Yearly Archives: 2013

Chinese Icons in Xi’an

Chances are that if you’re making a list of sights to see in China then pretty soon after the Great Wall will be the Terracotta Warriors. These are located close to the city of Xi’an but they are by no means the only tomb in the area. According to our guidebook, the province of Shaanxi is peppered with imperial remains.

Tomb of Emperor Jingdi

On our first day we decided to visit one of the less well known archaeological sites, Emperor Jingdi’s Tomb, also known as the Han Yangling Mausoleum. The Lonely Planet describes this as “Xi’an’s most underrated highlight”. Which is a shame because it’s very well set up, has interesting displays and provides a nice contrast with the Terracotta Warriors. On the other hand, the fact that it’s underrated means that there aren’t many visitors which is always a plus point in my book…

The Emperor’s burial mound and the South Gate reconstruction

The site consists of the burial mounds of Emperor Jingdi and his empress, Empress Wang. Surrounding the emperor’s tomb are 86 pits which were filled with pottery figurines representing all aspects of the court (men, women and eunuchs) as well as domesticated animals. The figurines are approximately 60cm tall and originally would have had wooden arms and clothing appropriate to their position. Over the years these more perishable parts have rotted away leaving the figures nude. A museum has been built over some of the pits so that you can see how they were found and the archaeologists continue to work in the remaining pits. In the same building you are shown a holographic display explaining the history of the emperor and empress. This looked very shiny, but the speech part was far too fast for me to be able to take it all in.

Us in fron of the Emperor’s burial mound

A variety of burial pits in the underground museum

In a separate area of the site is the Archaeological Exhibition Hall showing the vast array of different artefacts found there. This was very nicely laid out and the lack of visitors meant that we had plenty of time to get a good look at everything without being jostled.

Andrew viewing one of the cases of figures

Pottery figure as it was found, reconstruction of a figure to how it would have been buried, some figures were found on horseback

The pits contained a wide variety of representations of domesticated animals

Terracotta Warriors

In contrast to the relative peace of our visit to Emperor Jingdi’s tomb, as soon as the bus dropped us off outside the main entrance to the Terracotta Army we were surrounded by crowds of tourists, guides trying to persuade us to employ them and miscellaneous vendors selling overpriced tat. We even had to fend off several guys with wheelchairs offering to push Dad around the site (for a fee obviously).

The Lonely Planet suggests that you visit the three pits in reverse order and we found that to be good advice. Pit 3 is smaller than the other two and contains just a few figures as it was seriously damaged at some point in history. Pit 2 is larger but remains largely unexcavated. There are some cases at the side which contain examples of each of the different types of figures which have been found – kneeling archer, standing archer, middle-ranking officer, high-ranking officer, and cavalryman with his saddled war-horse. These allow you to get a good close up look at the figures and see the detail that went into making each one.

An unexcavated section of pit 2, and a corridor showing how the warriors are found

Kneeling archer, Cavalryman with saddled war-horse, High-ranking officer

Details (clockwise from top left): Archer’s shoulder armour, officer’s hands, sole of archer’s boot, horse head and bridle

The scale of pit 1 will make your jaw drop to the floor. It is vast, 230m x 62m (roughly the size of two football pitches laid end to end) and it is expected that more than 6000 warriors and horses will be unearthed from it once archaeological work is complete.

The aircraft hangar like scope of pit 1

Walking around the pit you can see the areas where archaeologists are still working to reassemble the warriors

The Terracotta Warriors site has a bit of a Disneyland feel to it – the path from the pits back to the main entrance is lined with expensive shops and photo opportunities. For the ultimate souvenir it’s even possible to buy a full size replica warrior! Despite all the commercialisation, if you only have time to visit one site while you’re in Xi’an then it should definitely be the Terracotta Warriors, but there’s a good bit of variety out there and we enjoyed seeing the different style of Emperor Jingdi’s tomb as well.

Lucky Panda Tour

And while we’re talking about Chinese icons we can’t really leave out the panda can we? We stayed at the Han Tang House in Xi’an and one of the tours that they offer is the Lucky Panda Tour, a half day with an early start to the nearby Shaanxi Rare Wildlife Rescue and Breeding Centre. They have 19 giant pandas at the centre including a rare brown panda. Each panda has a covered sleeping and eating area and a large overgrown garden area which means that they can hide away and you are by no means guaranteed to see one, although our guide knew all their names and called out to the ones who are usually most sociable! We were fortunate enough to be entertained by the beautiful 4 year old Yaya for a good 20 minutes as well as catching a fleeting hello with her mother, Juju. If the pandas are not out to play when you visit there’s still plenty to see – golden takins, asiatic black bears, golden monkeys, red pandas and a number of different birds are kept there too.

Yaya: panda splat, pretending to be Kung Fu Panda, she may look cute, but like all bears she has pretty scary looking teeth

Trying to get the bamboo!

Animals at the centre (clockwise from top left): Golden takin, Golden monkey, Asiatic black bear, eagle

Xi’an City

We didn’t spend much time in the city itself, but an honourable mention needs to go to the food that we ate in Xi’an. On our first night we went for Chinese hotpot (sometimes known as fondue chinois in Europe) at a restaurant around the corner from our hotel called ‘The King’. They had to rustle up a young lad from the kitchen who spoke a little bit of English and we started off a bit confused about how things were priced (actually we still weren’t sure until we got the bill and I think it was mainly because it was so cheap that we thought there must be some mistake), but once we got going it was great. We had a large pot of simmering broth in the middle of the table and chose skewers of vegetables, meat and fish from the buffet as well as thinly sliced meat from the kitchen to cook in it. There was also a dip buffet for you to make your own dipping sauce – owing to our confusion, our helper from the kitchen just made us up a bowl each once we’d told him not too much chilli! And the bill for the huge amount of food that the four of us ate (including 6 beers and a soft drink)? ¥149.50, about £15.50. No wonder we were confused!

Mum and Dad, Andrew and I enjoying the hotpot

On our second night we walked past the beautifully illuminated drum and bell towers to the Muslim Quarter for kebabs. The street is buzzing with people and all kinds of stalls. We found a busy stand with a small back room where we could eat our delicious lamb kebabs and sesame flatbreads.

Bell and drum towers, getting stuck in to the kebabs in the Muslim Quarter

The Great Wall

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If we asked a 100 people to name something they associate with the country of China, like they do on the UK gameshow Family Fortunes, our survey would definitely include “The Great Wall“.

Started in the 7th century BC, and extended and fortified to the defences we see today largely by the Ming Dynasty in the 14th century, The Great Wall is not actually a great wall for 2 reasons… firstly, the Chinese name for it literally translates into English as “the long wall”, and secondly, it’s a continuous defence only because it incorporates natural obstacles such as hills and rivers.

But, it is Great..
Us on The Great Wall of China with Julie’s parents, Norman and Moira. The Sīmatái section snakes over the ridge of hills in the distance

There are 7 well-trodden and accessible sections of The Great Wall that vary in their proximity to Beijing by how much they’ve been restored, and how popular they are. In order of popularity:

Bādáling – the most photographed and visited section
Mùtiányù
Jūyōngguān
Sīmatái – sadly closed when we were there, as it follows on from..
Jīnshānling – the part we visited
Jiànkòu
Huánghuā

We picked Jīnshānling because of our preference for quieter spots, and the description in our guidebook:

Jīnshānling marks the starting point of an exhilarating 10km hike to Sīmatái. the journey – through some stunning mountainous terrain – takes around four hours as the trail is steep and parts of the wall have collapsed; it can be traversed without too much difficulty, but some find it tiring.

Getting to Jīnshānling was straightforward, but our helpful local bus conductor woman ushered us off the bus at the first stop in the town rather than the bus station which meant we had to negotiate with a taxi driver who just happened to be waiting for business. Were they in cahoots? We’ll never know…

Having bought our entrance tickets, we then started along a very nicely kept and recently laid stone stairway up the hillside to The Great Wall – it hadn’t really occurred to me that we’d have to walk up to the wall before we could walk on the wall!

The hiking trail up to The Great Wall

The view teasing us through the forest as we climbed – “East Tower with five holes” in the foreground, and “Qilin Tower” behind

The climb to the wall was pretty tough going, but the reward was simply staring in awe at the wonder of this mammoth human achievement once we’d reached it.

And we needed the rest, because these walls aren’t at all like those in Datong, or the ones back home in York – they follow the highest ridge of the hills which means a lot more steps!

A very steep section of the Jīnshānling Great Wall – the “steps” up to the tower are over knee height

The descent into “Flowers Tower”, the furthest point Julie and I reached before we had to turn back

Norman and Moira had stopped back to do a spot of bird watching

The birds were too quick to photograph, but there were plenty of insects, including a giant grasshopper (there’s an ant by its foot to give you a sense of scale – can you see it?)

As you can see from our photographs we were fortunate with both the weather and the tranquility to enjoy The Great Wall by ourselves – I think we saw more people on the trail up and back down than we did on the wall itself!

798 Art District, Beijing

Datong, Shanxi Province, China

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Datong is a strange place. For a start, the city centre is partway through being rebuilt. That means that they are knocking down perfectly fine but not very attractive buildings in order to recreate the historic centre… I think it’s being done to make the city more attractive to tourists, but the scale of the work is so huge that it will surely take decades to recoup through tourism the amount being spent on construction.

A cross section of the new city wall which is not yet finished

Newly built city street

We also felt a little like celebrities here. It’s sufficiently off the beaten path that the locals are very curious about anyone ‘foreign’ looking! I think we’ll encounter this quite often as we travel through China but I don’t know if I’ll get used to it. To give you some idea:

people would stare at us on the street – I was worried that we might cause an accident as quite a few of those staring were on bicycles
people looked at us shyly and say ‘hello’ or ‘ni hao’ – us replying generally resulted in a fit of giggles
more confident locals would stop us to have a chat (usually quite limited by their lack of English and our lack of Mandarin)
and if they were feeling really confident they would ask if they could take our picture!

Getting there

Getting to Datong was very straightforward. As the train takes about 6 hours we decided that it wasn’t worth doing an overnight trip as we wouldn’t get enough sleep so instead we took the bus which is faster (between 4.5 and 5.5 hours). We were worried about buying our bus ticket but in the end it was more complicated to find out which bus station in Beijing we needed, and how to get there (for anyone having the same difficulties it’s Liuliqiao which can be reached by subway lines 9 or 10). To buy the ticket, we said ‘Datong’ and showed the clerk the Chinese characters for the city name in our guidebook. She turned her screen around and showed us the time of the next bus and the price. Easy peasy. As an added bonus we got views of the Great Wall during the journey which whetted our appetite for when we make the trip there!

The Great Wall from the bus

Our hostel

We stayed at the brand new Fly by Knight Hostel, the original branch of which is in Beijing. We had a large and comfortable private room with floor to ceiling windows. As the hostel is located on the 22nd floor of a brand new apartment building this means that we had incredible views over the city.

View of bustling Datong

The city walls are lit up at night

Sights in the city centre

One of the authentically old parts of the city centre is the Nine Dragon Screen which was built in 1392. According to the information board in the grounds

it was originally situated in front of Dai-king Zhu Gui’s mansion who was the 13th son of Zhu Yuan Zhang, the first emperor of the Ming dynasty.

The mansion has long since gone, but the screen is well worth a quick visit. And yes, the first thing we did was to count the dragons and check that there were nine!

Us in front of the Nine Dragon screen (we really are there in the middle, it’s just very big – 45.5m long!), and two of the dragons

We discovered that it’s also possible to walk on the city walls. Amusingly, the entrance ticket describes them as Ancient City Walls despite the fact that it’s not yet possible to walk all the way around because they haven’t finished building them! It was a nice walk though and we amused ourselves by watching the Chinese tourists on the tandems that are for hire on top of the wall.

There’s a fake pagoda as part of Datong’s city walls, Chinese tourists on a tandem, and view of a not yet demolished part of the city centre from the walls

From Datong there are 2 day trips to major sights which are really the main reason for visiting the city:

Hanging Monastery

The Hanging Monastery is located near the town of Hunyuan, a two hour bus ride from Datong. Again it was easy to buy the bus ticket and the bus driver put us into a taxi for the last 5 minutes to the site of the monastery. If we had been a bit more on the ball we would have tried to communicate to the bus station taxi driver a time when he should come and collect us. Unfortunately, we thought he was just going to hang around, but he was nowhere to be seen when we came back out. We waited to see if he would return (with more tourists from another bus for example), but in the end we had to haggle for a taxi back to Datong – they quoted such a ridiculous price for the 2km to Hunyuan bus station that it just wasn’t worth it. Anyway we had plenty of time to bargain so we were quite pleased to get the price down from 200RMB to 140RMB.

The monastery itself is built into the side of a cliff and dates from 491. It looks as if it’s kind of floating there, as it’s supported by beams drilled into the rock face as well as stilts to the ground. The mountain peak above it protects it from rain and strong winds, and its position 50m from the ground means that it doesn’t get flooded.

The buildings are now just a tourist attraction and there is a prescribed path around the 36 tiny rooms and linking walkways. Some of them are a little precarious and there aren’t many spaces for passing people so we sometimes felt a bit pushed along by the horde of Chinese tourists behind us, but the up close views of the roofs and the building’s quirky structure were worth it. It’s construction is not the only unusual thing about the monastery, it also has elements of all three of the traditional religions: Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism.

Narrow staircase between levels of the monastery, colourful roof tiles, and inside one of the temples

Yungang Grottoes

The Yungang grottoes also date from the 5th century and feature Buddhist carvings and paintings in dozens of caves. The cave decorations range from bright wall paintings to huge Buddha statues (some are nearly 20m high). We enjoyed the variety and the scale of the place is really magnificent.

Varied cave decorations

Us in front of the 13.7m high White Buddha (cave no. 20), the cave entrance around this statue has collapsed

The caves’ original purpose was of course worship and Buddhist visitors today still burn incense and pray. A new temple has also been built on the site.

Burning incense, new statues inside the temple, the newly built temple complex is on an island

This sign at the end of the walking trail made us chuckle

Food

We had a bit of trouble finding the Nine Dragon Screen at first and stopped in a local restaurant for lunch and to ask the way (travelling tip for China: copy out the Chinese characters for the sight you want to visit before you leave your hostel, or carry your guidebook with you – showing someone the written Chinese is much easier than the blank look you get if you try to say it). Lunch was potato starch noodles in what looked like chilli soup although it wasn’t actually too spicy. Potato starch noodles are not easy to eat with chopsticks – if I didn’t know better I would think they were made from jellyfish, they’re slimy and gloopy and fall apart when you lift them too high from the bowl! They were surprisingly tasty though.

The restaurant, and the noodle soup (the noodles are all lurking below the surface in this picture)

But our favourite place to eat in Datong (we went there every day!) was a street stand just along the road from our hostel. It was run by a husband and wife team. She shaped and cooked bread rolls on a charcoal stove and he shredded the (pre-cooked) pork with mild green chilli and some of the pork cooking gravy to stuff the freshly baked rolls. Delicious!

Yummy pork rolls

Mongolia Round Up

What photo takes you right back to Mongolia?

Our trip to the Gobi desert was probably the highlight of our stay in Mongolia, not only for the stunningly beautiful places that we visited, but also the interesting conversations (and playful banter) between the members of our group.

In order of height and in front of our trusty Russian vans: Thomas, Isaac, Oogii, Tsogii, Andrew, Rebecca, Khun, Jessica, Julie, Jason, Erkha, Terry [photo credit: Wasut (Khun) Pornpatcharapong]

Summarise Mongolia in three words.

Scenic – the Mongolian countryside is breathtakingly beautiful with its vast unpeopled steppes and even the weather usually cooperates in great photos by providing interesting clouds
Ger – Mongolia’s traditional house makes for a cool place to stay
Meat – just read the post we wrote about the country’s cuisine…

You really know you’re in Mongolia when…

You’re faced with another large plate of mutton for dinner and all of the men around you have their T-shirts hiked up over their bellies (I’m not sure why, I can only surmise that it’s a way to keep cool).

What one item should you definitely pack when going to Mongolia?

Sun cream. The summer weather can be relentlessly hot and there aren’t too many shady places to hide. Despite numerous locals telling us that we could by sun cream EVERYWHERE, we struggled to find anything bigger than a 50ml bottle.

two year trip

Andrew and Julie's Travelling Adventures