China thirty years after: A weekend in Xi'an

Xi'an's drum tower by night

View from Bell Tower

Earlier this month I paid a whirlwind visit to Xi’an, the one-time capital of some of China’s greatest dynasties and a favorite tourist destination. I’d visited Xi’an twice before, in 1980 and 1984. As with everywhere else I’ve visited, the downtown is unrecognizable except for its landmark sites: the Drum Tower and Bell Tower, though even they are hemmed in by modern buildings, shopping centers, McDonalds, spiffy clothing stores and high-end restaurants.

It was a quick visit: I arrived Thursday evening and left Sunday night, but almost every minute had been planned by a former student, Yang Yasha, who’d done her undergraduate study there, and by two friends of hers, Mr. and Mrs. Zhang. I was whisked into the city in their Buick van. Mr. Zhang is in real estate development; he’d occasionally point out some multi-story building his company was constructing.

Xi'an's wall: old city to right,
new city to left

Those tall apartment buildings lie outside the walls that still surround the old city of Xi’an. Unlike Beijing, which has removed most of its old walls and gates to make room for superhighways, Xi’an puts up with some congestion at each of the four main city gates. It’s part of the city’s tourist appeal, and the tourist business has really taken off in Xi’an.

Jia San Tang Bao

On Thursday evening we visited shopping streets behind one of the gates, a busy place of fast food and touristy tchotchkes, ending with dinner at a well known restaurant. Mr. Zhang was determined I would sample all of Xi’an’s cuisine on this short visit; this restaurant specialized in Jia San tang bao.

Bing Ma Yong warriors Pit I

Friday morning we were off early to Lintong, where the burial site of Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di, is located. This was not to be one of my usual experiences of bumbling around trying to locate a bus going to a famous spot. We went in Mr. Zhang’s Buick, and were greeted by Pang A Ping, the Chief Executive of the People’s Government of Lintong District. Mr. Zhang is clearly a man with influence, or guanxi: wherever we went he would get out his cellphone to call ahead, and we’d be greeted by an official who assured red carpet treatment.

Ongoing excavation, Pit I

While foreign and Chinese visitors waited in long lines to buy tickets to the Bing Ma Yong museum where Qin Shi Huang Di’s vast clay army is located, we were driven in a convoy of official vehicles to the front door of the building housing Pit 1, the oldest excavation site, and escorted to a viewing area reserved for special visitors, closer to the grey and brown warriors. Angela Merkel, I was told, had recently received the same treatment. Being so close to the grey and brown warrior army allows one to see better the individual poses, features, and even expressions of the figures.

Lintong luncheon table

One can’t tell that each had once been brightly colored, the color having faded almost immediately after they were exposed to light, or that they had been nothing but fragments when excavated. The wooden beams supporting the tomb had collapsed on them, thanks to an army of rebels against the emperor’s megalomaniac exactions, who’d fired the beams millennia ago. The scorch marks are still visible.

In one section, a man was very slowly removing bits of yet another warrior from packed earth. It’s a process that will go on for decades. These are just the outliers of the emperor’s tomb, in a vast tumulus some distance away. No one knows when or if the tomb itself will ever be excavated; there are intriguing tales of rivers of mercury and crossbow booby traps, but the main deterrent is the lack of technology needed to preserve whatever is found.

After visiting the smaller excavations called Pits II and III, featuring additional elements of the emperor’s fantasy army of next-world protectors, housed in special buildings, Mr. Ping took us to lunch at a restaurant with yet more local specialties, including duck feet web, small toasty birds said to be pigeon (complete with head), salmon sashimi, and small crabs requiring great attention to find miniscule bits of meat. All of these, and many other dishes, were accompanied by frequent toasts in the local potent bai jiu liquor, Xi Feng, and concluded with another local specialty, sweet persimmons and pomegranates for which Shaanxi is famous.

Corn drying

Shaanxi apples

It was harvest time in Shaanxi province. There were apples for sale everywhere and neatly threaded rows of corn cobs placed to dry along rooftops or strung around tree trunks.

I was sated and ready for xiuxi, a nice nap, but our host wasn’t through with showing us the sights. We headed for Huaqing hotsprings, site of the famous Xi’an incident, where Chiang Kai-Shek, leader of the Nationalists during the anti-Japanese war, was coerced into agreeing to a United Front with the Communists against the Japanese in 1936. The tone of criticism of Chiang had much abated since my last visit, perhaps because China’s relations with Taiwan have improved.

Yang Kuei Fei and admirers

Now you can dress up like a Nationalist soldier and have your picture taken. In any case, the real draw for most Chinese visitors isn’t the Xi'an incident but the legend of Yang Kuei Fei, consort of an 8th Century Tang Dynasty emperor. A nude statue of a Rubenesque Yang Kuei Fei is now the first thing you see on entering the Hotsprings.
Mr. Ping saw us off with dinner in Litong: no duck web, but there were chicken feet, pumpkin tendrils, shrimp on a skewer, and noodles with mushrooms.

Ghost Day observances
in the Shaanxi countryside

On the way back to Xi’an on Friday evening, smoke hung in the air from people burning pieces of paper dedicated to the departed: it was the eve of Ghost Day, when paper inscribed with greetings is burned to keep ancestors warm as winter approaches.

Folk religious practices are more evident now than they were thirty years ago, as are Buddhism and Taoism. On Saturday, after visiting the tomb of Wu Zetian we visited the Famen temple, a vast, modernistic Buddhist structure with a representation of giant hands over an enclosure in which a famous relic of the Buddha, a finger bone, is displayed on occasion.

Famen temple

Relic of the Buddha

Doves at Famen temple

The long approach to the temple is lined on both sides by giant gilded Bodhisattvas, each with its own altar. The Famen temple is one of many sites developed for the rapidly developing industry of religious tourism aimed mainly at Chinese tourists. One survey reports that 85 percent of Chinese practice some kind of religion, and it seems to be especially so among younger people. China Daily quotes this opinion by a Buddhist: “Thanks to increasing tolerance and freedom, the religious need, a human instinct… will be further awakened” in China. But there’s money in it as well: governments around the country are developing projects to renovate and market their temples.

That evening, back in Xi’an, I was treated to yet another local specialty, Pao Mo, which involved breaking up bread cakes into small pieces and sending them off to the kitchen where they are combined with soup and vegetables, served with wu zhu, a spikey lettuce, cucumber with lotus root, and stewed chicken.

Tang "dancing horses" in
Shaanxi museum

Hanyanling underground museum

Sunday was my last day in Xi’an. We went in the morning to the Shaanxi provincial museum, an outstanding museum with treasures from the Tang dynasty, including gold and silver pieces clearly strongly influenced by Tang contacts with Persia.

In the afternoon, Yasha and I rode bikes part way around the Xian city wall, a bumpy but enjoyable ride. In the afternoon, on the way to the airport, we stopped at the Hanyanling museum, an underground museum where one looks down through plexiglass walkways onto excavated trenches from a Han dynasty burial. Here, the figures are small and doll-like, but in their way as individual in expression as the life-size Bing Ma Yong warriors. Thousands of them had once been posed with wooden arms and full-dress outfits, the arms and cloth having long rotted away.

It was a whirlwind tour, and I’ve regretfully left a lot out: the food (cake with meat: rou jia mo, liang pi, Qishan Sao Zi Mian (noodle), thin sliced ham, the varieties of local bai jiu or white liquor, pai gu); sights I haven’t mentioned; and above all, the generous hospitality of the Zhangs and their friends. I returned to Wuhan with a backpack stuffed full of Shaanxi pomegranates and apples.