Xi'an and Beijing, China
Wednesday, October 6, 1999
Hello
I can't write for very long because I'm in an Internet bar across from a big hotel in Xi'an, China, where most of the 79 people on our field trip here just had dinner while listening to T'ang dynasty music in a cabaret setting, and the show will be over soon. Hong Kong, where we flew from yesterday and where I spent practically no time, has a dramatic harbor with lots of high rise buildings nestled near the water's edge under large tree covered hills. It was muggy. Tomorrow we fly to Beijing.
We arrived last night in this smoggy, ancient capital of Chinese civilization which was historically significant for thousands of years but which now looks like any other industrial city that isn't paying too much attention to environmental policy. We saw the Xi'an life size terracotta warriors; there were supposed to be 8,000 of them made during the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE by 700,000 people but only a small portion of them remain. Many of them have been partially damaged. The whole vast complex is an amazing find from the past.
We also saw a hot springs - which now has been filtered off to feed some so-called hospitals, which are really fronts for government bureaucrat's own private spas - around which an extraordinarily beautiful Chinese city had built. So much of the old and beautiful has been destroyed for the new, less attractive and practical, both by successive dynasties and my Mao's cultural revolution. The site of relatively poor and very numerous Chinese entrepreneurs lining the streets with tourist souvenir stands and riding bicycles isn't very pretty. Our guide, Mr. Wang, has been great: very informative, funny, approachable, witty, and willing to take on our challenging questions. He obviously enjoys his job.
Friday, October 8, 1999
Hi
We flew to Beijing yesterday and I'm paying for Internet time at about the rate of .16 per minute at Beijing International Hotel on the main thoroughfare in the city so I won't write for long.
The day before yesterday: Xi'an, a gray city of 7 million somewhat poor people, industrializing and moving forward, Terracotta soldiers, hot springs (Shangxi) with a very beautiful Chinese village built upon a hillside which was also the site where Chang Kai Shek was abducted in 1936 and released only after he agreed to fight with the Communists against Japan. Third world muddy streets and vendors on bicycles selling chicken feet and cauliflowers. Semester at Sea students who request basic massages and at least three of 10 or 15 of whom get Chinese sex workers who don't speak English and who don't seem to understand the word no.
Yesterday: The amazingly beautiful and immense Forbidden Palace, home for 500 years to emperors in the Ming and Ching Dynasties (early 1400s until 1911) who had wives, concubines, eunuchs and slave girls in an elaborate social drama, which as you walk through it becomes more intimate and lovely. The roofs of the Forbidden Palace are particularly beautiful. And we stood in Tianamen Square, across from the Forbidden Palace, on the last day of of the 50th anniversary of Communism, close to where the famous student stood down the tank. This is China's third largest city with 13 million inhabitants. It's more modern and much better off city than Xi'an - at least the road in from the airport to a very nice hotel seemed prosperous. I just tried to get the New York Times on the Web and could not while I could get cnet on the web. Censorship I suspect.