens' Monastiraki, Paris' Latin Quarter, Bangkok's Chatuchak Market...) full of relatively exotic food served kebab style and cheap trinkets, of course! Given the prevalence of both sausages-on-sticks and fried corn batter at Chinese street food markets, whoever introduces pronto pups to this country is going to make a bazillion Yuan!

I'm not sure if there were more chibi warriors on the streets of Xi'An than actual Terracotta warriors, or the other way around.

"Quit taking pictures and let's get some fried potatoes!"

This was liquid-nitrogen-cooled sweetened corn puffs, not _actually_ unicorn scat.

The next morning we rose early to visit the reason visitors foreign and domestic all flock to Xi'An - the Terracotta Army.

In the outskirts of Xi'An, the Terracotta Army is roughly ten thousand full-size pottery soldiers guarding the tomb of the first Qin emperor (who unified China roughly 2,300 years ago). You can check out the Wikipedia article for the full story, but the first emperor of China ordered his citizens to create an army made up of pottery soldiers, generals, and horses armed with actual weapons and chariots. These were buried near his tomb to protect him from enemies that he was sure would attack his spirit in the afterlife. He was, in fact, a controversial fellow.

The entire site was lost to history until 1974 when farmers stumbled across it while digging a well. Much of it has been excavated now, enclosed in massive buildings to protect the pottery from the elements, but much of the site has been left covered (or even re-buried) to preserve the paint and finer details.

The actual tomb of the Qin emperor is completely undisturbed in a large mound about 2 km behind the army pictured below. He's believed to have been buried in a chamber created as a map of China with lakes and rivers of mercury, and mercury levels do measure abnormally high near his burial mound. Since mercury vapor is (in addition to being appallingly toxic) a great preservative, the plan is to leave him buried until technology improves and archaeologists are confident they can investigate the burial mound without destroying any priceless artifacts (or dying of mercury poisoning).

Same picture as from the Wikipedia article, except with our kids in it! Not pictured - the insane crowd we pushed through to get to this view.

Every statue is different, and signed by its creator - so the higher-ups knew who to punish if it wasn't up to snuff.

This area was called "The Infirmary"

Anyone want to do a thousand 3D jigsaw puzzles whose pieces have been mixed together?! (answer: yes. The kids were disappointed they didn't get to try)

This sword is still sharp. And was chrome plated, thousands of years before the west learned how to do it.

We've seen traveling exhibitions of the Terracotta Army before, both at the British Museum and also at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Those experiences tended to have just a few pieces and go into a lot more detail about the process that was used to create them, the history, the archaeology. The actual site was much more about the sheer scope of the effort rather than the quality and craftsmanship, and it was hard to reconcile the two sometimes. At its peak, between 700k and a million people were engaged on the Qin emperor's funerary complex - about 5% of the population of imperial China at the time!

After resting for a bit at the hostel, we explored the city walls. Xi'An has the most complete city walls of any city in China and are large enough that you can rent a bicycle and spend about two hours riding all the way along the top. Since there were no baby seats, we chose to stroll, and saw about 1/12th of it. However, it was a lot easier to stop for ice cream while on foot. Vacations are all about ice-cream stops.

Most of the wall was built after Xi'An was the imperial capital... to protect it against the emperor.

The next day began with another high-speed train - this one to Luoyang.

A couple of observations after watching over a thousand kilometers of countryside go by:

Although nearly every available square meter of open land was used for farming, we saw zero tractors or farm machinery. Some farmers appeared to have motorcycles that they used to get to the plot of land they were working, but that was about it.
We passed an astounding number of nuclear power plants. China's decisions around it's energy economy draw a lot of criticism for taking a surprisingly short-term view for a country that has no short-term accountability, and the smog was nearly universal. China has been investing heavily in solar and wind power, and hopefully they can finish their "industrial revolution speed-run" soon.
We didn't see any new construction under 30 stories tall. Some of the construction is essentially busy work to make sure economic "growth" hits the target set by the government, but most of it represents the enormous migration from rural villages to the growing cities.