It was not until wandering the city walls of Xi'an that the weight of history finally crashed onto my conscious thoughts. With so much of China's urban growth occurring in the past twenty years, the areas that I have been in so far have formed a monolithic testimonial to the power of its current regime. The new high-rise apartments and office buildings loom like some urban specter, cookie-cutter affairs with few windows open during the day, and even fewer lights on at night. It is hard to look at any of it and be reminded of the dynastic cycle that had powered the Chinese engine for the previous four thousand years.
Even against my personal history, the memories from my previous experiences, other cities like Jinan have changed so much that they are impossible for me to recognize. Gone from the main avenues are the outside barbecue stands with lamb skewers and chicken hearts, the long rows of bicycles that condensed in the late afternoon traffic, the street vendors and their little hand scales. When my father visited last month, the neighborhood he grew up in was almost unidentifiable.
In that sense, the past invoked by my travels here is the double-layered past of the personal and the public. Xi'an has the only fully preserved city walls in China, and much of the architecture of the area has kept the curved, sloping roofs and ornaments of dynastic China. And out on the streets, the narrow, cobbled alleyways with street vendors and outdoor grills from my childhood remain. If only for now, history here has kept the full force of modernization at bay. A final defense by the city walls its builders did not predict, could never have predicted.
The pervasive atmosphere of the ancient, of what once was, in the details of Xi'an reminds me of Italo Calvino's description in Invisible Cities of the city of Zaira:
"The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”
And like the lines of a hand, it vanishes when grasped at.
And on the pedestal these words appear...
On my second day in Xi'an, I took the trip out to the Terracotta Army and the tomb of the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. It's a forty minute bus ride away from the train station, and the route passes by the local university and mountain scenery, During the last leg of the drive, a tour guide gets on and talks about the history of the area, which includes a ten second glance of China's most accurate clock. I actually enjoyed his little spiel more than I'd thought I would, half because I still had the past dwelling in my mind, and half because it proved that my Chinese was better than I had believed.
The figures were discovered in 1974 by farmers while digging a well, and so the site is recent in the public consciousness. There are three main excavation sites. The first pit is the best preserved, and the vast majority of the fully restored figures are there. Unfortunately, that means it also attracts the lion's share of the tourists, and during the peak season, which is now, there are hundreds if not thousands of people pushing against the fences from all four ends.
Thus, I enjoyed the other two pits a lot more. Pits two and three contain the more unrestored, unexcavated portions of the site, and as such the crowds are much smaller. I found the shattered figures and faded roofs much more interesting that the assembled soldiers that have already been restored, especially from a closer angle. The availability of closer angles was also a bonus.
Tomorrow, I am determined to hike Huashan, one of the Five Great Mountains, which is roughly thirty minutes away from Xi'an by train. I had initially planned on doing so my second day, but I overslept my alarm and decided to push it back rather than risk the crowds and lines.
Otherwise, from the city walls to the mountain scenery to the local food, Xi'an has been slowly filling in the cracks of lost memories, old and new.