China visit 2010: fourth installment

October 19: More Xi'an rambles

Today we planned to do what we'd done in York, namely climb the city walls and walk around at least part of the city. We climbed atop the city walls at the south gate, which is a literal stone's throw from our hostel. These walls are big suckers: enough for two tour buses to pass side by side without scraping mirrors, which makes the walls we walked atop in York seem like amateur efforts; Xi'an's walls are about four times the width and as much as twice the height of York's walls. The difference, presumably, is that as a Chinese emperor, you have access to nearly unlimited slave labor and don't have to worry about how many people you kill during the construction.

The walls themselves are an impressive feat of construction, and not just because of how big they are. There are many small interesting details such as a slight slope inwards towards the city for drainage; you want the outer wall higher than the inner wall, of course. Many of the stones still carried recognizable "maker's marks". The guard towers are spaced at about two bowshots distance so that no spot on the walls would be out of reach of archers, but the distances are relatively short, suggesting they used traditional Chinese bows rather than the more powerful English-style longbow. However, unlike the York walls, the arrow slots don't slope downward, so attackers would be safe from arrow fire once they got within about 5 to 10 metres of the wall. To accommodate growth and modernization of the city, most of which has been replaced with 20th century buildings, the main roads have been punched through the walls. (We didn't learn when, but presumably recently rather than long ago during periods when China was still at risk of invasion by Huns and Mongols.) It must have been an interesting construction challenge, since these walls are massive and very well constructed, making it difficult to deconstruct them without a collapse. But we saw no signs of collapse, and few signs of damage (such as settling cracks) above the newly constructed archways.

After a short while, walking the top of the wall grew monotonous. So rather than spending most of our time looking along the walls or outwards, we tended to look outward only when we reached the guard towers and other protrusions, such as the corner turrets. Instead, we walked the inner edge of the walls and looked down on street life. (Voyeurs'r'us!) There were the usual street scenes of merchants and sidewalk cooks, but easier to see from above without being intrusive because we could stare without giving offense. Most interesting new sights: a mother washing her household laundry in a tiny basin at curbside, while her son whacked her with a styrofoam (or similar) sword, and a Buddha statue that had clearly been touched so many times on one hand that even from the top of the wall it had clearly been polished brighter than the rest of the statue.

We only made it as far around as the west gate (about a sixth of the total circumference of the walled part of the city) before we descended to the street and returned homewards, passing through the Muslim quarter of Xi'an. This is interesting because before this trip, I'd never even considered the possibility of an Islamic presence in China. Of course, that's a shortsighted way of thinking given that the Arabs were undoubtedly trading with China for hundreds of years before Europeans discovered the Silk Road.

This part of the city is a wonderful place to wander, since there is block after block of market stalls (some out in the street, some tucked into those typical 3-metre storefronts), and these are very long Chinese blocks. We wandered for hours on our way back to the hotel. There's enough food being cooked to feed several armies, and we found ourselves wondering whether most people buy their meals on the street because they don't have cooking facilities in their homes. We also wondered how locals chose where to buy; there were dozens of each kind of shop (e.g., for dates and vegetables, for fry cooks, for butchers, etc.), all seemingly identical. Food seemed most common on the east–west streets and tourist merchandise on the north–south streets, but that may have just been coincidence based on the streets we chose to walk.

The streets are narrow enough and populated enough that you have to weave and bob to get through in places. And you have to watch out for scooters and tricycle cabs, which weave in and out of the human traffic, but there are few cars in many of the streets; there'd be little room for them to enter and less room for them to maneuver. There's a loose sense of a prevailing direction for the traffic, with people on each side of the street mostly moving in one direction, but as elsewhere, it's not a 100% thing and you have to keep an eye open on what's happening around you. After a while, the barrage of sights, sounds, and smells becomes overwhelming, and you get a bit numb. It's definitely something best done while you're fresh enough to take in a significant fraction of what's going on around you.

One of my goals this trip was to find a replacement for the Beijing Olympics t-shirt with the five rings transformed into an abstract figure of someone performing tai chi. I find the design beautifully simple and elegantly conceived, and have always wished I'd bought several the last time I was in China (in 2002); now they seem to have vanished, though I did find a close-enough equivalent, and bought a couple copies. Bargaining is always a stressful thing for me; our guidebook describes it as "blood sport", but that's way too strong because Chinese are way too polite to do the Arab soukh trader routine. ("If I give it to you at that price, I will have to sell my mother to camel herders.") We know that the starting price is typically four to six times the final price someone will settle for, and even at that level, you're usually leaving the vendor a decent profit margin. I rarely try to bargain below 1/4 the initial price because it just doesn’t feel right; once I've gotten the price below what I'd consider to be fair in the West, I figure that they need the money far more than I do, and I'd rather that both of us felt that we got a bargain. So I'm sure most vendors figure I'm a sucker, but I'm okay with that.

Once again, I found myself wondering how these teeny stores survive. Some are reasonably large, about the size of a Western convenience store (e.g., a 7/11 or a Quebec depanneur), but many are about 3 by 2 metres, with a tiny selection of merchandise and not many copies of each item. (We assume the vendors live in the variously decrepit buildings behind their stores.) The vendors make clever use of the available space, so that for smaller goods, there's an amazing amount of material packed into such a small space, but there's still not much there in many of the stores, and much of it seems of limited interest. I have to assume the volume of traffic is so high that even with a low rate of successful sales, they still manage to turn over their inventory sufficiently rapidly to survive. Or possibly everything is provided on consignment, and these stores are the equivalent of a mobile sales force for the manufacturer. The number of times a particular item is repeated along a given stretch of street (often dozens of times) suggests this is possible.

We'd spent an awful lot of time walking, so we decided to have dinner at the hostel rather than going out again. There wasn't much choice in terms of Chinese food (we'd agreed to avoid Western food wherever possible until we returned), as the hostel specializes in comfort food for Westerners, but we had a decent spicy peanut chicken and stir-fried veggies, followed by a beer in the pub.

October 20: Xi'an, Terra Cotta warriors

Today was scheduled for us to do what everyone does in Xi'an: visit the archeological dig where they're excavating the terra cotta warriors of the emperor Qin Shihuang. This guy was one of the traditional kinds of monomaniacal ruler who felt it was important to stockpile a full (post-)lifetime supply of everything he'd need in the afterlife, so he built himself an army of clay warriors to give him temporal power in the hereafter.

Though we often arrange our own tours, getting to the dig site is enough of a schlep and hassle that we chose to book a tour through the hostel instead of trying to get there by bus or by hiring a cab. That proved to be a good choice, since we ran into an appalling traffic jam even by Chinese standards—we took nearly half an hour to move less than 30 metres at one point. The problem proved to result from really bad driver behavior. The road we were on was 6 to 8 lanes wide (based on counting cars—not as easy a task as it sounds given how optional lanes are to many Chinese drivers), divided roughly equally between the two directions of travel. Unfortunately, the vehicles traveling in our direction had encroached two or three lanes into the lanes reserved for the oncoming traffic. To add insult to injury, they did this in the approach to a major intersection, with a lesser but still large amount of traffic running perpendicular to our course. In addition, the people driving towards us had also expanded outwards to occupy two or three of the lanes on our side of the road. Three traffic cops were valiantly trying to restore order and weave the dozen-plus lanes of conflicting vehicles back into their proper lanes, and having no luck whatsoever.

We eventually made it through the intersection, with smooth sailing thereafter right up to the dig site, which has been turned into a sprawling tourist complex. The roadsides were lined with vendors selling what we thought were huge apples but that turned out to be pomegranates, though ones with oddly pale flesh, and what appeared to be pink plums but were possibly persimmons. Also, many farmers had their corn spread out to dry at the side of the road; we saw people raking it to turn it over and promote more even drying. I don't want to think of the pollutants that contaminate the corn, since the drying is done right next to a major road that is heavily traveled by vehicles with little or no emission controls.

Our guide, a young woman named Qia Jia ("chyah jyah") from Lanzhou and of Mongolian parentage ("26 years old and single", she proudly announced) was very cute and very bubbly. Most guides carry flags so their scattered charges can follow them through the crowds, but there's a limit to the number of variations on a flag that can be distinguished by jetlagged and distracted tourists looking for their guide at a distance through a sea of equally confused tourists. So many of the guides innovate: folded or unfurled umbrellas are a common alternative, as are national flags, but Qia had a hand puppet in the form of a smiley-face sunflower. She took us through the pits out of order: Pits 2 and 3 first (these are more recent digs and still being explored), and finally Pit 1, saving the best for last, since it's the oldest and best restored. The site is huge, with tall aircraft-hangar-style buildings covering and protecting the digs. You can't get very close to the actual statues, but the upside of that is that you get a much better overview of the dig and a more atmospheric experience.

Pit 2 is like a giant cavern, and that's the memory I'll take away of it: in the dusty gloom that stretches off into the distance, you can see heaps of shattered statues at the bottoms of trenches, not yet fully excavated and gathered together for reassembly. (There are estimates it will take as much as a century at current rates to complete the dig.) The site is about 100 m across, and there are wide berms (rammed-earth walls) that turn it into a huge checkerboard; pale light filters in through upper windows, creating distinct sunbeams in the dusty air. Pit 3 is a small U-shaped pit, maybe 30 m across and better lit, and there are fewer statues, but those that there are, are in better shape. Pit 1 is like a football (soccer) field, with all the players standing either out on the surface after restoration, or still standing in pits running the length of the floor.

The usual story is that the bodies and limbs are largely identical for a given class of soldier (e.g., footsoldier versus archer), but that each of the estimated 8000+ faces is unique. We didn't rigorously compare them, but there was certainly a remarkable amount of variation in the faces; each seemed distinct, and captured with a different facial expression. The result is both beautiful work, exhibiting a high degree of craft, and deeply creepy: Qia told us that the artisans who carved the faces used the workers as their models, and that both the teams of artisans and the countless workers who built the site were killed and buried at the site to ensure nobody would survive to tell anyone where the figures (and the weapons and equipment they were buried with) were. This seems somewhat illogical if you consider how hard it would have been to conceal excavations spanning hectares from the people in the surrounding area. Indeed, a video (poorly assembled and of low quality imho) that we watched at the end of the tour suggested that during a peasant rebellion that occurred after the emperor's death, the peasants easily found, looted, and burned the installations. (You can still see ash layers in some places.)

The last stop on the tour was a visit to the tomb of the emperor Qin Shihuang. That proved to be rather disappointing, since the park-slash-tourist-site that contains the small mountain that contains the tomb only opened a few days before our visit, and there's really nothing to see. It's so new that the trees that will eventually create cool and shady paths are still wrapped in the ropes the planters used to wrap the trunks and protect the bark during lifting and planting. For that matter, it's so new that there are only a few vendors rather than the usual gantlet that evolves at any major tourist site. At some point, there will be another significant tourist attraction here, but not until the tomb is opened. That may be some time, since the archaeologists are not yet ready to dig into the tomb to see what's there. The problem is that their research in historical records suggests that the tomb is protected by a "lake of mercury", which would be horribly toxic to anyone who tries to enter the tomb, and a major environmental problem once released.

Whatever the actual story, there's really nothing there to see, so this part of the tour was pretty much a waste of time. But we got home in a reasonable amount of time anyway; apparently the beleaguered police had eventually managed to clear the traffic jam.

One nice serendipity of the tour of the terra cotta dig was that we met three fellow Canadians, all from Vancouver. James is 42 and Chinese Canadian, and is having the good kind of midlife crisis (i.e., the kind that doesn't involve buying a Porsche and a trophy wife): he's quit his job, and has placed all his possessions except those he's carrying with him in storage so he can spend the next three months touring in Asia (China, Thailand, and possibly Japan if his money holds out). Betty is Chinese Canadian and Niha (spelling unknown until she e-mails us after she returns home) is from India, but was raised from her teens onwards in Canada; both work for Indian and Northern Affairs Canada. All three were pleasant companions, and we chatted during much of the day and on into the night. Some of this is just what you do when you meet fellow countryman after more than a week of traveling in a foreign land, surrounded by "the other", but mostly we just seemed to hit it off and have a lot in common.

When we got home, our three countrymen suggested it would be nice to visit the "Great Mosque", which lies deep in the heart of the Muslim quarter. They'd tried to find it the previous day, but missed it. Since that was on our itinerary too, we agreed that we would head back to our rooms to refresh ourselves for 15 minutes, meet for a coffee in the hostel's coffee shop, then head out immediately in search of the mosque. By the time we got going, the sun was setting and we reached the Muslim area in time to see the "night market" arising. This is much like the chaos of the day, only an order of magnitude greater because those who don't work in the area have come home from work. (Even though this is a major tourist destination, we found relatively few tourists.) Everyone is out eating or walking the streets, the lights are all lit, and it's like wading through a sea of humanity. Not an experience to be missed: overwhelming sights, sounds, and smells (mostly good).

We did finally manage to thread our way down a narrow alleyway, following directions James obtained from one of the locals, and reached what we thought was the Great Mosque. We were invited in by the man watching (not guarding) the gate, after Niha and I greeted him with a "salaam aleikem" (basically, "peace be upon you"). The space we entered was a pleasant courtyard behind a high wall, with the area of worship across the courtyard from the entrance. Several men were chatting quietly (possibly studying) in a small gazebo, and largely ignored us. What with the play of darkness and light, it was very peaceful and atmospheric space. The wood at the front of the mosque itself was a lovely rich amber shade; the wood at the back was darker and looked much older and worn by time, though not decrepit. We were congratulating ourselves on finding this place when a man left the worship area. When we greeted him, he seemd pleased by our salaams, and spoke to us in fluent English. He rightly suspected we were looking for the Great Mosque, and regretfully informed us that we'd completely missed the boat and found only a smaller community place of worship—then pointed us in the right direction.

We still had a terrible time finding the mosque, which is hidden away down a minor maze of small sidestreets, but fortunately Shoshanna spotted a tiny overhead sign, easy to miss amidst all that visual noise, pointing the way. Unfortunately, we'd managed to dither and enjoy the night market so much that we arrived after it had closed for the evening. Not ones to be dismayed by such small misfortunes, we instead chose to commit commerce for much of the next hour. (I'll have to learn the Chinese name for "retail therapy". *G*) The usual hard bargaining ensued, but one of the differences from previous bargaining sessions was that when we found something we liked, but in the wrong size, trading between stores quickly ensued. Several times, the storekeeper trustingly abandoned us in her shop (all the shopkeepers I dealt with were women, though there were many shops run by men too) and ran off to try to borrow the correct size from a friend or relative. Sadly, a couple of the shirts I wanted weren't available in my size, so all that running about was in vain. I felt more than a bit guilty leaving without buying anything.

We then went to dinner at Lao Sun Jia, a Muslim restaurant established in 1989 and famous for a particular dish, yangrou paomo, which mixes dumplings similar to gnocchi into a lamb stew, and a wide variety of dumplings. It's very minimalist, what with steel tables and not much in the way of decoration, but the food was ridiculously cheap and very tasty; you dip the dumplings into pepper sauce and nom them down. After we'd finished, James, Betty, and Niha left us, wanting to visit a tea house they'd been to earlier, whereas we wanted to head home and get some beer before bed.

All in all, a delightful day.