We have seen he famous Panncotta Terriers. Or is that Tapioca Wurlitzers? Terracotta Warriors? Whatever, were they were pretty impressive both in terms of individual beauty and sheer numers: Emperor Qin Shi Huang (the first guy to unite disperate territories into a single Chinese state) was buried with over 6,000 individually sculpted life-size figures of infantrymen, generals, charioteers and archers in a bid to protect his passage through the underworld. Although much has been destroyed there are still a good collection of figures left, all very beauiful and on a staggering scale, and the site itself is interesting as it is still a working archaeological dig: there is plenty of excavation still to do and it actually looks to be being carried out in a responsible way.
Getting to the Terracotta Army itself was an odd experience for me - we decided to take an organsied tour. This, as you know, goes against all of my instincts and much ridicule and scorn I myself have poured on tour parties myself over the years. But hey, everything's worth trying once eh? And the tour covered lots of other sites that we wanted to go to, all a fair way away from each other; its cost wasn't much more than the total cost of all the entry tickets so it was easily justified. With a sense of foreboding I boarded the coach, and surely enough after about 2 hours I was reduced to the same switched-off slack-jawed dull-eyed zombie state I have always noticed in tour group members before - aaargh! The main problem with these things is that you get herded along and told stuff so you don't actually need to use your brain or eyes at all. No active engagement required when you can passively recieve it all with no effort.
As it turns out, the tour was well constructed, serving up the poor stuff first (trip to badly staged factory shop, followed by visit to a local museum housing the items not good enough to be shown in the excellent Shaanxi history museum we went to the day before), and improving quickly via the excellent Huaqing Hot Springs Palace, lunch, and the Terracotta Army followed by Qin Shi Huang's tomb. And once I'd gotten over my switched-off stupor and roamed around by myself for a bit I was able to take the best bits of the tour - background information given, convenient transportation from place to place - and combine them with being able to experience the amazing things I'd come out here to see. In the end the thing lasted 10 hours, we got to see loads of good things that we wanted to visit anyway, and we had absolutely no frustrations trying to organise details becuase this was all done for us. I must say that I still do not feel drawn to tours, and that this one still lacked any sense of the discovery or self-achievement that we could've got by doing it for ourselves, but must concede that when done well a tour can be a real hassle- and time- saver. There's no way we would've got out as far as some of the places we went to independently and all in all it was a top day, making our huge detour to Xi'an more than worth it.
It turns out that Xi'an is the start (or end depending on your perspective) of the Silk Roads. I had assumed that the terminus was Beijing but of course when trading was esablished the capital was here, not in the east. This makes our time here even more special as the main aim for this second half of the journey is to try to retrace the silk roads back to Istanbul and on to France. To be stood here in this great city, which thanks to the dust, ancient city walls and towers, and vibrant muslim community already feels more like a Central Asian city than a Chinese one, it feels as though we have reached a major milestone - a dizzying feeling that brings a real sense of acomplishment tinged with trepidation: after we have detoured to South East Asia this journey home promises to be the trickiest yet. Hurrah again for traveling!