Xian, history, mass tourism

In the very center of the ancient Chinese city of Xian there is a sturdy
and imposing Bell Tower which today has traffic swirling all around it. The
base of the Bell Tower must be some 100 feet long. A little to its
northwest, there’s a slightly less high–though still impressive–Drum Tower.
On the evening that Bill and I arrived in the city, we made our way
through the dark, street-level tunnel that pierces the base of the Drum Tower.
It was May 1, and all parts of the city center were jam-packed with
revelers, so on occasion we had to almost push our way through the crowd
in the tunnel, and a couple of luckless drivers seemed quite stuck in the
midst of the pedestrian throng.

When we got emerged from the northern end of the tunnel, it was as though
we were in a different world. Nearly everywhere else in the city, the
culture seems very recognizably Chinese. The women are bareheaded,
with many of them wearing their hair in jaunty little pony tails. The
food stores and restaurants offer dumplings or noodles. All the signs
you can see are in Chinese characters. But in that neighborhood north
of the Drum Tower, the atmosphere seems much more “Central Asian”. Here–
and especially along that first long street leading out of the Drum Tower,
the main food item offered is kebabs. All the store-signs have Chinese
writing on them– but some also have some Arabic script, too. A number
of the women wear headscarves or veils. This street, here in the heart
of China, is Xian’s famous “Muslim Street”, a continuing symbol of the fact
that Xian is the city that anchors the eastern end of the trans-Asian Silk
Road.

These people are indigenous Xian natives from innumerable generations. They
speak the same language and have many of the same customs as their non-Muslim
neighbors. In China, they are called “Hui”: they are ethnic Han Muslims,
and they have been Muslims for a very long time.

As far as we could tell from what we saw in the incredible historical holdings
in the city’s beautiful and fairly new museum, the Buddhist influences first
came to this region of central China in around the fifth century CE. Then,
two centuries later, in 629 CE, a local scholar/seeker called Xuan Zang left
Xian on an important religious quest: he set off westward along the Silk
Road toward India hoping to find and bring back to his home-town as many
Buddhist scriptures as he could. His quest took him 17 years. He
skirted the Himalayas to the north, made for (roughly) today’s Afghanistan,
and then turned south to make a long journey around many sacred places in
India, acquiring manuscripts and woodcut books of the scriptures as he went.

When he brought them back to Xian, he organized a large cadre of local scholars
to work on translating all the works into Chinese. Until today, his
story is celebrated as an important part of Chinese folk-history, and his
perseverance in overcoming numerous terrible obstacles is lauded. The
huge work of translating and publishing those works led to Xian becoming
an important center of scholarship, calligraphy, translation, and publication–
a role that it still plays today. Further south, near the massive,
still-complete city wall, there’s a street called “Ancient Street” that embodies
and presents these aspects of the city’s culture. The stores
here are nearly all calligraphy-supply stores. Many have a huge line
of hefty calligraphy brushes hanging along outside the storefront. Others
have carefully-folded stacks of rice-paper on their shelves.

Just a few years after Xuan Zang brought the Buddhist scriptures back to
Xian, the Silk Road brought another wealth of religious revelation and experience
to the city’s door-step, too. This was a little later in the 7th century
CE, when Islam arrived here–also from the west. (Earlier, the Silk
Road had brought Christianity, mainly that of the Iraqi-originated Nestorian
variety, to this spot in central China.)

We spent time in two important religious complexes in Xian. One was
the city’s Grand Mosque, which we visited on our first evening there. The
other was the Wild Goose Pagoda, a lovely brick-built structure a little
south of the city that had been built by Xuan Zang as a repository
for all his holy texts.

The Pagoda stands maybe 120 feet tall, and has seven fairly solidly-built
stories that together make up a significant statement on the skyline of that
part of the city. Around its base there’s a fairly extensive and fairly
modern-looking temple complex. There was much of the usual Buddhist
iconery. I tried to see if there was any chance of seeing some of the
earlier manuscripts, etc. In one case there were a couple of Sanskrit-looking
documents that had roughly the same dimensions as the loose-leaf woodcut
versions of the Tibetan holy books. And there were many, many more
recent compilations of texts–in Chinese–in the display cases, too.

Was this a continuing center of Buddhist study and learning, I wondered?
There were a few monks around. I peeked into one room that looked
like a small reading room. A monk sat in there apparently trying to
concentrate on reading a book while around him the gawping tourists bustled
and jostled.

That whole complex looked well and expensively maintained. The same
can certainly NOT be said of the Grand Mosque, which had a decidedly dusty
and down-at-heel air to it. We entered the mosque from a small covered
shopping arcade, and immediately we did so we were transported “back” into
another world. The mosque is laid out like all the other Chinese temples
and palaces we’ve seen so far: the series of slightly rising courtyards punctuated
by ever grander halls as you process from the southern entry-point toward
the most sacred places of all, near the northern end. The garden, and
indeed the architecture too, all had a srongly “Chinese” esthetic to them.
But the Muslim community certainly looked as though it should invest in another coat of
paint or three if they want to preserve the structure of their mosque in
best condition,

I peeked into the main prayer hall– there were notices saying it was forbidden
for non-Muslims to enter that one– and I saw maybe six people performing
the ritual bowings required of nightly prayers. In that whole echoing
complex there weren’t very many tourists at all– and I never saw anyone
who resembled a local ‘alim, or religious teacher. The Wild
Goose Pagoda, by contrast, was a veritable mob-scene, even though it was
raining quite seriously when we finally got there.

On our third and last day in the city we finally went to see the fabled “terracotta
warriors” at the tomb of Qinshihuang, the first of the Qin Dynasty emperors.
It’s located about 25 miles east of today’s city.

Qinshihuang came to power at age 13 in 221 BCE. He was the first ruler
who was able to “unify” China, which he did by conquering six other statelets.
(350 years later, another civilization headquartered in a Xian-area
metropolis would be responsible for two significant further “advances”. In the 2nd century CE, an emissary of the Western Han dynasty managed to open
up the Silk Road. And inventors working under that same dynasty invented
the technology of paper-making at around the same time.)

Qinshihuang’s achievement in “unifying” China made him–very much post-mortem–a
great favorite of Mao Zedong, and an iconic figure for many Chinese even
today. In his own time, it gave him access to a truly enormous amount
of economic surplus– the lands around here are rich alluvial plains, very
fertile. So as he went about consolidating his empire, he also–just
like the pharaonic rulers of ancient–started planning for his after-life.
In Qinshihuang’s case that meant digging a number of huge pits into
which he had placed life-sized terracotta figures representing an entire
army.

The first of the three pits so far opened up was discovered by accident in
1974. A local farmer was digging a well and he came across a portion
of a terracotta horse. He called in the local government authopries,
and the rest is “history”… (It is actually pretty incredible that
the knowledge of these pits had been buried so effectively, along with the
contents of the pits themselves, for so many centuries… I can only think
that the alluvium which is the basis for the whole area’s wealth must come
down the rivers in vast floods every so often: the weight of these floods
would have burst into the vaulted rooves of the pits and deposited huge loads
of heavy alluvium on top of the terracotta figures– while the broad devastation
caused by the flood would have killed thousands of the local people and perhaps
scattered the rest, along with any folk-memory they might have had about
the existence and location of the burial pits.)

The first pit is in many ways the most impressive. It consists of eleven
long files of men, each with four warriors standing abreast and making up between
them a huge rectangle formation. Among them are archers, cavalrymen,
scouts, charioteers, etc. In this pit alone there are more than 8,000 figures: each
one painstakingly constructed out of fired clay and, once upon a time, painted.

I shan’t do much more to describe the site. I’m sure other people have
done that already. What I want to describe is the “scene” of the people
visiting it. It was May 3rd: three days into the week-long holiday
that many, many Chinese take in order to celebrate Mayday. The previous
day had been wet. Not a good day to visit the pits, though each one
is covered by a soaring canopy. But May 3 was a big day day
for people to be visiting the terracotta warrior tombs. And nearly all
of our fellow-visitors were Chinese.

As went in, it felt as though we were joining a veritable human wave!
The visitor-management systems worked pretty well, keeping us moving
along well-defined walkways that gave everyone a chance to see most of what
there was to see. But the cost of the visit was not small. It
was 90 yuan, and unusually for China there seemed to be no special rate for
students or anyone else. It was pay your 90 yuan (just over $10), or
don’t go in. Bill and I estimated, based on the traffic flows we experienced,
that probably upwards of 70,000 people would be visiting the pits that day–
and that nearly all of them would be Chinese.

That’s a lot of money for Chinese people to pay! The fact that so many
people could do so was a real eye-opener. The fact that so many people
wanted to also seemed revealing. Dr. Huang Liping, one of our main
hosts at East China Normal University, told us later that inter-city tourism
is something pretty new for Chinese people, but that they have taken to it
in a big way over the past ten years. (She also said that Tibet is
one of the favorite destinations for Chinese tourists, and we discussed that
a bit.)

I’m getting tired here, and I need to finish this. I just want to
finish with a related reflection: this one, on the efficiency status and
huge scale of operations of the country’s internal air-travel system. When
Bill was first planning this trip along with our friend Brantly Womack (a great China specialist), and Bill
said to me, “Oh, let’s us go to Xian, even if Brantly and Ann don’t have
time to,” I was a bit trepidatious. I realized it would mean adding
at least one additional flight to our itinerary, and I’d heard some pretty
negative things about the state of China’s domestic air system.

Now, though, I’m almost ready to eat crow on that. While we were in
China we took a total of three internal flights. Two of them were,
it is true, quite late. But then, the second of those was on Mayday,
which is sort of like traveling on the day before Thanksgiving inside the
United States. One should expect hassles!

But even for those two flights that were delayed, the airlines handled everything
very satisfactorily. For the first delayed flight– our trip from Shanghai
to Beijing– the ground crew people kept us all very well informed as to
what was happening. They pasted a large bilingual poster up beside
the gate-desk that told us that there was a delay due to “mechanical problems”,
and soon thereafter directed us all to join another flight. I think
all the passengers fit into that other plane– and even more amazingly, our
bags all arrived on the carousel at the other end. For the delayed
May 1 flight, we were kept similarly well informed, via English-language
announcements on the PA system that were much clearer to understand than
many announcements at airports inside the US. And once again, our checked
bags arrived where we wanted them…. On our third internal flight,
from Xian to Shanghai, the plane actually pushed back from the jetway a few
minutes early.

On all these flights, the vast majority of our fellow-travelers were Chinese.
Many of them seemed to act like yuppies just about anywhere in the
world– for example, whipping out their cell-phones the moment the plane
landed, to discuss meeting arrangements with someone who’d come to pick them
up, or to resume a business discussion interrupted earlier.

When we flew into Xian from Beijing, a person in a white medical coat was
standing beside the door, pointing a remote thermometer at
us as we deplaned. (There had been four or five cases of SARS confirmed
in Beijing in the preceding days.) Then, when we flew out of Shanghai
to come back to the US, we had to go through a special medical screening
point even before we could check in. At this checkpoint, everyone filled
out a form and walked through a designated walkway before the form got stamped
“OK” As we left the checkpoint I turned back and saw a couple of people
attentively watching computer screens on which a thermal image of the people
in the walkway appeared.

Talk about well organized!!