It's an early departure for our flight to Xi'an (pop 6,000,000). Too early for breakfast, but we drop in to the restaurant and ask if we can take away some coffee. They give us three half-litre soup containers of milky coffee, with big smiles!

We land in Xi'an at noon, and are met by our guide, Tony. For this stage of our travels, we have booked our flights and hotels through CAA's travel services. They had purchased our trip through Goway Travel, who in turn had contracted China International Travel Services to provide guides and airport transfers at all stops. Yup, quite a few middlemen there. This is not the way we usually like to travel, but with a packed schedule at home, only a month's notice to book the trip and a detailed itinerary required to obtain our Chinese entry visas, this was the only way we could manage it. Since we don't speak Mandarin, it's reassuring to have someone to herd us around, but we are worried that we won't have the flexibility to set our own pace or to do things on the spur of the moment. Flexibility is what we are looking for now, since Thai has strongly recommended that we see the tomb of Emperor Jingdi, which is not on the Goway itinerary. We ask Tony about it, and learn that flexibility is indeed possible, albeit at a price. Since the tomb is close to the airport, we go straight there and leave our bags in the van with the driver. On the way to the site, Tony points out the rounded hill that is the burial site of Jingdi's Empress.

A larger burial mound houses Jingdi's tomb, and pits radiating from have been found to contain terra cotta figures and items intended for use in the afterlife. The pits have has been cleverly excavated to allow visitors to walk underground and look through glass to see the artifacts lying where they were left 2,000+ years ago. We are given shoe covers to wear, exactly like the ones Kim and I had worn to tour the sterile products preparation area at Peking University Third Hospital. We shuffle along a glass floor beside windows that allow us to peer into the pits of the tomb. The pits contain thousands of miniature clay figures of men, women, and animals...quite an amazing sight.





It doesn't take long to tour the tomb of Emperor Jingdi. By mid-afternoon we are checked in to our hotel, where we have a light lunch and a rest. We have disappointed Tony by declining his suggestion to buy tickets for a show in the evening, but he has accepted our decision with good humour. At 5.30, we meet Kim in the lobby and head into the heart of the city to see the Muslim Quarter and Great Mosque. Our cab drops us off in the area between Xi'an's Bell and Drum towers, which, like Beijing's, helped the local population tell time in ancient days.

Xi'an's Muslim quarter seems like the China we'd imagined (although in truth, most of China is nothing like we'd imagined). Scooters and bicycles blowing their horns as the drivers make their way through throngs of people; shops full of inexpensive merchandise, food stalls selling everything imaginable, walnuts being cracked open on chopping blocks with hammers, skewers of meat being barbecued on the roadside, and strange and delicious aromas in the air.





Xi'an's Muslims population are part of the Hui minority; many of the men are wearing white caps and the women are wearing headscarves.



We make our way through the crowd and eventually find the Great Mosque, which seems more like a Buddhist temple than a mosque, other than the interior of prayer hall.



The grounds inside the gates are a peaceful haven from the mayhem on the streets outside.



We are there until sunset and although there has been no Call to Prayer, worshippers begin to trickle in and we are asked to leave.

Now we walk through the streets of the market, which is famous (or infamous) for the fact that everything is fake. Most of it is rubbish, but I do buy a couple of pretty scarves. Our next challenge will be to find something to eat. We are surrounded by street stalls with a vast selection of delicious-smelling food, but having seen the raw meat lying out in the sun, unrefrigerated, we are hesitant to risk it. Eventually, we end up in what appears to be a Chinese chain restaurant on the second floor of a shopping centre, , where the food is cooked on the tabletops using convection elements. We chose a dish of chicken and vegetables, which is simple and good although not up to the standard we had become accustomed to in Beijing. Then we are back to the all-too-familiar challenge of finding a cab to get us back to the hotel. We chose our spot strategically, and after about ten minutes we are successful.

August 21st

We're off to see the Terra Cotta Army; the main reason for our visit to Xi'an! It's a bit deflating to be told that our first stop will be a ceramics factory. We're beginning to get a grasp on the implications of having placed our travel destiny into the hands of a tour company, but Tony reassures us that the stop will be short and that we will not be obliged to buy anything. The factory provides a quick demonstration of how they make reproduction terra cotta warriors. The guide points to reproduction warrior and tells us that it is "oo'nick". "How do you know it's a eunich?" I ask. "Because there is only one" the guide replies. Ah, unique! I get it now. Of course, the main focus of the tour is of course to sell us ceramic items and other souvenirs. I get talked into buying a (hopefully) silk fan before we make our escape.

Finally, we can move on and see the Terra Cotta Army. Oh but wait; first we have to go through the gift shop, where we can have the opportunity to buy a copy of a book autographed by the "lucky farmer" who discovered the army when he was digging a well 35 years ago. The lucky farmer is seated at a table with his books and, for a price, we can also take his photograph. We decline both of these opportunities and ask Tony whether there is actually only one lucky farmer. "There were several" he tells us, "but the others are all dead now". A lucky farmer indeed.

But the sight of the Terra Cotta army makes it all worthwhile. Thousands of life-sized figures made of terra cotta, every face different. This army was meant to protect Emperor Qin Shi Huang in the afterlife, although for some reason, the Emperor is buried in a separate tomb nearby, rather than with his army. The first pit has thousands of foot soldiers.




Originally the warriors held weapons, although most of these have disappeared through rotting and/or looting. In the other pits we see kneeling archer and cavalry, The horses are so lifelike that they look like they could burst into a gallop at any moment. Although the figures were originally painted in bright colours, the pigments faded away quickly when exposed to the light. Archeologists are looking for a way to preserve the colours of the ones that have not yet been unearthed. We discover just how lucky the lucky farmer was when we see that the shaft of the well was located just at an outer corner of Pit Number 1. If he'd dug just a few feet away, he'd have missed it entirely.



The scale of the site is immense, and it is mind-boggling to imagine how all this was accomplished over 2200 years ago.



Most of the warriors were found in pieces, and the shards are being painstakingly reassembled on site, like jigsaw puzzles. However, in the third building, Tony shows us the figure of an archer that he says is "Perfect Warrior" because he was basically intact when discovered.





We also see intricate bronze chariots (half-size) and a sword that had been chrome-plated to prevent corrosion - this last particularly amazing since the process for chrome-plating was not developed in Europe until the 20th century. Of course, we can't resist having our photos taken beside reproduction warriors.



Now it is time for lunch, and since it is included in the price of our tour we will not get to choose our restaurant. It's pretty bland, and Kim sums it all up when she says the meal tastes like it came from a food court. But since we're still exclaiming over the wonders of the Terra Cotta warriors, we enjoy ourselves anyway. Next we are taken to the tea house next door, for a traditional tea ceremony. Our tea is prepared and poured by a lovely young woman in traditional dress.



The ceremony is fun and several of the teas are quite delicious, but clearly the underlying intent is to sell us tea. Unfortunately, the prices seem to be about quadruple what we would pay for high quality tea in Canada. We don't buy any. Kim suffers spasms of guilt, because the young woman pouring the tea had been so nice, and Tony won't get a commission. But we hold our ground.

In the evening, we set out for a walk on the Xi'an city walls. It takes us a while to find the South Gate entrance, and our circuitous journey takes us across the same busy intersection twice and into a backpackers bar to ask for directions. A sign in the entryway proclaims the establishment to be a "hash bar". Surely not? We finally find the stairs to the top of the wall, where Kim and I stroll along talking while Rick rents a bicycle and covers more ground.



Rick returns telling us that he has spotted what appears to be a district of nice restaurants near the southwest corner of the wall, so we flag down a cab and point to it on a map.

After a couple of false starts, we eventually get a table on the second-floor terrace of a restaurant the name of which we cannot tell you, because the sign is in script. No one speaks a word of English, but we are able to order our meal from an iPad with photos of the food. We end up with some strange choices (one of the dishes turns out to be a Chinese version of tacos) but have a great evening enjoying the ambience and watching the people. The people at the table behind us are having quite a party. One woman staggers to the washroom on tottering heels, clearly about to lose her dinner. By the end of the evening, empty liquor bottles are stacked behind their chairs and three of them are asleep with their heads on the table. We stick to our Chinese beer, which luckily for us is low in alcohol content. We're a bit off the beaten track, so it's a relief when the waiter finds a cab for us and gets us back to the hotel without incident. Next stop Guilin!