2015 China

19 April, Xi’an
Vienna Hotel 169CNY

One tends to oversleep in a windowless room. Perhaps it is the stale air, or just the silence and darkness. Whatever the case, we made a late start, but still packed in a full day.

The Xi’an Beilin Museum, also known as the Stele Forest, is housed in a former Confucian temple inside the Wenchang Gate of the Xi’an city wall*. On display are stone steles**, over 3000 of them; also stone sculptures and calligraphy. The museum officially began its stele collection in 1087, almost 1000 years ago. “It became a Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level in 1961 and thus survived the Cultural Revolution” (Wikipedia). Exhibits include the Kaicheng classics, carved in 837 during the Tang dynasty and the Nestorian stele from 781, the earliest recorded account of Christianity in China.

A Sunday market made for a pleasant amble through the old city streets, both en route the Stele Forest and again after our visit there. An innovative photographic studio advertised itself by dressing three lovely lasses in bright traditional clothing and posing them outside the studio for passersby to admire and photograph; traders punted calligraphy brushes and signature stamps or seals, known colloquially as “chops”; also on offer: cheap handbags and complex paper cutouts, old coins and new jade.   

The Silk Route brought Arab traders to its terminus at Xi’an where they left their mark. The backstreets north of the Drum Tower have been home to China’s Hui community of Muslims since the 7th century. Described as an “explosion of sights, sounds and smells”, this is a fantastic area in which to spend a Sunday evening. A couple of cartoon studios were doing brisk business midst the restaurants and street food vendors. Barbecued lamb and squid; bean jelly or new potatoes stir fried with spices, sprouts, sweet corn and chillies; quail eggs on a skewer ... For those with a sweet tooth: baked persimmon pancakes made with rose-petals, walnuts and sugar; eight-treasure rose mirror cake, a sticky-rice dessert steamed and flavoured with nuts, jam, fruit and sesame; a cold yellow sticky rice cake topped with a layer of jujube, Chinese dates; peanut crisp, noisily made on site with large wooden mallets. Such a delight.

On our way to the Metro well after dark, we walked past the beautifully lit Drum Tower where kite sellers were flying long strings of tiny kites, each catching at the light, tempting one to buy.

Today we reserved three sets of train tickets for three long journeys, including two over-nighters. The young woman who assisted us at the Advance Train Ticket Booking Office, used an abacus to calculate our change. Not something one sees much of nowadays.

* Though Xi’an’s turbulent history dates from the Zhou dynasty of 3000 years ago, its extant wall, just shy of 12km in length, was built in 1370 during the Ming dynasty.

** Wikipedia: “A stele (plural steles ...) or stela (plural stelas or stelae ...) is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected as a monument, very often for funerary or commemorative purposes. Stelae may be used for government notices or as territorial markers to mark borders or delineate land ownership. They very often have texts and may have decoration. This ornamentation may be inscribed, carved in relief (bas, high, etc.), or painted onto the slab. Traditional Western gravestones are technically stelae, but are very rarely described by the term.”

*** Wikipedia: “A seal, in an East Asian context, is a general name for printing stamps and impressions thereof which are used in lieu of signatures in personal documents, office paperwork, contracts, art, or any item requiring acknowledgement or authorship ... Chinese seals are typically made of stone, sometimes of metals, wood, bamboo, plastic, or ivory, and are typically used with red ink or cinnabar paste ... The colloquial name chop, when referring to these kinds of seals, was adapted from the Hindi word chapa and from the Malay word cap meaning stamp or rubber stamps.”