Xian

I closed my last post noting how cleverly the "bath" room in our hotel allowed one to sit on the toilet and shower simultaneously. Very clever. Before moving on, I thought the view from our hotel window would be instructive on how much things had changed from Shanghai.

But, never mind. We weren't in Xian to concern ourselves over hotel rooms. We had a larger agenda. First of all, for those of you not totally up to date on Chinese history, Xian is the capital of Shaanxi province and one of the oldest cities in China, with a history going back more than 3,100 years. It's one of the Four Great Ancient Capitals of China, having been the capital under the Zhou, Qin, Han, Sui, and Tang dynasties. It was the eastern terminus of the silk road. So Xian, while a reasonably big deal now, was a very big deal in the past. In the time of the Roman Empire, Xian was the biggest city in the world. In addition to those terra cotta warriors, Xian has a very well preserved city wall and, among other things, the Great Wild Goose Pavilion, first built in 652 to house Buddhist texts brought back from India by Xuanzang. That's where we went first.

^{You can't go in, but you can go around. Here are a few photos.}

^{As is the case with everything I'm showing you, the photos really don't do it justice.}

^{Our next stop was the mandatory attempt to get us to buy something. In this case, it was a factory making terra cotta warrior copies. Here's a photo from there.}

^{Finally we arrived at the site of the terra cotta army. If you would like to read about it here's a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terracotta_Army. The site is vast.}

^{The TCA was built by Qin (Chin) Shi Huang, the first Qin emperor and, I believe, the first to unify China. He began the tomb in the third century B.C. when he was 13. The army is actually outside the tomb, which has not been opened, and was discovered in 1974 by farmers looking for water. Three pits have been excavated, though not completely. In the first pit there were an estimated 8,000 life size, utterly realistic warriors. None are the same as any others. They are all in battle poses and had real weapons, thousands of weapons. Many of the metal blades have chromium coatings, something the west discovered 2,000 or so years later. It's all really too much. Some photos.}

^{Note all the pieces of warriors. Only one warrior was unbroken. All the others have been pieced together. The work goes on.}

^{Here's the unbroken one. He's kneeling archer.}

^{Here's the site plan of the whole tomb. It's vast, and all very feng shui'ish.}

^{Here's the last building we visited. It's huge and contains thousands of reconstructed soldiers. Amazing!}

^{All good things must come to an end, and so it was time for lunch and then the long drive home. Nancy wasn't feeling great. She stayed in our cubicle while I took one more walk around Xian. Here are some photos of and from that Bell Tower Pagoda I showed you in the last post. Here's the actual bell.}

^{and the view. You can see the city wall in the distance.}

^{Here's the pagoda itself, all up close and personal. As an aside, three people took my photo while I was there. So much for traveling anonymously.}

^{I took a quick walk to the wall before heading back to the room. I suppose this was a guardhouse.}

These buildings ran right up to the wall.

^{I suppose when the wall was originally built, it didn't have holes for cars to pass through.}

That night Nancy stayed in the room while I went out for a dumpling dinner and show. Not to worry, I got her some beer and chinese potato chips to compensate.

The show was here.

While people ate this lady played what ever it was she played. Something from the Tang dynasty presumably. The final course was soup heated on a burner. The burner at the table next to mine was very cool.

Eventually, it was show time. Each act was introduced by this duo, he spoke Chinese and she English.

It really was a great show. The performer were very talented and the costumes were amazing. I'll just show you a few photos.

I've saved the best for last. The final number was a blow out extravaganza,

and the lady behind me talked on her cell phone through the entire thing!

It was quite the evening.

I got back to the room and to Nancy without incident. She was already on the road to getting better -- a good thing since the next day we were off bright and early for Beijing.