In March 1974 a drought had left the fields around Xiyang, a village about 35 kilometres east of Xi’an, badly short of water, and a group of farmers decided to dig a well. What came up out of the hole was not water. It was fragments of fired clay, a bronze arrowhead, and a head.
They had dug into the edge of an army of some eight thousand clay soldiers, buried more than two thousand years earlier to guard the tomb of China’s first emperor. They were looking for water.
Half a century later that army is the reason most people come to Xi’an, and one of the reasons I did.
When the Silk Road first came into being under the Han Dynasty in the second century BC it took months, sometimes years, to travel to Xi’an from Europe. I got to Xi’an in less than six hours on the high speed train from Shanghai, travelling at 345 km/h in significantly more comfort than the traders 2,200 years ago. I had come to learn more about Chinese history and the Silk Road, and Xi’an is the place to do so.
During the height of trading along the Silk Road people of all nationalities came to Xi’an, and many made the city their new home. At times up to 10,000 foreigners lived in Xi’an. One large group were Muslims, and their descendants can still be found in the Muslim Quarter in the centre of the city, nowadays a bustling neighbourhood with many shops and restaurants and a favourite among tourists and visitors.
Museums in China are a contact sport
One day it rained from morning to night, which made it the obvious day for the Shaanxi History Museum. A DiDi took me the six kilometres across town in half an hour for less than ten yuan, a price that makes the bus hard to argue for.
The museum is very big, and it was very crowded. It turns out that visiting a museum in China is a contact sport. You fight your way to the screens to find out what you are looking at, and then you fight your way to the glass to actually look at it. When you get there, everyone around you is photographing every single object in the case with a phone. What they do with all those pictures afterwards I have no idea. I travel to take photographs myself, so I am in no position to complain.
The exhibition is laid out as a walk through time. It starts with Lantian Man, one of the oldest human fossils found in China and well over a million years old, and works its way forward through the dynasties, the Qin, the Han, the Tang and on to the Ming, with the Silk Road running through the middle of it all. By the end I had a far better idea of how the pieces of Chinese history fit together than when I walked in.
It would have been ideal preparation for the Terracotta Army. I went the day after. If you go, do it the other way round.
Eight thousand soldiers and a few thousand elbows
The Terracotta Army was the whole reason for coming to Xi’an, and it is not actually in Xi’an. The pits are about 50 kilometres away by road, and a DiDi took me out there in the rain for around 70 yuan, which for the distance is a bargain.
The crowds were already massive when I arrived. Even with a ticket bought in advance I had to queue. At the gate they scanned my passport, which was the ticket, and I picked up the English audio guide and went straight to Pit 1.
Pit 1 is the one in all the photographs, rank after rank of soldiers standing in long earth corridors under a roof the size of an aircraft hangar. It is very impressive. It was also jam-packed. Personal space is a smaller unit in China than it is at home, and the rail around the pit was a slow-moving scrum of pushing and shoving, several people deep.
From there the route takes you to Pit 3 and then to Pit 2, and each is less impressive than the one before. Pit 3 is the command post, with fewer than a hundred figures, and much of Pit 2 is still under its covering of earth. Starting with the best and finishing with the least is an unusual way to arrange a visit. I would have reversed it, so that you get more impressed as you go along rather than less.
After the pits there is an exhibition hall, also impressive. Then I returned the audio guide and ate a couple of pieces of chicken, on the theory that this was my last chance of food. Outside the gates was an enormous commercial area full of restaurants. The theory was wrong.
Two days, the same history twice. Once behind glass with a label, once standing in a pit in the rain. Both of them crowded. Both of them worth the elbows.