My hotel in Xi'an = very noisy. I am basically in the middle of town, and apparently, there is a constant party. Also my bed was very hard. But I was so exhausted from my pair of super intense days that I had no trouble sleeping allllll night.
This morning we started by going to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, which is a big, old Buddhist temple. There is quite a story behind how it got there. During the Tang Dynasty, the Emperor sent out a monk to learn about Buddhism. So, this monk wandered around southern Asia for 17 years, spending most of that time in India. He eventually came back to Xi'an, bringing with him 300 Buddhist scrolls, and singlehandedly founded Buddhism in China.
In India, a particular sect of Buddhists were very hungry one day, and they asked the Buddha to give them some food. At that moment, a goose flying overhead dropped dead in their midst. They declared it a miracle and then decided never to eat meat again. Then they built a pagoda on the spot where the goose fell and called it "Wild Goose Pagoda."
When the Chinese monk came back to China, he decided he wanted to emulate this, so he got the emperor to build him his own Wild Goose Pagoda. This was 1400 years ago, and it is still standing. Sometime later, they made another Wild Goose Pagoda, which was smaller, so they differentiate them based on size, hence "Big Wild Goose Pagoda." And it is very big. Seven stories and over 30 m tall, it's pretty impressive, considering how old it is.
After the Pagoda, we went to the site of a 6000 year old village, which they call the Bampo village, because they found it in a region called Bampo. They have actually built a museum around the excavation of the village, so we could see everything as it lay in the ground, which was pretty nifty. There was the main living section, which consisted largely of mud houses with straw roofs, and was completely surrounded by a moat (the ancient Chinese loves them some moats). Then there was the burial section, where they had dug up a bunch of graves, which you could look into. I found this exceptionally creepy.
After the Bampo Village, it was lunch and then on to the Terra Cotta Warriors, which is the entire reason anyone goes to Xi'an. in 1974, a farmer was digging a well in his field, when he discovered a clay head. He very cleverly reported it to the authorities, and they bought his field and dug up the pieces of over 6000 clay warriors.
You see, in addition to uniting China and building the Great Wall, the first emperor of China decided he wanted to be safe in the afterlife as well, so he ordered the construction of a Terra Cotta (which means clay, basically) army. Each soldier in the army is unique, and each one was painted. Archaeologists suspect that there are more sites of Terra Cotta Warriors, since these ones are 1.5 km away from his tomb, in just one direction. (I'm not so sure the emperor wanted to be protected in the afterlife. I think he just wanted a better Warhammer army than Pharaoh Ramses.)
He had 700 000 people working on the Terra Cotta Warriors for 37 years. The people were not too impressed about this, because despite the fact that he united China, he was a bit of a jerk, so after he died, the peasants started revolting, and one of the things they did was break into the Terra Cotta Warriors hall, break them, and set them on fire. I'm not sure how smart setting clay on fire was, but they did manage to burn most of the paint off and wreck the structural supports so that the cavern collapsed. Thus, when they found the warriors they were in many pieces. They have been slowly re-assembling them for the last 30 years.
The emperor was a pretty paranoid guy though. His tomb was very Indiana Jones. There were automatic arrows, big pits and a moat of mercury. THEN, just to make sure no one could figure out how to get into his tomb, he had the people who designed it buried in it as well, long before they were dead. (The Chinese were big on burying other people in their tombs. The Empresses, Concubines and numerous servents were often buried right along with the emperor, regardless of how dead they were at the time.) To this day, no one has been able to get in, and it is still under a mound of dirt.
The Terra Cotta Warriors are pretty impressive though. If I were a ghost, I wouldn't want to try and get through.
I found out something very interesting about China today also. I had always assumed that, like Russia, religion was against the law. It is possible that this was the case during Mao's rule, but it is not anymore. People are free to worship whatever they like, which explains the presence of a Mosque and a Buddhist temple, both of which are still active. Hooray for not being quite as oppressive as I thought, China.
I had a pretty good time in Xi'an, although it was very short. I was in Xi'an for like 36 hours. If you think history is interesting (like me) I would recommend going to Xi'an over anywhere else in China, because although Beijing has relics dating back hundreds of years, Xi'an has thousands of years of history, which is actually pretty tough for me to wrap my head around.
The city itself isn't so thrilling, for the reaons I mentioned in the last post. My tour guide, who I spent a lot of time with, as she picked me up from the train station took me on a private tour, then the next day led my group tour, and then brought me back to the train station, was very nice. Chinese people tend to think I am very young (like 17, or in one case 15), so I think she was being protective of me. Also, I am a pretty excellent student, because I always look interested and ask questions. As such, I often notice teachers (and in this case tour guides) lecturing directly at me. This tour guide (whose name was Sophie) did that a lot. So when she asked me if I liked the city, she was so earnest and so sincere about how great the city was, I couldn't exactly say, "Well, it's sort of old and dingy." But it is.
Anyhow, I got to the train station, managed to get on my train and found my spot. I held out hope that no one else was going to be in my little berth area, but three Chinese men came in. They were fairly loud, they smoked and they were playing some kind of card game. I watched them play for over an hour, and I'm pretty sure I've got the rules, so when I get back, I intend to play it with some people. I THOUGHT once we all went to sleep, they would cease to be annoying, but one of them snored incredibly loudly. It was second only to Dr. Chen in terms of volume and general annoyingness. But I was so tired I went back to sleep pretty quick.
Now, on to Shanghai!
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