'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

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!!