History lessons

As you know, I'm in Xi'an at the moment, which is literally the birthplace of what the West perceive as ancient China.

I had a chance to look at the Bell Tower in the centre of Xi'an yesterday and it's comparatively new, having being first built in 1384AD. It offer spectacular views of the town's main road, though you could hardly call Xi'an a town having roughly 4 times the population of Perth, with 8 million people calling the locality home.

Xi'an is in the Shaanxi province, at the heart of China and it was here that the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, unified China and standardized the country's language, currency and instilled Xi'an (then known as Chang'an) as the seat of political power. If you've seen Zhang Yimou's movie Hero, you'll be familiar with the story - how ironic that in that film, Jet Li played a character who seeks to assassinate this emperor, but in the upcoming Mummy film, he is actually playing a version of the despotic ruler himself! :)

I'm missing movies, I happened to switch on the TV here and Nottinghill was on one of the channels with Hugh Grant and Rhys Ifans chatting in Mandarin :) At least they got close to the timbre of the actors actual voices in the dubbing!

So today it was a visit to the spectacular Shaanxi Museum, which has relics from prehistoric China, through to their bronze age and up until the Ming and Tang Dynasty periods which reflect Xi'an's rise and decline as the former seat of power. I don't know if there were big crowds in general or because the weather lent itself to tourists, but there were multitudes of people eager to have their photos taken in front of the displayed terracotta warriors in the museum and the amazing (though hard to discern due to lack of light) terracotta miniature chariots with horses.

Another Xi'an must see is the Great Goose Pagoda, established during the Tang Dynasty (AD 652) and which has an interesting section documenting the chronicles of the monk Xuanzang, who travelled to India and returned with important sutras, said to immortalised with the tale of the Journey into the West (but I thought that had Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy too...or maybe I'm just nostalgic for Monkey Magic :)

We then headed off to see the much advertised terracotta warriors themselves. The countryside surrounding their location was beautiful, green hills in the distance and the centre surrounding the pits built up in a classic style to support the ensuing tourist industry.

Pit 1 is spectacular. Containing the main infantry, the large silo structure houses over 6000 warriors in battle formation with horses amongst them. There are still fragments to be assembled, and in raised sections of the pit you can see evidence of what restorers have been painstakingly working towards for over 30 years.
Pit 2 is just as fascinating, but less worked on as they are still excavating; and Pit 3, rumoured to the the command centre is unexcavated due to archaeologists wishing to wait for better restoration techniques to be developed, as the soldiers in Pit 1 and 2 had initially displayed colours upon their first discovery, however these paints have subsequently oxidised and faded with exposure to the air.

Rebecca, my guide was reasonably helpful with her local knowledge, but really so much has been written and documented about the terracotta warriors (there's even a kung fu/ acrobat/ opera spectacular currently playing in Beijing all about them!); that I already knew most of the information from my DK book and the notes at the museum.
I did get a chance to buy some jade earlier in the day though, and I was happy to get the real thing (totally worried I was going to ignorantly buy a cheap hard plastic knock-off!:)

Here's a pic of some warriors in the latest leisure wear in Xi'an :)