With all our volunteer service opportunities falling through, we decided to tour China with the hope that something would turn up, so we headed South for Pingyao on our first overnight train ride. We soon learned why our tickets were called "hard sleepers". Imagine 6 bunks stacked 3 high jammed into a 6x6 foot floorspace. Then add a large dose of cigarette smoke, some loud snoring, rumbling food cart vendors banging metal on metal to announce their "delicacies", plus loud Chinese music inexplicably blaring over the loudspeakers at 6am and you begin to understand why they are called "hard sleepers".
We had to stay overnight in Shijiazhuan, a place with so much air pollution that the most die-hard skeptic would quickly embrace Al Gore's agenda for saving the planet. Here's the view from our hotel window.While Shijiazhuan was the worst we saw, the terrible smog in most Chinese cities scared us about the impact of China's coal-burning electric plants on the planet's environment. If China doesn't clean up its air, we're in big trouble!
After another train ride, we arrived in Pingyao, and it was well-worth the bleary-eyed travel experience. As the best-preserved walled city in China, it is a delightful place. We stayed inside the old walled city at a hostel with rooms around a traditional Chinese courtyard.
We spent a day touring ancient Confucian temples and the first Chinese bank (invented so that silver and gold didn't have to be hauled long distances across China).
Confucian students studied for years to take exams. Here you see one of the final exams... over 3 meters long written in tiny Chinese characters that were graded for accuracy and aesthetics. Joe and David decided not to sign up for that class.
We ended the day with a tour of the ancient courts and jail. We left the jail hoping that the gruesome depictions and devices of torture wouldn't show up as nightmares in our sleep
After another overnight hard sleeper train, we arrived in Luoyang to see Longmen Grottos, the site of the Thousand Budda Caves. Stretching more than a kilometer on both sides of the Yi River, we saw countless grottos carved into sold rock, each with one or more Buddha statues inside. Carved from 493 AD to about 680 AD it's hard to conceive how many millions of hours were spent carving these homages to Buddha. From a distance, you see hundreds of holes plus a set of giant Buddhas carved into the hillside. I have to admit that I suffered a bit of "Buddha burnout" by the end, but it was still an amazing experience to see a different culture's epic religious monument.
After vowing to grow his hair long, David decided that days without showers make for a shaggy mess, so he took his chances and picked a haircutter at random in Luoyang. He chose well and he got a great haircut from a perfectionist cutter for about $4.
After another overnight hard sleeper (we endured them several times before we wised up and purchased "soft sleeper" tickets to Lhasa, Tibet... more on that later), we arrived in Xi'an, capital of China for 13 dynasties. After uniting China as first Emperor in about 200 BC, Qín Shǐhuáng Líng wanted to insure that he got a fitting burial, complete with an imperial "army" to help him rule in the afterlife. First discovered in 1974 by a peasant farmer digging a well, this site is one of the most significant archaeological finds of the last century. Now Xi'an is now known worldwide for its emperor's tomb and army of "terra cotta warriors". Over the last 30+ years, archeologists have unearthed and restored almost 10,000 life-size terra cotta (glazed clay) soldiers, each one unique, believed to be patterned afer the emperor's real soldiers. Here you see some of the statues, including some that are part-way through their reconstruction process.
Lined up in battle formation, these clay soldiers are incredibly lifelike, many in marching formation with spears (the wood long decomposed), some crouched as archers, and others in various poses including an officers' headquarters. To see thousands of these life-size soldiers lined up in battle formation is an imposing and awesome sight. Now housed in three huge pavilions (think 20 aircraft hangers big), the statues are still being unearthed with no one knowing how many they will find. The emperor's tomb has not yet been excavated, but it is reputed to have taken 700,000 people 38 years to construct. Popular folklore says that the tomb is filled with jewels, rivers of mercury, and many lethal booby traps. To protect the secrets of the tomb's entrance and passageways, the emperor killed all the designers after they were finished.
In a little over a week, we had seen the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Summer Palace, the Thousand Buddha Caves, and the Terra Cotta Warriors. We were seeing a culture with very long-term vision and the will to spend decades or centuries to build on an unimaginably massive scale. (It also doesn't hurt to be an Emperor with hundreds of thousands of laborers at your command.) Having seen some of the legendary sites of Imperial China, it was time to visit a completely different culture - the mystical world of Tibet - where they also think in terms of centuries... but this time as multiple lifetimes through reincarnation.
Lined up in battle formation, these clay soldiers are incredibly lifelike, many in marching formation with spears (the wood long decomposed), some crouched as archers, and others in various poses including an officers' headquarters. To see thousands of these life-size soldiers lined up in battle formation is an imposing and awesome sight. Now housed in three huge pavilions (think 20 aircraft hangers big), the statues are still being unearthed with no one knowing how many they will find. The emperor's tomb has not yet been excavated, but it is reputed to have taken 700,000 people 38 years to construct. Popular folklore says that the tomb is filled with jewels, rivers of mercury, and many lethal booby traps. To protect the secrets of the tomb's entrance and passageways, the emperor killed all the designers after they were finished.
In a little over a week, we had seen the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Summer Palace, the Thousand Buddha Caves, and the Terra Cotta Warriors. We were seeing a culture with very long-term vision and the will to spend decades or centuries to build on an unimaginably massive scale. (It also doesn't hurt to be an Emperor with hundreds of thousands of laborers at your command.) Having seen some of the legendary sites of Imperial China, it was time to visit a completely different culture - the mystical world of Tibet - where they also think in terms of centuries... but this time as multiple lifetimes through reincarnation.
- Steve
