| China Destination Guide: Xian |
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Main Tour Attractions in
Xian
Terra Cotta Warriors
In March 1974, a villager in Lintong County, Shaanxi Province, was digging a well when he came across some broken ceramic pieces. Local authorities were alerted and subsequent exploration and excavation led to the discovery of the now famous underground army of terra cotta warriors.
Yingzheng, commonly known as Qin Shihuang or the First Emperor of Qin, dominated China in the 3rd century B.C. While Chinese history extends farther back, it was Yingzheng who for the first time in Chinese history truly centralized the Chinese state and thus set a model of imperial rule in China, a tradition that survived all the way into the twentieth century. Like all ambitious and powerful men of the old days, the First Qin Emperor wanted to carry his glory and authority over to the other world, and in his last years he had an enormous tomb built for himself. As part of this effort he had thousands of terra cotta warriors made to be buried along with him. It took over 700,000 labors and 38 years to build the emperor’s mausoleum.
Currently three formations of the First Emperor’s underground army are known to exit. Pit 1 measures 230 meters (744 feet) in length and 62 meters (203 feet) in width, and here one finds over 6,000 armored and armed terra cotta warriors. Most of these life-size figures were infantry while the rest were cavalry and charioteers. The heads of the figures were individually hand-molded and thus they all look different from one another.
The first emperor’s tomb itself is located two-kilometers west of where the terra cotta warriors stand. The tomb has not been fully excavated, although over the years about 50,000 artifacts have been unearth at the site.
Created over 23 centuries ago, that is two hundred years before the founding of the Roman Empire in the West, the First Qin Emperor’s underground army of terra cotta warriors is an archeological discovery of tremendous historical importance.
Xian City Wall
Traditionally almost all Chinese towns and cities at the county level and above had walls built around them, separating them from surrounding areas for safety and a sense of grandeur. Most of these walls were torn down in the course of the 20th century to make room for expansion and development. The wall for old Xian, however, has survived and is indeed the largest of its kind and one of the best preserved in the country.
The Xian City Wall was originally built in the Tang Dynasty (618-907). The existent wall was largely the re-construction in the early Ming era (14th and 15th century). The wall enclosed a city that is rectangle in shape - the eastern and western side of the wall measure approximately 2,600 meters each while the southern and northern sides extend about 3,400 meters respectively, making the total length of the wall close to 12 kilometers (8 miles). In height the wall measures 12 meters (36 feet); in thickness it is 12 to 14 meters at top and 15 to 18 meters at bottom. The wall has hard brick exteriors and an earthen inside. A moat, 20 meters (60 feet) in width and 10 meters (30 feet) deep, surrounds the walled city in full length, with bridges across the meat leading up to four city gates, each on one side of the city. Needless to say, the Chinese took care to give the gates auspicious names: Changle (“Everlasting Happiness”), Anding (“Peace and Stability”), Yongning (“Eternal Tranquility”), and Anyuan (“Pacific Land”). Of these gates, the southern gate was the oldest, initially built in the Sui Dynasty (581-617).
The city wall being primarily a defense system, it was designed and built with various features that would be useful in times of war. Each of the gates, for instance, is consisted of several structures, which together would help defenders to keep out invaders. Up in the front is a free-standing tower which controls the bridge on the moat. Behind it is the main gate which regulates the admission of people. Further behind is a third gate which is connected to the main gate, serving as the last line of defense, where defenders could force the enemies who had breached the main gate into a small place where they could be contained or destroyed.
China being a country of Yin and Yang, it would be improper to be martial exclusively without a literary counter-balance. So on the Xian City Wall there also sit’s a Kuixing Lou - Tower of Literary Star, which is located, quite logically, close to the city’s Confucian Temple and near what is known as the Stele Forest - a depository of precious calligraphic inscriptions from the past two thousand years.
Big Wild Goose Pagoda
Xuanzang was a Chinese Buddhism monk of the Tang dynasty (618-907) who made a pilgrimage to India and brought back with him much revered Buddhist scriptures and relics. Upon his return to Changan, a temple was built out outside the Chinese capital city as the depository for the Buddhist sutra and treasures. One main building on the premise was the Big Wild Goose Pagoda (Dayanta), which has survived to our time. Constructed in 652, the pagoda is both a famous object of Buddhism devotion and an architectural feat of great historical importance. Measuring 64 meters (211 feet) in height, the pagoda is seven-storied, and its interior decorated with fine engravings by ancient artists. The texts on the two stone tablets that stand at the southern entrance of the pagoda are respectively composed by the Taizong Emperor and Gaozong Emperor of the Tang Dynasty, and they are in the handwriting of the noted Tang calligrapher Chu Suiliang. The pagoda is located five kilometers (3 miles) south of central Xian.
Forest of Stelae
Located inside the walled city of Xian, the Forest of Stelae (Beilin) is a historical museum that preserves stone tablets and monuments collected over the centuries. The forerunner of the museum was the state university in the capital city Changan of the Tang China, where a set of stone monuments with inscribed Confucian classics was first erected. This particular collection is consisted of 114 steles that bear the full texts of 12 Confucian classics, written out in over 600,000 characters (one more work, Mencius, was added in the Qing Dynasty, to make the collection a complete library of the most important Confucian classics). During the Song Dynasty, in 1090, these steles, along with some others, were relocated to the present site, and in the coming centuries the museum and its collection were further expanded. Currently over 2,300 stelae can be found at the museum, which date from the Han dynasty (206 B.C. - A.D.220) through the Qing era (1644-1911). These memorials are of wide diverse both in contents and styles. The Classic of Filial Piety, for instance, was prefaced and hand-written by the Xuanzong Emperor of the Tang Dynasty in the year 745; the text is engraved on four stelae each measuring five meters (15 feet) in height and 3 meters (9 feet) across. Another item of particular interest is the Nestorian Stele, which was erected in the Tang Dynasty to memorialize the arrival of Nestorian Christianity in China in A.D. 635. The calligraphy and other works of renowned Chinese artists such as Wang Xizhi (303 - 361), Wu Daozi (710 - 760) and Yan Zhenqing (709 - 785) can also be found at the Forest of Stelae. Interested tourists will also enjoy the show that demonstrates the process of “tablet-rubbing” by which ink prints of the engravings on steles are produced.
Bell Tower and Drum Tower
In the old days in each Chinese city there was a drum/bell tower or towers. These installations were used to sound the hours of the day and night and to mark special occasions. These buildings were the main public buildings of a city back then, which were supposed to embody the stability and strength of the city.
The bell and drum towers of Xian are located at the center of the walled city. Drum Tower was constructed in 1380, during the Ming Dynasty. This is a three-storied structured, 33 meters (108 feet) in height. Bell Tower was 3 meters (10 feet) higher than Drum Tower. When it was initially constructed in 1384, Bell Tower sat at a site that is 1,000 meters west of where it stands today. Close to two hundred years after its original construction, in 1582, the expansion of the city necessitated the moving of the building. A base was built at the new site, and the upper part of the old tower, that is the whole wooden structure, was taken apart and then reassembled on the new base - quite an architectural and engineering feat given the time when this took place. A stone tablet on the tower recorded how the relocation was accomplished.
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