XI'AN
“Bad pollution today,” said Joe Liu, my guide in Xi’an, pointing at the unnaturally greyish-yellow, oddly lowhanging sky. I’d never seen anything like it, and I was glad I was able to. Is this our future? Xi’an is the cradle of Chinese civilisation, the country’s capital from its unification in 221 BC until 907 AD, and the terminus of the Silk Road in the city’s heyday under the open-minded and inclusive Tang dynasty, when China was the most prosperous and powerful country in the world. Some 72 emperors are buried in greater Xi’an’s 8,000 square kilometres, but I flew here for the funerary extravaganza of Qin Shi Huang, the warlike first emperor who brutally created the footprint of the modern Chinese state. Empire building was apparently no prettier than wresting a country from underdevelopment. He died, in 210 BC, a spectacularly paranoid man: his 8,000-strong Terracotta Army was meant to guard him in the afterlife. Not surprisingly, it was also he who began building the Great Wall.
The facts about the warriors are well-known. They are lifesize. They stand in battle-ready formation facing east, where danger supposedly lay. They were accidentally discovered by farmers in 1974. And each is distinct from the other in everything: physiognomy, hairstyle, clothes, even the lines in the palms of their hands. But no photographs prepare you for the vastness of Pit I, which is about two football fields. Still, what stayed with me the most strongly was one detail. In a glass case in the museum adjacent to the ongoing excavation sites is a figure of a kneeling archer. His handsome face is young, his ancient Chinese version of a man-bun is slightly askew, his lips form a Mona Lisa smile, and when you walk around him you see the intricately patterned sole of his right shoe making an indentation in his buttock as he kneels. A young man in all his idealised specificity must have posed for this. You hear the whoosh of millennia.
After a quick visit to the tatty but magnificent 8th-century Great Mosque, in the heart of Xi’an’s old walled city, which is remarkable for its Chinese-inspired architecture—the minaret looks like a pagoda, and I sat on a Qing dynasty bed while talking to the imam—it was back to the airport for my flight to Shanghai. “If you return,” Liu said, “don’t come during the first week of May or October. Those are both national holidays. Chinese use their elbows and Westerners end up seeing nothing. We feel bad about that.”