Fast forward to really appreciate an ancient city
As the birthplace of Chinese civilization, the capital of 13 dynasties and the resting place for 72 emperors, Xi’an boasts an incredible amount of history.
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the brilliant halo of sites like the Terracotta Warriors, dozens of emperors’ tombs, old palaces and numerous ancient temples and towers. That’s, of course, where most tourists flock.
I was thinking about all this as I strolled along the red lantern-flanked streets of the Shaanxi Province capital. Some 2,500 years of history does give Xi’an a special cachet, but what happens if we focus the looking glass more recently?
I found the answer at the Xi’an City Memories Museum in a tumbledown former steel factory in the city’s eastern suburb. It displays more than 5,000 items collected from ordinary Xi’an families over the past 40 years.
Bamboo baskets, wooden barrels, iron woks, tin pots, aluminum lunchboxes, enamel cups, cookie cans, oil bottles, spatulas and farm tools are but a few of the items of daily life that illustrate how Xi’an has developed in more modern times.
“I observe the city and its people from a perspective of an ordinary citizen,” says Song Qun, a Xi’an artist who is the museum’s founder.
The trigger for the idea for such a museum came when he couldn’t find a clear, readable book about Xi’an’s last 100 years.
Song interviewed and filmed 1,000 Xi’an families, collecting their stories about life in the city. Individual memories gradually coalesced into an overarching retrospective of Xi’an.
“What we see in an official museum is always about the country or royalty, especially in an old capital city like Xi’an,” Song says. “But the lives of ordinary people sometimes get neglected.”
Indeed, what makes Xi’an the city it is today are not only the 13 dynasties or ancient emperors. The city’s population has soared from 400,000 in 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was founded, to 9 million today. Along with that surge came economic development.
“My collections might not be as refined as those in big museums,” Song says. “Though more coarse and downto-earth, they present a valuable insight into how a city’s residents view their surroundings.”
I was stuck on a city street after 11pm one night due to serious traffic gridlock in the downtown area. The bus lines and Metro were already shut down, and the taxi I was in didn’t move for 20 minutes.