Day Five of Tour, continued... (Terracotta Warriors)

Before hitting the warriors, we made a stop at the Folk Art Museum where we first had a guided tour with a lovely docent and then a calligraphy demonstration and lesson.  This was a relatively small but lovely museum.  It seems it was connected with local art schools, as at the end of our visit there, we got to thumb through student-created art for purchase.  The museum housed art from ancient turtle plastrons (2,300 yrs old), ancient artifacts, to leather shadow puppets, and more recent and modern folk art.  

Shannah - notice the ink-wash!!

Representing male and female, yin and yang, good and evil (kind of Adam and Eve)

This represents the importance of family and one generation caring for the next, "Filial Duty."

Awesome bathroom (they can be few and far between...)

After the tour, we crossed a very high threshold into the calligraphy demonstration room.  [Many of the old buildings in China have thresholds over which one must step to get from room to room in a building.  The higher the threshold one must cross in entering a building or room, the more important the person who lives or works there.  The museum was housed in an old building that had had a former use we don’t recall.]  We were seated at a long table with paper, ink, and calligraphy brushes in front of us. 

We were really trying!!

Our guide first demonstrated and then had us try making the eight basic strokes that make up all Chinese characters.  Looks so simple, but not at all easy.  It is totally understandable why an expert calligrapher is so revered.  A classical Chinese artist really had to be master of a number of spatial and linguistic talents.  Any given artwork included not only the spatial piece, what we’d generally see as being the art (the picture), but also a poem describing or in reference to the picture, so the artist would also need linguistic talent to compose beautiful accompanying poetry to complement, rather than detract from, the spatial piece.  One would also have to be a skilled calligrapher to write the poem artistically.  Additionally, each spatial piece needed to be signed by using a stamp, which the artist was expected to carve himself.  SO, the artist also had to be a good carver in order that their signature on their work would, again, enhance and not detract from the composition.  Our first efforts at calligraphy strokes were looking more and more pathetic…  We were happy to leave it to the professionals, and enjoyed instead, looking through the gorgeous student artwork for purchase.  The money, it was great to learn, actually went entirely back to the students.  We left the Folk Art Museum to make one more stop before the warriors.

We stopped at a factory where they reproduce warriors for sale, along with other pottery items and small sculptures.  The factory was quite an interesting prelude to the actual excavation site.  Just seeing the hundreds of warrior reproductions lined up ready for sale was quite the sight - - different sizes, painted or not painted (as the warriors were originally painted when created)…just hundreds of them.  We got to see how the larger warriors are created today with a mold (not so in ancient times), and how the head is a completely separate piece that gets placed into the neck hole, kind of like a stopper in a bottle.  The pottery workmanship, though the modern artisanship isn’t as awe inspiring as thinking about what it was like a few thousand years ago, is still an impressive amount of work. 

In the museum store.  Sure looks like the real thing, just in miniature!

On the ride to the Terracotta Warriors National Heritage Site, Jackie regaled us with information.  We learned about Emperor Qin, who was the mastermind behind uniting China and then how he, and kinda rightfully so, wanted to be remembered in death.  Despite all of his efforts to secure the magic fruit or elixir (a kiwi fruit, perhaps, which he had sent hundreds of young men and women off to Japan to find and bring back - - but no one returned) he saw that he was going to have to settle for mortality, he realized that, having ticked off so many warlords off during his lifetime, he was going to need a mighty army to protect himself against these highly irritated warriors in the afterlife.  After all, he needed to preserve his body just in case the elixir of life was found and he could be brought back to life.  This wouldn’t work so well if his body had been destroyed by vengeful enemies, hence his perceived need for an army of warriors to protect his tomb.  His tomb, mind you, still has not been excavated.  It’s booby-trapped, for one, and two, our technology is such that people would open it, and all that is in it is libel to crumble to dust; so why disturb it if archaeologists are apt to die opening it (Qin wasn’t messing around - - he had all of the workers who knew how the actual tomb was put together put to death) and then upon opening it, the goods get destroyed?  The Terracotta Warriors that have been excavated so far are thought to be only a small portion of all that are protecting the tomb.  But we are getting ahead of ourselves in talking about what Jackie had to say, prior to our arrival at the museum.

The museum is a huge complex, and we had to queue up and ride silent electric shuttles (kind of like at an amusement park) in order to get to our first destination within the complex: food.  Jackie informed us that we would be eating lunch at the museum restaurant, so we weren’t expecting much in the way of excitement with that.  But we actually had another very interesting noodle experience!  The dining area was quite large, with big tables all outfitted with huge glass lazy-Susans, the Chinese restaurant norm.  Much of the food was served at the table, but at the front of the restaurant, there were two noodle stations, and Jackie pointed them out and explained what was going on.  We felt quite well informed, experts even, as we stood in line and explained to the curious and confused Australians behind us (who didn’t have a Jackie) that the chef nearest to us was making “shaved” noodles, and the one at the far end of the noodle station, was making “stretched” noodles.  It really was quite mesmerizing to watch - - kind of like watching someone throwing pizza dough.  The “shaved” noodle chef had a huge hunk of dough rolled into a log that he held along the length of his arm. He used a knife with which he shaved strips off strips of dough from the log.  The strips landed in the pot of beef broth in front of him.  The log and the process looked sort of like shawarma at a Greek or Middle Eastern restaurant being cut.  The noodles were thick and tasted more like dumplings.  The chef at the other end of the station definitely had the more glamorous noodle-making situation, as he, really like a pizza crust maker, got to whip his dough around in the air to stretch it.  At some points it looked like he was playing Cat’s Cradle with the dough, in order to form the noodles, that he then dropped into the chicken broth.  Both varieties were pretty yummy, the noodle prep quite entertaining, though we all agreed on liking the stretched noodles the best.  All this, and we hadn’t even seen the Warriors yet!

A tasty lunch behind us, we were finally making our way to the first pit of warriors.  We walked down a long sycamore tree-lined walkway on our approach.  Despite the throngs of people we’d been experiencing, this little stretch was a quiet and rather unpopulated interlude.  The building, though large and sound, for sure, its window grates decorated with the repeated motif of a warrior on a chariot, revealed nothing of its contents.  So, as we walked through the doors of the unassuming entrance, and walked up the stairs, which delivered us above the warriors, where a viewing platform made its way around the excavation site, the scene was absolutely breathtaking.  We’ve seen pictures, and we’ve been told, but seeing the enormity of the pit, the vastness of the excavation site, the hundreds of warriors excavated, and the potential of the hundreds more to come, was simply breathtaking.  Still stunned, and after jostling for a position along the viewing platform, we turned our attention to Jackie, who, now that we had taken in an initial view, was ready to give us some specifics to look for.

If only we’d known what a demonstration he was going to put forth, we’d have readied our video cameras!  Much to the delight of not only us, but also to the many Chinese tourists who gathered around, Jackie went into a very dramatic demonstration of the different stances in which warriors were positioned in the pits: the stances of what are believed to be generals, with their hands held at “attention” below their hips, the cavalry, the archers who were kneeling, the archers who were standing, and the standing warriors.  For each of these, Jackie put on a dramatic physical demonstration to show how each category of warrior was positioned, where the quiver of arrows (now decayed) would have been, where a sward would have been held, or to advise us (in another building to come, where we could get a closer look at warriors) to look at the treads of the warriors’ shoes.  Though we were itchy to look at the pit, his demonstration was so compelling and informative; between the sight of us, the Americans, and then Jackie doing what looked like an interpretive dance in the entryway of the viewing pit, we attracted quite the crowd.

Now fully informed, we gave our full and much awaited attention to the warriors and slowly made our way around the pit.  It really is a wonder, the whole of it.  Kind of like looking at the Grand Canyon and trying to convey how big it is, it feels like trying to convey how overwhelming the sight of Pit One was.  There’s just so much there, so to speak: the weight of so much history - - just a couple thousand years of it.  So much to marvel at, seen and unseen.  The knowledge that the farmland that had been above the warriors had “forever” been unproductive, with nothing growing well.  It was thought that perhaps the land needed better irrigation, so farmers attempted to build a well.  In digging the well, in 1974, a farmer pulled up warrior bits and the first pit was found.  So why had nothing grown in the area?  Not because the area of the pit (or pits) was poisoned or something, but because Emperor Qin brilliantly protected his warrior army from the roots of trees and other plant life by covering the warriors with twenty feet of baked clay to keep roots from penetrating the tomb.  Just this little fact alone is enough to boggle the mind, given how much clay we’re talking about.  What had been the clay-covered area is vast.  Or the fact that each of the 6,000 warriors is an individual; no one face has been determined to be a duplicate (and we’re talking about scientist and archaeologists using state of the art face-recognition technology).  The ridiculous amount of tedious work it’s taken to reconstruct these warriors that have been crushed into a zillion pieces under the weight of 2,000 years and twenty feet of clay - - a jigsaw puzzle for which they have no guiding picture to reference and have no absolute knowledge of where the “edge pieces,” so to speak, lie; it is speculated that there are four times as many as the 6,000 known warriors, as there are four directions (north, south, east, and west) for which the Emperor needed forces for protect.  “Only” the first set of warriors has been excavated, and of course, that’s still a work in progress.   Unseen marvels also include the fact that all of the warriors, chariots, and cavalry were originally brightly painted.  Still, the detail remaining is astonishing.  The armor, the strands of hair detailed in their topknots (the shape of which helped to specify rank).

We viewed the first pit, then the next pit which shows a lot of partially excavated areas, along with what is thought to be basically a war room.  There are lots of headless warriors standing at attention and in specific configuration.  Also here in this building were individual warriors and generals that one could look at close up.  Boy, they were impressive.  So strange to be looking into the faces of these statues constructed before Christ was walking the earth, along about the time some of those sequoias in California were seedlings.  It felt like looking into impassive faces of time.  Yes, it sounds dramatic, but well, it WAS dramatic.  Though Jackie said that he’s been to see the warriors at least a thousand time over the years, with tour groups, he never tires of going.  He says seeing them still takes his breath away and that it’s something that gives him great pride in his country.  He likes to stand, with his eyes closed, when he’s in the viewing pit, and imagine himself back in the time of the Emperor Qin and imagine himself a warrior.  At first blush, given the grandeur and dignity one sees, this seems so appealing.  But after thinking just a tiny bit about how hard life was for an average person at that time, the luster of taking a walk down ancient history lane quickly tarnishes for me.  What if you drew the short straw for being a potter making warriors and your work (all of which was signed to ensure quality control) was not up to snuff.  That was cause for beheading.  Or what if you had to go down with the ship, so to speak, and go to your death because you knew the ins and outs of the tomb’s secrets?  Well, though the idea of being transported was a bit too much, being humbled and awed was definitely the result of our visit to the Terracotta Warriors National Heritage Sight. 

As we exited, we actually saw the farmer, now quite old, who discovered the warriors.  He was signing books, so of course we had to get his signature.  We stood in our last line in Xi’an, except for when we got ready to board the plane to Beijing, and offered up our purchased book for s signature.  The elderly gentleman was very perfunctory and serious, but still very cool.  It had been yet another super cool day in China, and one that we will never forget.

To top off our amazing day, we made a relatively quick stop in a tea house just outside the museum and got to participate in a traditional, albeit abbreviated, Chinese tea ceremony.

We each got to choose three teas to sample.

Tiny and delicious!

Very cool clay and resin statues used to test the temperature of the water.  The resin figures turn colors when water is poured over them.

 

Sadly, we weren’t able to just go back to the hotel and call it a night.  Our flight to Beijing had been cancelled due to high winds, which is actually what had afforded us the time to squeeze in the Folk Art Museum (score!).  But now, after such an amazing day, we were tired.  It was late, and there we were taking a flight that was going to land us in Beijing at 11:00PM and there had been no plans made for dinner.  We knew that we weren’t going to get anything of note on the plane, so we ate our worst dinner of the trip, lowered our standards significantly, and actually ate at Burger King.  Icky, but a necessary evil dinner.  And then, as if to add insult to injury, a return trip had to be made to airport security for a left laptop.  We won’t say whose, and let’s chalk it up to exhaustion, distraction, and food deprivation.  The awful state of panic is not one we hope ever to repeat.  But at least the incident had a happy ending, following a sweaty run to security and then back to the gate, still time to board with everyone else. Hot, tired, filled with icky food, we boarded our last domestic flight in China, and were on our way to Beijing. 

After an uneventful flight, during which it was too late to eat or look out the window, we arrived in Beijing and were picked up by our final tour guide.  Though we are sure that Lily is a perfectly lovely person, she remained an unimpressive tour guide from the start to the end.  Sadly for her, she had to follow Eva and Jackie, who were beyond personable, and who both also so fervently loved what they were doing, that she paled in comparison.  We wanted to have mercy on her, and cut her some slack, but really, even in giving her allowances, she was not up to snuff.  Nonetheless, it was good to at least be collected from the airport and whisked off, yet again, to a secure place to lay our heads.  And the Beijing International Hotel was absolutely awesome.  It had the best beds yet, firm but not rock hard.  It had an amazing bathroom, with a shower-head coming out of the ceiling and a fantastic bathtub.  There was, oddly, a huge picture window flanked by curtains, looking into the main room from the bathtub (weird, but kinda cool).  The beautiful sliding (space-saving) wooden door that closed the bathroom in turn opened the closet, where a closet light automatically turned on, which, upon a moment’s inspection of the closet, revealed a pop-top can containing a breathing mask in case of fire, or perhaps air pollution.  (They seem to have thought of everything!)  The breakfast spread, too, was awesome.  Super cool fish tank in the dining room and gorgeous potted orchids in the lobby.  And like at another hotel where we had stayed, encased between glass within the huge revolving door of the hotel entrance was an enormous flower display, the likes of which seems uniquely a Chinese invention.  

We really ended our tour hotel stays with a bang, going out in style at the Beijing International.  Not that we reveled much, as it was going to be another early morning and a day spent at the Summer Palace, visiting a jade museum, and THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA...

Once again, stay tuned!