Xian: The Home of Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di and His Warriors of Clay.
Written: Jan 29 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Extremely significant and historical place, archaeologically and anthropologically.
Cons: Winter travel is cold, the city is polluted, beware the guided tours.
The Bottom Line: Come to Xi'an to see the Terra Cotta Warriors of Qin.
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| Ironcladd's Full Review: Xi'an |
Xian: The Home of Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di and His Warriors of Clay.
By
James P. Zaworski
Caution: This is a long review where my experiences of Xian dominate the narrative!
After a two-week jaunt in the cold wonders of Beijing in December 2004 and into January of 2005, I reluctantly moved on to the ancient city of Xian, in west central China.
The flight to Xian was handled by Air China, and they got us there in one piece. On the way, I noticed the terrain below changed from plains near Beijing to rough and rugged, and largely dry, mountains. Xian is right in the middle of them, and Xian is also the doorstop to Tibet. However, I had come to Xian to see the fabled terra cotta warriors of Emperor Qin Shih Huang Di, the first emperor of China who conquered the six rival kingdoms and unified the country for the first time. Emperor Qin was the founder of the Qin Dynasty, and he ruled for 37 years. He was at once an inspired ruler and also had the reputation of being a kind of despot, burning books and executing people.
I would be in Xian only for three days, and arrived in the afternoon after the 2-hour flight from Beijing. My traveling companion and I had loose plans in traveling to Xian, meaning that we did not have an established hotel reservation made in advance. There were some places I had looked at on the Internet, but did not book them because it seems that in the off-season, we would have our choice in finding a reasonably priced hotel. Besides, I had my Lonely Planet Guidebook to China that had some suggestions, so I was not worried too much.
The airport in Xian is about 40 km from the city itself. Xian is a kind of industrial city of nearly seven million people, and we took a shuttle bus from the airport to the center of Xian. On the way there, we passed cultivated fields and finally arrived on the outskirts of Xian. What we saw initially was not so nice, especially after Beijing. The outskirts of the city were very shabby, with bad roads and industrial smog hanging over the populace. As we continued on in the bus, the Shaanxi girl assisting the bus driver was talking continuously and incessantly to the bus driver; my companion and I marveled at how much this girl could talk, and wondered if she was a typical Shaanxi girl in this regard. The speculation was a joke, of course, between the two of us, but we found it to be strangely prophetic.
We got further and further into Xian, and when we came to the old part of the city, surrounded with a splendidly preserved Ming Dynasty wall with complete and perfect gates and towers, things started to look nicer. We pulled into the Bell Tower Square, where there are two hotels. We took our bags and entered one hotel opposite the Bell Tower Square, and were immediately accosted by another Shaanxi girl, this time a travel agent of some sort trying to get our attention to stay at the hotel across the street, the Bell Tower Hotel. We went upstairs, and I was starting to feel a little dizzy. Up until this time, I had been well in terms of health. I had not eaten anything to make me ill, no gastrointestinal troubles, and no cold yet. However, I started to feel weak and a little dizzy, and left the negotiations to the Shaanxi travel agent girl, who talked even more than the bus driver assistant, and my companion Jing. After they negotiated back and forth for a long while, it was decided to go across the street to compare the rooms at the Bell Tower Hotel with the ones in this hotel, whose name eludes me right now. The Bell Tower Hotel had the same rooms, but they were just a little larger in size, so a porter moved our bags across the street and we checked in to the hotel. The bed was very stiff, I noticed, and not much different from sleeping on the floor, or on a board. But, it was good to be done with travel for the time being and get a little rest.
No such luck, as my companion was a little hungry and she spied a McDonalds restaurant in the square, and suggested we go there for lunch. I had not yet patronized a western fast food restaurant while in China, and so I reluctantly agreed. They were playing on loud speakers the hip-hop rap theme of McDonalds and the Im Loving It motto. It was a weird and surreal scene. With that done, we had the opportunity to check out some of the areas in the Bell Tower Square, including the shopping areas. Needing bottled water and some other supplies; we crossed the street using the interesting underground tunnels that I had found were also in Beijing. Some of these shopping centers are truly wonders, even by western standards. New and up to five floors high, they are packed with people and goods for sale and are very lively and bustling social areas. One note is that I was the only western tourist in this downtown section of Xian, and this must be the case during the off-season. My companion and I got many, many stares and looks of curiosity from the locals.
Oh, and one word about the locals: there are many Muslims Uyghur peoples in Xian, and they add to the interesting atmosphere in this ancient city. Their food is very distinctive, and there is a restaurant of Uyghur food that features a lot of Middle Eastern flavors, with lots of mutton to go around. They have a wonderful mutton soup that the locals crumble the interesting bread into and devour with hungry mouth. We did the same, and waited around too long for shish kebabs that were promised, but never delivered. The local food is very inexpensive and also very delicious. There is also a good dumpling place next door.
After dinner, we went back to the hotel to get some sleep. But I was rudely awakened three times that evening by the telephone ringing. Do you want massage? I was asked this odd question at midnight. No thank you! Ten minutes after I went back to sleep, another telephone call, with the same female voice on the other end of the phone. No! Please, no! One hour later, awakened from a blissful sleep, I bruskly hung up the phone for the third time and unplugged it. I realized now what the section of nuisances or annoyances in the Lonely Planet Guide (http://www.epinions.com/content_170799042180) were all about: the hotels that are 3 stars and under have a deal with the local prostitutes! I did not actually believe this was the case when I read it, because this was two full weeks into the trip and nothing like this occurred before. But, I recalled, the hotels I stayed in were, prior to this, 4 or 5 star hotels! I found out the next morning on the organized tour that every foreign tourist had to endure this same annoyance.
The next day, we would visit several sites that helped put Xian on the tourist map in the past few decades.
We rose early and had to get downstairs to meet a small tour bus that would take us, and other guests to be picked up on the way, firstly to the site of the terra cotta warriors, then to the tomb mound of Emperor Qin, and then to the Hu Qing Pools.
The journey to the terra cotta warriors cannot be taken by taxi, as it is 40 km or so outside of town. The day dawned cold and dreary, and I threw on my clothing, but did not dress well enough. We picked up a Russian couple, and then a French guy who was a professor of French in a university in Pusan, South Korea, and a Japanese guy. This was the first organized tour we joined, and the last, of the trip. The mini-van took our little group firstly to a tourist trap: the jade factory situated in a gas station outside of town.
It was colder inside the jade factory and the display room than it was outside! I was absolutely freezing, having worn only one layer above and below and one winter coat, no hat, no gloves and no scarf. I was asking for it, to get sicker than I was already. The jade sculptures and carvings were exquisite and beautiful, and too expensive! We did learn a little about jade there, and how to tell what is real jade and what is fake jade. Color and weight seem to be the keys to it. No one bought anything and it was a colossal waste of time.
So, our tour bus moved on to the museum of the terra cotta warriors. The story goes that in the 1970s, I think 1976, there was a severe drought in this part of China, and three peasant farmers were digging a well to get water to their thirsty crops. They accidentally discovered what turned out to be buried under their farm fields, an army of ceramic figures that were ancient. Quickly the Chinese government stepped in and brought in its team of archaeologists, who superbly excavated the site. What they found was astounding! This pit, about 1.5 km from the tomb mound of Emperor Qin, contained some 6,000 ceramic warriors that were individual in features, and also life sized or larger.
When they were excavated originally, the figures were painted in brilliant life-like colors, but these sadly have faded due to oxidation since the time of discovery. Pit number one, was our first stop.
We got there in the morning, about 9 AM. It was very cold and we went from the van to an open-air big golf cart, which slowly sped us to the museum that housed pit number ones warriors. These transport are designed for summer use, and we all suffered this trip with the wind whipping up and torturing us every step of the way. We made it to the museum, and I thought that yes, it would indeed be heated inside. No, it was not heated! I think it was colder inside this museum than any other place I had been in China. But, we were here and that is what mattered. The museum encloses pit number one, with 6,000 ceramic soldiers in full battle array and in a full regimental formation. There are archers, foot soldiers who held swords and generals. Each warrior is magnificent and unique in facial features! These warriors were made to ensure the protection of Emperor Qin Shih Huang Di. We took some photos and walked around the cold museum, and moved on to the next two buildings that housed pit two and three. These pits have another 2,000-4,000 figures, and include a group of cavalry units, with life-sized horses and the senior army commanders. The last of the big pits is about half excavated, leaving the remaining soldiers in situ, to be excavated by newer archaeological techniques in the future.
Besides being cold, the museums that housed the warriors had other exhibits too. There is a below ground level museum with some splendid bronze chariots from near Qins tomb. But the exhibits are remarkably devoid of interpretive signs, and the tour guides do not have the qualifications to answer my questions about excavation techniques, remote sensing, etc.
After viewing the museums, we headed to see a 360-degree film about Emperor Qin and his ceramic soldiers. An informative but kind of cheesy film, it is usually the first stop at the site for most tourists. We were led into a gift shop too, where the only one of three surviving peasants who accidentally discovered the pits sits to sign a book he did not write about the terra cotta warriors, as he is now in the employ of the Chinese government to do just this.
The tour moved on to another gift shop slash restaurant for lunch. For 30 RMB per person, we dined on some cheap eats that were perhaps the worst food I had while in China.
When this was finished, we went to the tomb mound of Emperor Qin, a structure that took decades to build and is some 60 meters high today, and has never been excavated or plundered. It is about as big as Monks Mound at Cahokia, and from historical accounts, there is supposed to be a scale model replica in the burial chamber of the city of Xian, with rivers of mercury. Levels of mercury in the soil around the mound are very high, so perhaps the legends are true.
The last stop on our blockbuster tour of Xian was the Hu Qing Pools from the Tang Dynasty. These hot springs were the pleasure areas of the emperors, and included an emperor who loved his daughter in law, and forced his son to divorce her, so he could marry her. It is a beautiful little site on the edge of a mountain.
So, our tour of Xian came to an end. It was horribly cold but it was worth the 80 RMB for the two of us. I was very fortunate to see the ceramic soldiers of Emperor Qin, and to climb his burial mound, and gaze into the pools of Hu Qing. For the modern Xian, I was happy to be able to depart from it. I did not like the hotel very much, although it was situated right down town and next to the bell tower itself, an impressive Ming Dynasty tower that sits opposite the Drum Tower. Xian is a very dirty, very crowded, and very poor city. My exposure to the cold ended up being the deciding factor in my high fever for the next few days, as I was weakened by the onslaught of the winter weather.
I recommend Xian to be visited in a season other than winter, as it was worse than the cold of Beijing for me. But it was well worth the visit even in wintertime for me.
Please read my other China-trip related reviews:
Beijing: http://www.epinions.com/content_169727987332
The Forbidden City: http://www.epinions.com/content_171315269252
Lantau Island: http://www.epinions.com/content_170886467204
Air China: http://www.epinions.com/content_170883387012
Southern China Airlines: http://www.epinions.com/content_169039072900
Lonely Planet Guide to China: http://www.epinions.com/content_170799042180
Lonely Planet Guide to Mandarin: http://www.epinions.com/content_170232942212
Recommended:
Yes
Best Suited For: Couples
Best Time to Travel Here: Mar - May
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Epinions.com ID:
Ironcladd
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 - Top 500 |
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Member: James Zaworski
Location: Shenzhen, China
Reviews written: 504
Trusted by: 157 members
About Me:
I am an English teacher, Archeologist and Anthropologist.
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