XiAn（西安）——A City With Many Relics

XiAn is an old city, one of the capitals of many dynasties in ancient China.  Therefore, in the around, there are many relics such as Drum Pavilion (鼓樓), Bell Pavilion (鐘樓), Big Wild Goose Pagoda (大雁塔),  Small Wild Goose Pagoda (小雁塔), the Museum of Stone Tablets (碑林), the Tomb of the First Emperor of Qin (秦), the Vaults of Terra-cotta Warriors and Horses (兵馬俑坑), the Tomb of Princess Yongtai (永泰) of Tang Dynasty and Huaqing Pool (華清池), etc.
        It was the first time I had a chance to go to XiAn, and as not much time was allowed, I could only visit some of them.  The first place I went was the Vaults of Terra-cotta Warriors and Horses, situated some 1.5 km east of the Tomb of the First Emperor of Qin Dynasty, three vaults on display and many others being dug. All warriors, as well as horses, are lifelike and lifesize, some holding bronze spears and some carrying bows and arrows, and others following chariots, all in war array.  According to the estimation of experts, there are 8000 figures and horses, and over 100 chariots.  These warriors were buried there as bodyguards to the Emperor.  People in the old time of China believed that when one died his ghost would live in the nether world just as he had lived in the upper world.  So his sons would put into the tomb all the clothes, jewelry and utensils he needed in his life in the darkness.  If he was an emperor, his sons would in addition have clay warriors and horses made and buried near his tomb to protect him from any danger of being attacked by other sovereign ghosts.  The heads of the figures are movable and removable.  Figures wearing caps of different shapes are officers of different ranks while those without caps are soldiers.  We can say without boasting that it is the eighth wonder of the world, considering the number, the size and the workmanship.
        Huaqing Pool, located at the foot of Lishan Mountain (驪山), is famous for the pool, in which Yang Yuhuan (楊貴妃 died in 755 AD), the royal concubine of Emperor Xuanzong (玄宗) of Tang Dynasty (on the throne: 712 AD----755 AS), often came to take her bath.  The pool is in a small room, made of smooth stone and shaped like a four-petaled flower.  But the buildings there are not those constructed in Tang Dynasty.  The original ones were destroyed during the wars waged by subsequent dynasties and the present ones were rebuilt later.  It was said that before the royal concubine came from the palace, the guardsmen held up two lines on either side from which cloth hung down to form a passageway so that no one, maybe by chance in the vicinity, could see her.
        Near the room the pool is, in the same bungalow, is another room, in which Jiang Jieshi (蔣介石) stayed during the XiAn Incident in 1936.  Nearly halfway up the hillside stands a stone arbor called “Catch-Jiang” Arbor.  During the night the incident happened, when Jiang heard the report of guns, he quickly climbed out of the back window and ran barefooted as fast as he could up the hill.  He hid himself in a crevice of the rock near the arbor when he was found and taken prisoner; hence the name of the arbor.
        On Lishan Mountain there used to be a beacon tower in West-Zhou Dynasty.  A story goes back to that time about the tower. The queen of King Youwang (幽王), the last king of West-Zhou Dynasty (on the throne: 781 B.C.----771 B.C.), never even smiled in her life.  The king tried every means in his power to make her smile, but his efforts were all in vain.  He asked her what she liked best when a little girl.  She said that she liked to hear the sound of tearing cloth.  So the king ordered many scrolls of cloth to be brought into the palace and had them torn one by one to shreds, but the queen still didn』t smile.  Once he took her there on the mountain.  When they stood on the top, a wonderful idea struck him.  He ordered his men to ignite the beaconfire.  The lords hurried there with their troops, banners upheld and drums sounding, thinking that the enemies invaded the kingdom again.  When they saw only the king and queen sitting on the summit, they looked at one another and hurried away with banners rolled up and drums muffled.  At last the queen smiled----such sweet smile that made her look more beautiful and attractive.  But later when the enemies actually invaded and the beaconfire was lit, no one came to the rescue, and the king was killed and the queen was captured.
        The whole place of Huaqing Pool is a beautiful garden with flowers and trees, a pond and pavilions around it.  There are also rows of small bathroom where a visitor can take a hot spring water bath.  It is good to one』s health.  The temperature of the water is just a little higher than that of normal human body.
        The Tomb of Empress Wu Zetian (武則天), situated west of XiAn, has not been explored yet.  Empress Wu in Tang Dynasty was the first and the last empress, that is to say, the sole empress in the long history of China.  In the Chinese feudal society, the status of women was so low that they were dependent on their parents as a girl, on their husbands after marriage and on their sons as a widow.  Ot was against the convention and conception of feudalism that a woman could be a sovereign, but Empress Wu managed to be one and maintained her reign for so  many years.  There must have been something that we can learn.  According to history, she chose some upright men to be her courtiers and made some wise policies for the interests of people.  These might account for her long reign.  By her order given before her death, a tall stone tablet was put up posthumously at one side in front of her tomb without any Chinese characters engraved on it.  She meant by it that she would leave it for the posterity to inscribe with whatever comments they would make on her merits or demerits.
        Not far from her tomb is the tome of Princess Yongtai, her granddaughter, now open to the visitors.  Through a declining passageway, I went down into the innermost part of the tomb, where the princess』s coffin stands.  On the walls of the passageway I saw some pretty frescoes.  Two exhibition halls were set up on each side of the tomb in the foreground, in which on display are all the things taken from the tomb; among them are the well-known three-colored porcelain camels, horses and figurines of Tang Dynasty.  One camel of a larger size carries some smaller figurines on its back, its head raised high and the figurines all playing musical instruments except one woman in the middle. An interpreter was explaining to some foreign visitors, and in the end he added, “The woman in the middle is singing and the camel is singing, too.”  And a laughter rose among the listeners.
        The museum of XiAn is in the city.  Besides the famous three-colored porcelain figurines, the exhibition includes a few coins of ancient Persia and some earthenware of thousands of years ago found underground, etc.  But the chief exhibition is the sculptures and engravings in stone: squatting stone lions and other stone animals bigger than lifesize, stone coffins, stone Buddhas, stone dragons and deer in relief and mostly stone tablets of different dynasties and different sizes, a few tablets with stone turtles under them, of course, in one piece.  Whole books and articles were inscribed on them.  Therefore, these have often been imitated since then by the learners of calligraphy.  Chinese calligraphy is also a fine art and always goes hand in hand with Chinese paintings while the tablet is a thesaurus for Chinese calligraphy to be kept and handed down.