Trevor & Jonathans Cruise & Trip to the Far East and Australia 2016

Day 51 - Wednesday June 29th 2016 - Xi'an, China

Wow! Where do I even begin to write up about what we have seen today? Well as Julie Andrews once famously sang “Lets start at the very beginning, it’s a very good place to start” that’s where I’ll go, back to the alarm call.

So the alarm was set for 07:00 but in a normal chain of events Trev was up five minutes before it had gone off. He went to make the coffee when with much disappointment he told me that somehow we had managed to buy condensed milk last night rather than normal milk so we were down to the decidedly old looking packet of powdered coffee mate for our morning wake up drink, there was no other choice.

We went down for breakfast and is was the same normal western selection only here the eastern options significantly outnumbered what was on offer for the west, we are not complaining though and it was egg on toast all round to keep us going until lunch.

Lucia (our Chinese guide) was already waiting for us down in reception as we left the breakfast restaurant so it was a quick dash up to the room to collect our bags and check out before getting into Mr. Lees car and heading off to our first port of call of the day, The City Wall.

As we had discovered last night our hotel had been in the old city, inside the wall and it turned out that Xi’an has one of the few complete city walls still standing in China today. Xi’an was at one time the capital of China, in fact China has had many different capitals as they have been moved by different emperors and different dynasty’s over the years. The emperor that wanted Xi’an to be the capital dispatched his son to build the wall to protect the city prior to the emperor taking up residence but once complete he never moved. The wall is some 600 years old but is in amazingly good condition, almost Disney world like as it is so good. We came to the wall through one of the main gates and climbed a staircase taking you to the top of a square tower with a large central courtyard. The courtyard was a trap for invaders. If they made it through the city gates they would find themselves in this courtyard with high walls all around them and the waiting army perched high above them with the means to now easily kill them all. Running off the tower came the long stretches of straight wall. We could not see the end of the wall and today you can take a tour on cycle and go all the way around. We did not have the time for that today as we had much to do on our short stay in Xi’an but seeing the wall was still really interesting. Lucia, our guide was infectious, so bubbly and a real people person and she really tried to explain the complexities behind all the different Chinese dynasties and the different eras of power. Explaining those all here is way beyond us but what we want to say is that it did not come across as a history lesson, this was history live and we had a great story teller.

The wall itself is built of a dark grey brick and has a moat built om the outside of that. We couldn’t see the moat, the trees around the city walls had now obscured the view but we were assured that it was there.

Like Beijing, Xi’an follows a city pattern of blocks and you could draw a straight line across the middle of the city to get from gate to gate, in that line would be other important buildings like the drum tower and the bell tower just as we had seen in Beijing. Xi’an once had a royal palace, before the time of the Forbidden City but that had now been lost to the changes of time and only the moat to the old palace complex remains somewhere out in the city’s suburbs pre dating the building of the wall.

We didn’t have time to hang around today and we were definitely on a schedule so with the wall kind of done and dusted and no time to ride the bikes we were soon back in Bruce Lee’s car and heading for our second stop of the day, that of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. Strange name hey? Well I’m afraid that in the blur of all the information we have received today we also can’t remember the full detail but it had something to do with a goose falling out of the sky into the pagoda. The story is something along the lines of that the meat eating monks could not find any meat and they were hungry. They were praying for meat when a flock of geese flew over the temple and one fell out of the sky, this was obviously a gift from the great Buddha himself. The centre piece is a seven story high pagoda that today was covered in bamboo scaffolding as it was undergoing renovation. The Temple of the Goose is situated very much in new Xi’an with a Westin hotel and a relatively new mall right to the front of it which Lucia told us had all gone up in the last five years. It was a very different proposition to the street food road we had walked down last night. This area felt just like what we had seen in Beijing and was definitely an east meets west melting point.

So the Temple of the Goose is a Buddhist temple and in fact they have on display inside the pagoda some of tiniest fragments of the Buddha himself, just as we had supposedly seen a tooth of the Buddha when we had visited a temple in Candy in Sri Lanka.

As you do when you walk into all temples first you enter through a very grand gate that takes you into a courtyard area. The side temples at this particular temple were praying spaces to different gods so here you had the god of money, Vishnu the Indian god and a female Buddha figure but it’s the story of the temple (outside of the falling goose) that is actually what makes this place fascinating.

The story goes something like this. A lone monk travelled to India on his own taking some 18 years to get there to pick up the scriptures of Buddha that were written on plant leaves. On his way there he spoke with and was helped by many people across many cultures and all of this journey is depicted on wall hangings sometimes made of timber, some metal engravings and others in different colour jades that hang on the walls of many of the building throughout the complex. These story boards are huge, maybe five metres tall and they cover all the walls and are truly works of art.

So once the monk got to India he picked up the scriptures (that are still here in the temple) and started the long journey back to Xi’an. Again this journey id depicted on the many screens around the temple. The monk was at the time the only monk that could translate the teachings of the Buddha from Indian to Chinese and these translations are what are written within the books he bought back.

Once back in China he began teaching the people of Buddhism and it became very popular. The emperor at the time heard about the popularity of the monk and that people flocked to hear his teachings so he wanted to meet with the monk. The monk wanted nothing to do with politics but agreed in the end and the emperor visit the monk and after hearing what he had to say he made Buddhism the official religion of China.

Now we might have got some of this wrong as it was all so much to take in but that’s how we remember the story so we’ll stick with that.

Lucia told us that today China does not really have a religion, they have left that a bit like the UK but what they do have is a serious amount of superstitions. Superstitions begin with numbers, feng shui, which foot to put over a threshold first, animal superstitions about what can give you strength and wealth, even down to what tea you drink, all of these mean a lot to the Chinese.

We climbed to the top of the Pagoda to look over the city of Xi’an. You could really see where the old meets the new and how the city is still growing. As we said the other day in a different blog we were becoming a bit templed out but what made this on so different was the story of the monk and the way it was depicted and a great guide bringing it to life the best way she could.

Again the clock was ticking and we needed to get a move on and as we had still not visited the main historic place and the reason we had travelled up to Xi’an in the first place. Lucia was clearly saving the best until last and it was time to drive out to the Terracotta Warriors.

It was about an hour drive out to the Warriors and we had great chats with both Mr. Lee and Lucia on the way there. The road took us out past many new high rise blocks of apartments. Some look like they are right on top of their neighbours, something that Lucia confirmed as she said her neighbours look straight into her apartment and she has to draw the curtains……a lot. With a county the size of China and the land that they have available you would just think they would find a better solution rather than taking everything up, honestly I’m sure that normal houses exist in China but we have not really seen any apart from a few bungalow type dwellings in the back streets of Beijing.

As you approach the Terracotta Warriors the archway that goes over the top of the four lanes of roadway that take you in really resembled the archway at Disney World, seriously that’s just how it felt but obviously what was inside couldn’t be more different. What you are greeted with once you make it from the carpark is still a very manicured complex of buildings all set in lush green foliage with manicured pathways.

There are basically three main buildings that house the terracotta army, huge hanger type structures that house pit one, pit two and pit three. Our first stop of the day was pit one and this is the largest of all the pits but before we get to that we should probably explain what we know of why they are even here in the first place. So we have talked about how superstitious the Chinese are already and along with numbers and animals etc. they also have a very strong belief in the afterlife. Well the Terracotta Warriors are basically all about the afterlife, a whole army built to protect the dead emperor in his afterlife.

Their discovery really is quite remarkable though, especially as it happened in our lifetime (1974) so this is history that we remember as children watching on the television, not understanding it but at the same time realising that it was an important find in archaeology.

So the area around Xi’an was mainly farmland, pomegranate trees and persimmon fruit trees were the main crops and they still grow around the site in abundance. The farmer was digging a well when the bottom fell out of his hole. Going down to investigate this he was faced with heads and bodies, it would truly have been a really disturbing sight and the authorities were informed. No one in China knew where this burial tomb was located, its location having been kept a secret so that warring factions would not come and rob and pillage the tomb of its jewels and bronze and gold.

So when I say pits what do I mean? Well imagine digging a huge swimming pool type rectangle, filling it with terracotta models of people, soldiers, generals, horses, carriages, archers and then coving this terracotta army with a wooden roof and then earth so no one would know that it was there. This is exactly wat happened here.

Of course over time the wood of the roof structure rotted from the dampness of the soil above, tree roots grew down into the void of the pit causing the warriors to fall and get broken. When the farmer dug his well he starred down into that big void and discovered one of the wonders of the world.

When you first walk into pit one and you see the rows of soldiers looking back at you the first thing that really hits you is the size of the pit, this really is aircraft hangar size and the soldiers are also really tightly packed in. Pit one contains some 6000 soldiers all in different states of repair and restoration. Originally the soldiers would have been brightly coloured, there clothing and armour in colours of red and blue and oranges but due to exposure to the light those colours have washed out, faded away for ever and some of the warriors still sit under the soil today, unexcavated to protect their colour. The Chinese government are working with Johnson & Johnson and German scientists on finding a solution that will protect the colours for the future but that work is ongoing.

The rows of soldiers have an order.

The front rows are made up of Chinese peasants, if you like these are the lambs to the slaughter, the local people sent into the enemy first almost as sacrifices, horses are found in the front lines too, full size terracotta horses. The next rows are made of infantry men, the soldiers with medium ranked officers interspersed between the ranks.

What’s remarkable, really remarkable is that every single person, every warrior, every horse is different, not one are the same. From their hands to their facial features, their clothing, their stance all are completely different. The faces on the sacrificial people in the front lines show a real sadness, the generals more of a knowing expression. The people are thin and scrawny but the generals are shown with pot bellies and fuller faces again expressing maybe how the simple people lived compared to successful army officers. The warriors wore stone armour to protect them from arrows and all this is intricately carved into the terracotta, even strands of hair are detailed along with individual fingernails and palms offhand with lifelines and wrinkles, again every one different and just to remind you, there are 6000 of them.

You walk around the pit on an elevated platform that takes you right around the perimeter of this giant rectangle. Only visiting dignitaries are actually allowed down into the pits for diplomatic photo opportunities and some are displayed on the walls. Bill Clinton (the former American president) is one of the only people to actually be allowed into the full pit for a photo with his family, most are photographed in the preservation area where they try to rebuild broken warriors from the millions of pieces on the site, found in the trenches.

Not all the warriors are complete, at the front of pit one mostly the warriors have been rebuilt but as you travel further along you are faced with many broken pieces still not extracted from the earth just laying there in pieces waiting to be released. At the back of the pit is where the archaeologists rebuild the warriors, piece by micro piece, finding the smallest pieces inside the soil, deciding what is stone and what is warrior. I don’t know how long it takes to rebuild one warrior but it would not surprise me if it was over a year, the task is sizable and it’s amazing how many have been completed, rebuilt using clay from the same mountains where the original clay came from.

It’s the scale of the whole thing that gets you though, an emperor who at 13 years old decided to prepare his afterlife and start building all these warriors. They never actually finished the full complement of planned warriors as the emperor died and work stopped.

Lucia was doing a great job and explaining everything, filling our heads with details and facts and legends and it’s all quite overwhelming to be honest. It’s one of those things that you could just stand and stare at and slowly pick out all the details and the differences of every single warrior, you would be there sometime to do that though.

We had originally thought of skipping Xi’an as our agenda in China was so tight and as it was a train then a plane out it was a lot of extra travelling but we were already so glad that we had made the effort. To have missed this when we were this close in reality would have been criminal and our time in China incomplete.

Leaving the wonders of Pit one behind (definitely the most impressive pit) we headed for lunch. As is usual the guide always leaves you too it although Lucia did come back and join us once we had eaten and we chatted about our travelling, where we had been, what we had seen and even shared some photographs. She is truly charming (I know I’m gushing about her a lot). We have had some really big lunches supplied by the tour company on our trip and todays was no exception yet again. Todays was even bigger as we could also have noodles from a buffet and fungus soup (we passed) and a whole host of salad stuff. As we were getting on a plane later we knew we might not get the chance for anything later so we didn’t mind tucking in a bit.

After lunch we entered into the building that houses pit two. This is much smaller in size but it’s also deeper and its mainly housed middle ranking officers. What was also different about this pit of warriors is that they were not stood in straight lines. Some of these warriors were actually facing each other as if they were having a conversation with each other, discussing strategy or other army routines. Still the detail of all the individual warriors was astounding, it’s quite overwhelming seeing a so called wonder of the world and this really is a wow moment. The emperor that made this happen must have had a really high opinion of himself to think this up when he was thirteen, that takes a certain amount of belief in yourself.

Pit three is another proposition completely as in the whole the warriors and horses and carriages are still buried, under the clay and the soil although you can clearly make out the rows in which they are buried. These are being left as they are (at the moment apart from a few areas that have been exposed until they can find the right chemical treatments to apply to the warriors to preserve their original colours. They have learnt by the mistakes well experiences of their past and are holding these back until they can get it 100% right.

Our heads are actually full of many more things we could tell you about the warriors and what we saw but this blog would just go on and on and on again so we hope there is enough in here to give you a picture of what we saw.

What we should also say though about bit three is that it is also where you can get up close and personal with some of the warriors like the crouching archer, the general and the horseman and horse. These are all displayed in glass boxes that you can walk around and study all the details, see the repair lines and look into their eyes. They also have the bronze arrows that would have filled the archer’s sacks, the reins to the horses made form bronze and jade, one of the original horse drawn carriages is also on display, an exact scale model that is so detailed it defies logic of the time that these things were made.

Scientists have actually confirmed that some of the arrows and parts of the horse carriages had been chrome plated, 100’s and 100’s of years before the process was scientifically discovered. It appears that Chinese learnt how to do this but then the art was lost over time but it’s certainly a fascinating fact and you can’t argue with science.

It was time for us to leave the warriors behind and again I have to say what a great day we had, what a great guide we had (it really does make all the difference) and how glad we were that we made it to Xi’an even if it had been for only one day.

As you leave the warrior exhibits the exit is all a bit like exiting a theme park. Think leaving Disney or Universal studios are you’ll be right there. It was all restaurants, cafes and gift shops with a real boardwalk feel, something that we really did not expect especially after what you have just been immersed in for the last few hours. This was a real clash of eastern history meets western consumerism as we are talking about the big brands here like McDonalds and Starbucks, Subway and KFC….. just what you expect to see when you leave the Terracotta Warriors right?

Despite our tight time frame we were now actually ahead of the game and really early for getting to the airport but it was a catch 22, there was not enough time to do anything else so we said its fine, drop of off at the airport and as long as they have a coffee shop we will be fine.

We got to Xi’an international airport around five o’clock and our flight was not until eight so quite a wait. Luckily Lucia checked us in and got round all the Chinese language problems so we were free to go off and clear security and just chill for a bit before the flight.

Getting through security was fine and they did not bat an eyelid at our overweight hold luggage and hand luggage (we think it’s because communicating with us is beyond he hassles it creates).

Xi’an airport is actually really nice and not what you would expect for an area of China that you have not heard anything about. It feels really western and has all the usual suspects if not the Chinese equivalent. This was actually just as well as the flight departure boards were reporting many delays for flights to Shanghai and cancellations, this was not boading well! Our flight was eventually delayed just under an hour and a half so we ended up having a Burger King (as you do).

The flight was uneventful but the Chinese really are noisy, they seemed to be set on one volume and that was loud. I tried to put my head down and get into blog writing whilst Trev played Soduko. The guy next to me kept making really annoying chewing sounds with his mouth that were quite repulsive but what can you do? Apart from brief periods of turbulence and not being able to hear the announcements by the crew in English it was fine, a little more leg room would have been nice but we were only up in the air for an hour and a half so it was more than doable.

Our new guide Laura was there to meet us at the airport. Trevor would call her a low person as she really is low and under five foot. Having just spent the day with the lovely Lucia she had a hard act to follow and it was clear very early on that she was going to fail. She’s an elder lady (nothing wrong with that) but talked in facts and facts only, no small talk and no niceties, oh well.

We got into the hotel (which is really lovely) just before midnight and went straight round to the local corner shop and bought a few beers. We couldn’t go straight to bed after all the travelling and we had arranged with Laura to meet at 11:00 tomorrow to give us all some time to get some sleep.

It’s been an amazing but long day and one I am sure we will look back on, let’s hope that momentum continues here in Shanghai but right now I’m just glad that we have a bit of a lay in tomorrow!