Xi'an Tourist Day Trip!

This was yet another hasty decision for a tour, but also one that worked out really well in the end. My American friend Sarah was interested in going to the Terracotta Warriors, so she with her very limited Chinese set something up. There was much confusion and the bus was an hour late, but we got on the bus in the end and managed to squeeze five amazing Xi'an sights into one twelve-hour day!

First up was Lin Tong museum, which was nice but it wasn't exactly a booming start to our trip. It was a museum that was basically a bunch of old pots and ceramic ware, bronzes and other sorts of artefacts, put into an old Buddhist monestary building. It was interesting, in that you got to see some museum-type things, and there was also a particularly interesting poster about the various corporal punishments in Han dynasty China, but other than that it felt a bit random.

Second up was the Hua Qing Hot Springs, the site of the springs from Li mountain, which is actually a dormant volcano (or, in our English tour guide's words, 'a hot mountain'). The water is around 80C underground, but by the time it comes up to the surface it's a lovely 43C, and we paid our Y.50 to wash our hands and faces in it - apparently, it makes you beautiful! There, we saw three old chambers from the Tang dynasty, during which the whole place was made. There was the first emperor's bath - which looked about the size of a swimming pool! - the seventh emperor's bath - slightly smaller - and the seventh emperor's famous concubine's pool. The seventh emperor's concubine was named Lady Yang, and she was famed for her beauty, which was said to be replenished constantly by the hot springs.

For a bit of a recent history lesson, Chiang Kai-Shek also had a field operations base at the Hua Qing Hot Springs, and it was also the site of what has now become called the Xi'an Incident. The story goes that the Communists and the Guomindang were both getting really scared of the Japanese threat to the country (as it was the 1930s and Japan was scary) and there was supposed to be some sort of unification between the two Chinese factions. However, the Communists say that Chiang Kai-Shek didn't want to agree to form a united front, and so they chased him out of his bedroom at Hua Qing and up the mountain.

So, following chronologically, after the Hot Springs we went up Li mountain to take a look at Chiang Kai-Shek's hide-out. The touristy things were only put up in the last six years, which is really interesting, and they now have a pavillion that tells the story of the Xi'an Incident, and also climbing ropes so that you can climb up the rocky side of the mountain and take a look at the little hole Chiang kept himself hidden in for the few hours it took for the Communists to find him. Sarah went up there, with rather more ease than any of the rest of us thought we could do, and said it was a tiny hole with a opening in the top. The rest of the tourist attractions included a "park", in which there were displayed some tanks and Jeeps, and also a plane, integral to the Xi'an Incident, and a nice stone mural that told the story in carvings. You could also take a picture with a Chiang Kai-Shek look-alike!

From there, we went to the Qin Shi Huang mausoleum, which was the first emperor of China, responsible for unifying China for the first time under one ruling after the Warring States Period. He's also the one responsible for the army of Terracotta Warriors, the site of which was only situated a few kilometres away. The mausoleum is a big mountain, which we were going to climb up but we were short on time, so just had a quick jaunt around the base and watched a performance that included various ceremonies that would have happened during the Qin dynasty: there were some offerings to gods, with one person dressed up as Qin Shi Huang; a dance by some ladies dressed in long flowing white dresses; some warrior-type dances, as well as some guards looking very intimidating. That was enjoyable enough, but there were a lot of moths and bees hovering around the flowers near us which was a little off-putting.

Lunch was interesting, if only for the fact that the restaurant we stopped at was behind the site of a wedding, which of course was filled with huge celebratory dances and lots of fireworks and everything. We couldn't see them from inside the building, but we could definitely hear them, and at one point they started playing the wedding march on their traditional instruments, it was pretty funny. It was also this point that I revealed how competent I was with my Chinese. There were a group of Australians on the tour as well, two of whom had been living in a city in the west working as teachers, and none of them spoke Chinese. I was there with Sarah, so I was really the only person who could speak Chinese amongst them, and I worked out our bills and everything because just waiting around for it was just getting too tedious. I don't mind being one of the foreigners and having an English-speaking tour guide and all, but when it's hindering our ability to eat or pay, then it just gets annoying. So I helped everyone out, and then they all knew I could speak Chinese - even if I'd told them before.

So then we went to the Terracotta Warriors - the entire point of us going on the trip! It's a huge complex with three pits of warriors, horses, generals, and archers. Pit #1 is the first one you go into, and the most famous. It looks like an aeroplane hangar, the curved rooftop and the wide open space, and it's large enough to fit planes in, but instead there is a large hole in the ground. At the front there are a few rows of repaired warriors and horses, and behind them are long aisles of warrior carnage. The way they were buried was in empty chambers, so due to the earth's natural movements over the last couple of thousand years, the statues were broken and buried with earth. The statues themselves are hollow all except for the legs, so they were particularly prone to breakages, so it's understandable. Still, there are lots of repaired ones, and they do an amazing job restoring them. One of the reasons they're not digging up any more is that the warriors are actually brightly colored and painted, and for the first few moments after being excavated, they retain their colors, but they quickly change into the dirty brown color after mixing with the atmosphere, so they don't want to dig up too many more before they figure out how to save that coloring.

Pits #2&3 are smaller and contain more carnage, which is really interesting as well. Pit #3 has a lot of the brick flooring in tact, and because they're smaller pits, you can see a lot of the details much better. They're just more of the same, though, really, and Pit #2 has some of the restored ones in glass cases where you could see them up close (one of them had the bright red on its armor, which was amazing). I remember this about last time I went to the Terracotta Warriors - just seeing them isn't really that spectacular. I mean, just the concept of them is amazing, and the actual reality of seeing them is sort of less impressive than the whole fact that they're there and what it means. Sort of like the pyramids? Though I've never seen them up close and imagine they're a bit more visually stunning.

And after that it was time to go home! There are lots of other things to see around Xi'an - I have still yet to go to the Hua Mountains, which I've heard are stunning - and I'll get around to them eventually, but this was one of those Xi'an Essential trips, something you have to do otherwise you just haven't been to Xi'an.

My Travellerspoint Photo Gallery has been updated with photos from the trip!