We were picked up at our hotel for another tour and our guide was a pleasant young Chinese man. Foreigners sat together at the back of the mini-bus under his charge. Lumped together were a Thai, a German, a Japanese, and three Australians who all spoke English and little Chinese. The first stop was Famen Si, a temple/museum where some finger bones of Buddha are said to be located. We were told King Asoka, the famous Buddhist ruler, decided to divide the pieces of Gautama’s corpse to be distributed to all the countries which had adopted the faith. I am not sure if this is now a practicing temple as I saw no evidence of it. Instead it is more of a museum and worships the god of money, the faith of the majority of modern Chinese. In the main hall our guide was trying to give us some information but was drowned out by a guide with a microphone and speaker set draped around her neck blaring out Chinese noise. I asked her to stop but she didn’t. Later I went to the booth where these guides are for hire and discussed the situation with the person I thought was the senior there. The strange response was “thank you.”
It is sad to see objects of devotion in such a context. There is a history of lack of respect for the divine here, not only in the Cultural Revolution era, but I wonder if it is a longer term characteristic of a country where church has served to bolster state for millennia. In a roofed verandah by the gate were carved steles of Buddha figures, most of which had their faces smashed off.
We went from there to Li Shan, Mount Li, and climbed the stairs to a crevice where Chiang Kai Shek attempted to hide when Communist troopers invaded his residence, killing all of his guards. The residence was at the Huaqing Palace and he ran to the mountain in an unsuccessful attempt to hide. We are told the rational for the capture was to get him to agree to cooperate with the Red Army to defeat the Japanese and soon he signed that agreement. The misnomer ‘peaceful’ was used for the ‘Xian Incident’ (remember the dead guards – maybe they were ‘incidental casualties’).
From there we went to a warehouse where we were forced to endure the attentions of salespeople who followed us (one each) round the shop urging us to buy and letting us know they would give us a ‘special price’. Everything in Xian is at a special price. Ellen saw a beautiful malachite necklace and I succeeded in getting it for her at 60% off by being totally non-negotiable. I walked off and let the staff haggle amongst themselves about accepting my one and final offer. They came back and said yes.
The emperor’s tomb was next and I sat in the shade and had an ice cold juice while Ellen went in and sent me phone messages – “Boring!”, etc. We got back on the bus and drove to a restaurant that was once a warehouse and had been hastily furnished like a factory canteen where we were charged double the normal price for a sparse menu of Chinese food that we believe gave me diarrhoea a couple of days later. The only drinks were beer and water. The water was free and about as cool as tap water from a hot mains pipe.
Finally we arrived at the highlight of the trip, the Warriors. They are only one part of the area of Qin Shi Huang’s burial site, their hallways unsealed and invaded shortly after their entombment and the proud images of the Emperor’s soldiers smashed to a collection of fragments, thus creating the biggest jigsaw puzzle in the world, now being put together piece by piece by patient archaeologists. One of our new friends bought a book and had it signed by one of the farmers who discovered the wonder. He seemed unimpressed by the Laowai invaders now inspecting his trove and behaved rudely in carrying out his role of celebrity. This really is a wonder of the world, created at the request of one of the most successful and megalomaniac tyrants and conquerors who ever lived. The enormous area which is the site of Qin Shi Huang’s tomb dwarfs the pyramids. Only a small portion of it has been excavated by archaeologists. Much of the Terracotta Army is not to be uncovered until scientists have a solution for the rapid fading of the original bright colours under exposure to air and light.
Everyone was weary from the hot day and constant harassment to buy and the bus headed back to the city. To our dismay it pulled into a parking area and we were asked to get off again as the driver ‘had to clean the bus’. It was no surprise that we were to take shelter in a Chinese supermarket. I went to our guide, Bruce by English name, and told him that in Australia we would not accept any of the commercial pressure that had gone on during our trip and said that if they wanted us to buy stuff they should say so instead of lying to us about the bus needing to be cleaned. No cleaning was taking place. When he and I went inside to keep cool by the door we found all the other non-Chinese ignoring the shelves and as a group they approached him about the same issue. He said that the Chinese like to look at products they can’t buy in their own cities. Maybe so, the others were distributed around the aisles. I told him he should inform his boss that this sort of thing is insulting to foreign visitors.
I neglected to say we had no lunch stop because the planned restaurant had closed and the bus driver refused to look for another. Shining girl was less impressed than me, and that’s saying something.