Saturday, October 21, 2006
The Protectors of the Dead
Xi'an
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Xi'an is the center of ancient China, the beginning of the silk road, one of the world's most polluted cities, a busy modern city with lots of banks, brothels and heavy traffic. Xian marks the edge of the muslim world and the center of the Middle Kingdom. Here, there are more int'l brand name shops and more beggares and homeless than in the cities we've seen East of here.
Xi'an is a world-class city, older than Rome, doing all it can to prepare for the expected wave of tourists coming with the 2008 Olympics. Here, too, every shop is overstaffed adn nobody trusts you to be able to choose what you like in a shop without help.
Tonight, we went into a crowded restaurant, but couldn't read the menu. Aja wrote chicken and vegetables and 5o Yuan ($6) in Japanese and we were brought a feast! The best food we've had yet. The Chinese food you find in China doesn't tend to resemble too closely the Chinese food served in the West. Everything is deep fried to death, and we are warned not to eat anything fresh because the water it's washed in could be too toxic for our soft stomachs. Yet as we move away from the sea, the food improves. In China, the mountain food is much better.
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A short bus ride from the city are the tombs of the first Qin emperror, who first united Central China by conquering the neighboring countries. He began construction of the Great Wall, and employed an army of 700,000 people to build an army of clay men to guard him in an underground city and palace after his death. This grand project was then buried under five meters of earth. Today, he is the hero who united China, but he was so unpopular that soon after he died, his tomb's army was sacked, burned and forgotten.
Under massive roofs, the Qin army has been unearthed and reconstructed. Seeing these people captured in clay, made with such care and skill, and each with his own personality showing through their clay skin, it is living people you see. Most of these men were larger than contemporary Chinese people and myself. (Perhaps Qin dynasty people had a better diet?) They all had different expressions, although no one's face or movements were exaggerated at all. They were all calm, not posing, but silently waiting, standing guard.
Standing in their presence, I felt as if I had entered a very holy place. This was the first shrine I've been to where I truly felt that a soul was enshrined, embodied in the space and in each statue. When the tomb was being excavated, one body was found in perfect condition, with peaches still fresh and words written on Bamboo leaves and preserved in water. When these things were discovered and exposed to air, the peaches turned to water before they could be photographed, the body dried up, and the calligraphy on the Bamboo leaves disappeared as the leaves turned black and curled up when removed from the water. The archaeologists mush have broken a powerful spell when they entered with their cameras and fresh air.
The relics of the underground palace are safe, for now. We don't yet know how to build a building big enough to cover that large an area nor do we have the technology to pump out the aquifer that the city lies under.
The tombs with the warriors were discovered in the 70's when some farmers digging a well found a statue. They were frightened. They thought they had unearthed a god and made it angry. But they quickly became folk heroes adn received state visits and got in newspapers as archaeologists discovered what a treasure they had found. They were not the first to dig up a statue, though. One of them told of his grandpa who dug one up in 1911 while digging a well. This statue stood until the well went dry. The farmers thought the warrior had drunken all the water and was smashed to bits. This has happened many times over history, but it was not until globalization and the 70's when finding a buried statue triggered a national wave of excitement.
Xi'an
-----
Xi'an is the center of ancient China, the beginning of the silk road, one of the world's most polluted cities, a busy modern city with lots of banks, brothels and heavy traffic. Xian marks the edge of the muslim world and the center of the Middle Kingdom. Here, there are more int'l brand name shops and more beggares and homeless than in the cities we've seen East of here.
Xi'an is a world-class city, older than Rome, doing all it can to prepare for the expected wave of tourists coming with the 2008 Olympics. Here, too, every shop is overstaffed adn nobody trusts you to be able to choose what you like in a shop without help.
Tonight, we went into a crowded restaurant, but couldn't read the menu. Aja wrote chicken and vegetables and 5o Yuan ($6) in Japanese and we were brought a feast! The best food we've had yet. The Chinese food you find in China doesn't tend to resemble too closely the Chinese food served in the West. Everything is deep fried to death, and we are warned not to eat anything fresh because the water it's washed in could be too toxic for our soft stomachs. Yet as we move away from the sea, the food improves. In China, the mountain food is much better.
--------------------------------------------------------
A short bus ride from the city are the tombs of the first Qin emperror, who first united Central China by conquering the neighboring countries. He began construction of the Great Wall, and employed an army of 700,000 people to build an army of clay men to guard him in an underground city and palace after his death. This grand project was then buried under five meters of earth. Today, he is the hero who united China, but he was so unpopular that soon after he died, his tomb's army was sacked, burned and forgotten.
Under massive roofs, the Qin army has been unearthed and reconstructed. Seeing these people captured in clay, made with such care and skill, and each with his own personality showing through their clay skin, it is living people you see. Most of these men were larger than contemporary Chinese people and myself. (Perhaps Qin dynasty people had a better diet?) They all had different expressions, although no one's face or movements were exaggerated at all. They were all calm, not posing, but silently waiting, standing guard.
Standing in their presence, I felt as if I had entered a very holy place. This was the first shrine I've been to where I truly felt that a soul was enshrined, embodied in the space and in each statue. When the tomb was being excavated, one body was found in perfect condition, with peaches still fresh and words written on Bamboo leaves and preserved in water. When these things were discovered and exposed to air, the peaches turned to water before they could be photographed, the body dried up, and the calligraphy on the Bamboo leaves disappeared as the leaves turned black and curled up when removed from the water. The archaeologists mush have broken a powerful spell when they entered with their cameras and fresh air.
The relics of the underground palace are safe, for now. We don't yet know how to build a building big enough to cover that large an area nor do we have the technology to pump out the aquifer that the city lies under.
The tombs with the warriors were discovered in the 70's when some farmers digging a well found a statue. They were frightened. They thought they had unearthed a god and made it angry. But they quickly became folk heroes adn received state visits and got in newspapers as archaeologists discovered what a treasure they had found. They were not the first to dig up a statue, though. One of them told of his grandpa who dug one up in 1911 while digging a well. This statue stood until the well went dry. The farmers thought the warrior had drunken all the water and was smashed to bits. This has happened many times over history, but it was not until globalization and the 70's when finding a buried statue triggered a national wave of excitement.
