Apr 30 2002 - Xian: A Real Fake

Where to begin? Hastings. I have travelled with Hastings before but he is a well-organized Aussie so things don’t go wrong – boring - and I don’t write about our travels.

Well he was true to form, nothing went wrong; it was just the place.

Everything from here on is a complete lie, with no basis in truth whatsoever, honest guv.

I had always avoided the real big tourist attractions on the assumption that my innumerable friends who were coming out for a visit would want to go to the biggies. Our time in China was coming to an end and the aforementioned innumerable friends had been conspicuous by their absence so time we went for a real one for the weekend – Xian or The Terracotta Army to my ignorant readers.

This is a two and a half hour flight from Guangzhou (think Athens if you are Northern European, just think if you are North American), so no mean venture. The usual tight schedule was organised i.e. flights and hotels booked. The guidebook is for reading on the aircraft.

Naturally the plane was late and our high quality hotel was well out of the centre of town. How do we know this? We get a street map, with no scale on it naturally, when we get to the hotel about 9 on Friday evening and walk straight towards the middle of town. After twenty minutes we cross the first named crossroad on our map and we are not even half way to the city walls.

We beat a retreat and find a sort of real café/coffee shop close to our hotel – no not a Dutch Coffee Shop. Oh shit, we did not ask, perhaps it was a real Dutch Coffee Shop. This was authentic Chinese – a Baby Grand Piano with a young pianist playing old English “Folk Songs” (“Greensleaves” would you believe) to about Level 3 Hastings assured me. It will come as no surprise to most of my readers that I do not have a clue what Level 3 means unless it is a computer game, and that only in the abstract because I have never reached level 2 at any of them.

No clues yet? Well not for us, we were gullible tourists. We were such tourists that we joined an official tour group on the Saturday run by the government tourist agency (the infamous CITS for those that have looked at their Lonely Planet). I am not saying that we had joined an expensive tour but there were about 15 people on the bus, only two of whom did not speak English and the majority of people were either English or Aussie.

First stop was the “Big Goose Pagoda”. I have no idea why it is called as such. There are various references to things being built in 648, 652 and 1335 in the literature. The guide was sufficiently attractive that Hastings took in all these dates. Being a rather more experienced Chinese tourist, I asked when the actual building in front of us was built. “It dates from the Qing dynasty but was renovated in the mid-1980s in the Ming style” was the answer. I realise that you, as students of the world, know that the Qing dynasty was overthrown less than 100 years ago and that the depredations of the Cultural Revolution left most vaguely religious buildings in ruins, so I will not mention it.

Next stop was some gardens at a joint outside town that was famous for some Emperor taking his favourite tart, oops sorry, concubine (one of China’s four famous beauties) for the summer to do a bit of skinny-dipping. Apart from the bottom of the aforementioned tart’s bathing pool (reconstructed naturally) having a notice in it saying “Exit” over the drain and people charging you for drinking filthy water, Lourdes style, one thing was very noticeable.

Credit where it is due, our guide told us the flowers were all fake. Looking at the tubs of extremely uniform tulips, we could see what she meant. What was more surprising was that, as we walked round, we could see fake fabric blossom attached to the trees by bits of wire. What made it worse was that we (Hastings and I) had commented on how nice the Cherry Blossom was on the way in before the guide spoke up. We had a bet that it was real or not. I won, but only because I had sneaked off to check. The guide had not lied but I did complain to her that some of the Magnolia was real; the fake flowers were in full flower but the real ones a few centimetres away were only half open.

Next step a New Stone Age village. This is from about 6,000 B.C. Some interesting conclusions from the archeologists. A matriarchal society with ditches running through the middle of the village (two metres deep, would you believe) to keep the families separate. The ditches were OK for the men to leap across to engage in a bit of consensual multi-relationship shagging (I believe that we might call it loose morals, a free for all or an orgy, depending on your background) but were to keep the women apart! There was more of the village outside that we did not have time to look at but was notable for an entrance consisting of a rather large naked woman’s body with a fanny for a gate (that is an English fanny, not an American one).

China has had quite a few capital cities. I am not talking about England here, which can raise three on a good day, or France that struggles to get past one without a schism. No China has had about seventeen.

One of these ex-capitals was Chang’an, which was the capital for three centuries during the European “Dark Ages” (Americans think of the “pioneers” of Salt Lake City and multiply by about 15 and you will get the idea – well actually you won’t but do not worry about it). This was big town stuff, perhaps the biggest city in the world at the time and we do not have to mention the competition – there wasn’t much, Rome was knackered, Alexandria was way past its peak, Tikal was never that big, Mexico City was centuries later. Constantinople was about the only competition but their Christian “Saviours” fixed that a bit later.

So you are in Chang’an’s modern successor in the early 1970s and think that your second-rate city could do with a bit of a boost- what do you do? Why, you build a few castes, create a few models from them, stick a bit of paint on them and chuck them down an empty well. This goes rather well and, having kept the castes, you knock up a few more as required with the ageing process built in, naturally, and you have one of the world’s major tourist attractions on your hands.

Supply and Demand is no problem. You only have a few hundred exhibits on site but you announce that there are actually 6,000 so archaeological funding should not be a problem. A western punter wanting a full size one (over real size – close to 2 metres tall) is no problem because of the “original” castes. Meanwhile smaller models can be produced to a high quality. Obviously, if you take the punters to the place where these new figures were being made by the “old terracotta” method and tell them that the quality is much higher than in the city they will buy. I did not succumb for two reasons – the terracotta warriors are badly made and ugly plus all the prices in the shop for other items were 10 TIMES the price that they were in other places that you can easily buy them.

I have digressed. To add a bit of authenticity to the plan you build a few buildings that look like aircraft hangars over the “archaeological sites” and the declare that you are not going to do any more digging in the big ones at the moment (where there are 4,000 “unexcavated” warriors) because you are worried about the light affecting the colours on the Terracotta. A bit of black paint on the windows? Turn out the lights? Perish the thought.

Back to the hotel and out to see a bit of original local culture for the evening. This was some music, dancing, scarf-waving, drumming and a bit of ventriloquism but was (honestly) thoroughly enjoyable. Naturally it was authentic.

The next day was visiting a few towers, which were pretty OK, definitely built pre-1990 plus a Mosque and a Wall. It is a general problem in China that they have many old, historic, antiquated, dodgy relics (choose adjectives to suit taste) that all look like they were reconstructed thirty years ago. Unfortunately this is not usually true; they were knocked up in the last decade, last year, last month, last week or last night – in the appropriate style of course. They all look old before they are finished. I am clearly a gullible tourist because I believed that these towers and the mosque were actually a bit older. You cannot easily tell the real age for several reasons of which the most conspicuous is that they get a paint job every year or three. This is great decoration and I have many poor photographs to prove that I believe it, even if it is not truly representative of any period, but that does not help with making a decent estimate of the true age.

The Mosque proved a little troublesome. What is the difference between a Mosque and a Taoist or Budhist temple? Not a hell of a lot - a shortage of Budhas perhaps and about three small bits of writing in Arabic – Oh and a few guys in funny white hats who actually went to pray when some old guy with a microphone started shouting. Otherwise ……

That left the walls. These are big, I mean big, as in seriously big. These are rectangular, with a circumference of 14 kilometres, 12 metres high and 12 metres wide AT THE TOP. If you think York you are in the wrong league; they claim that you could drive six coaches wide along the top and I believe them. You can hire Golf Carts or Tandems to get around the top. Proper huge defended gateways, strong points every hundred metres or so. They are much more impressive than a few knocked up mouldings. Allegedly built originally about 1400 A.D. so contemporary with the big Venetian/Genoese Castles around the Med. I have no doubt that the current version has been largely rebuilt but things are not so straight, clearly demarcate districts and a bit inconsistent – I believed them.

My whole theory about the city undermined.