China: A history still being unearthed - Telegraph
How do you rate a smile? This was the question facing us after attending an evening of music, dance and dinner at the Shaanxi Grand Opera House in Xian, China. This nightly do is strictly for tourists – every table is occupied by foreigners – but the entertainment is brilliant for all that.
In one musical tableau three women brought to life a famous mural of the Tang Dynasty called "Watching Bird" and "Catching Cicada", starting and ending as silhouettes that looked like paper cut-outs. It was captivating, haunting. At the end of the evening, as the empty bottles of Tsingtao beer and plates of half-eaten dumplings were being cleared away, the waitress presented us with a "Guest Comment Form" to fill in, then looked away anxiously.
Was the smile of the waitress Excellent, Good, merely Fair or downright Poor? It was Excellent of course, but it did leave me wondering how much fear there was behind it. This episode was an insight into just how well-oiled the tourist machine is in the home city of the Terracotta Warriors.
This was my second visit to Xian and this time the purpose was not just to see the clay army of the tyrannical Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a united China (and, come to think of it, just the sort of man to think up the idea of rating a smile). Xian was also to be the jumping-off point for a tour of China's Yellow River region, referred to in tourist literature as "the cradle of Chinese civilisation".
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China's great leap forward 10 Sep 2010
In the contiguous provinces of Shaanxi, Shanxi and Henan, through which China's second-longest river flows south then abruptly east, man made the first written records of his existence – on animal bones – and established China's earliest political and artistic cultures. Until power shifted north and east from the 10th century, the region remained the hub of a succession of dynasties, the one called Tang being generally considered the high point of Chinese civilisation.
These days the Yellow River plateau has swapped imperial robes for a boiler suit. Its coal mines and power stations feed the monster that is industrial China. But its past lives on in a succession of outstanding historic and archaeological sites that deserve to be rated world-class.
That they are not better known is partly because they are located in the heart of a vast country that only relatively recently, after nearly 4,000 years of civilisation, has been made accessible to foreigners (a region, moreover, that makes few concessions to Western tourists); and partly thanks to the Terracotta Army effect.
So far as foreign visitors are concerned, these endlessly celebrated and reproduced figures have eclipsed almost every other notable site in China (bar the Forbidden City and the Great Wall), just as Machu Picchu dominates the rich and varied archaeology of Peru. This is both a shame and a marvellous excuse for the reasonably adventurous tourist to go exploring.
Yes, yes, we did the Terracotta Warriors – and were glad to get it over with. Since I was last there, in 1998, the car park has been relocated half a mile from the actual museum so that visitors must run a gauntlet of souvenir shops to get there, battling not just through hawkers and fellow tourists but through the wall of heat that is reflected off the vast acreages of new paving stone.
After a long gap, excavations were resumed last year and 100 more figures have been unearthed and put back together. But for me, the impressiveness of the Warriors lies not merely in the sight of them, lined up in their earthen parade grounds, but in the knowledge that they represent only a tiny fraction of what still awaits discovery.
If you imagine Xian sitting at the centre of a necropolis the size of a football pitch, the pits containing the Terracotta Army occupy an area less than the size of the penalty spot. Driving from the airport towards the city, you see the telltale burial mounds pimpling the fields.
The actual tomb of Emperor Qin, remember, still awaits excavation, though fabulous stories of what it may contain, including rivers of mercury and elaborate booby traps – are legion. But other tombs have been opened up, notably that of Emperor Jing Di, who ruled China from 157 to 141BC, less than a century after Qin Shi Huang (and was, by all accounts, as enlightened as Qin was monstrous).
Jing's tomb was discovered during the building of the airport road in the early Nineties, and a museum opened on the site in 2005. It provides a poignant counterpoint to the commercial hoopla of Terracotta-Land.
Undisturbed by camera-clicking hordes, we walked along glass floors above 10 excavated burial pits containing miniature clay figures of men, women, eunuchs, pigs and chickens. The armless human figures once had wooden arms and real clothes. There were lacquer boxes and collapsed chariots, and a sense of intimacy, as if these artefacts were family heirlooms.
In this part of China, farmers and construction workers are only ever a spade's depth away from such treasures. And the vicinity of Xian is not the half of it. From Xian railway station we took a bullet train 200 miles east, and into the next phase of China's ancient history.
Our destination was Luoyang in Henan Province, which both preceded and succeeded Xian as the centre of the Chinese universe. Nowadays it is better known as the Tractor Capital of China, but it does have, up its grimy sleeve, one of the most breathtakingly audacious of China's historical sites.
A short distance to the south of the city, on the west bank of the Yi river, a stretch of limestone cliffs and hills more than half a mile long has been carved into innumerable caves and niches featuring more than 100,000 figures of the Buddha and his disciples. Known as the Longmen Grottoes, the carvings date from AD 493 to the ninth century and vary in height from an inch to nearly 60ft.
Neither foreign looters, who took some of them home to Japan and the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries, nor Red Guard thugs, who knocked bits off in the Cultural Revolution, nor the clicks of a billion cameras have disturbed the self-possession of this amazing cast, the greatest of which rival Abu Simbel, in Egypt, in size and majesty.
Many of the rulers and patrons who supported the creators of the Longmen Grottoes now lie in the landscape surrounding Luoyang. Every year, as roads are built and suburbs expanded, new tombs are discovered – or rediscovered, for most were robbed many centuries ago.
The tombs lie beneath burial mounds that look like the Neolithic tumuli of Wiltshire. If, like me, you have ever itched to walk into the centre of Silbury Hill, at Avebury, you owe yourself a visit to the Luoyang Museum of Ancient Tombs.
It's a maddening place in one sense. Twenty-eight tombs dating from the Han Dynasty to the Song – AD 200 to early 13th century – have been moved here stone by stone and "reconstructed", though you are never quite sure whether you are looking at the real thing or a copy.
But there is no such doubt about the centrepiece of the museum: the excavated burial mound of an emperor of the Northern Wei Dynasty, the rulers who first inspired the Longmen Grottoes. This is the real thing – as conical as a peasant's hat, as dark and mysterious as fear itself.
An earthen ramp slopes deep beneath the cone to a beehive-shaped chamber of blackened brick containing a stone platform and vast stone coffin. Standing there alone in the cool of the hill, my thoughts ran beyond Wiltshire to the daddy of them all, Cheops' chamber in the Great Pyramid at Giza.
From Luoyang we were driven north into Shanxi Province, following an approximate timeline of Chinese history. Our guide for this part of the journey, Peter Lou, was proud of the treasures that lurk beneath the industrial patina of his home patch.
"Shanxi Province is like a pearl buried in the sand," he said. "You just see a small part of it, but then you uncover it and see how big it is."
The analogy is a good one. Pearls there are – wooden towers and pagodas, Buddhist and Daoist temples, more vast and astounding Buddhas at Longmen's sister site, Yungang Caves – often bizarrely juxtaposed with heavy industry.
Guangsheng Temple, for example, containing the 150ft-high Flying Rainbow Pagoda – built of coloured, glazed tiles during the Ming Dynasty – sits above a smoggy landscape of factories and construction sites like a butterfly poised on the edge of a tar barrel.
Indeed, as well as a history lesson, our journey was a lesson in the irreconcilable paradoxes of modern China. In our V W Santana, with the air conditioning thrumming against the heat and grime outside, we were driven along country roads lined with melon sellers, overtaking donkeys-and-carts and homemade tractors that looked like Edwardian invalid carriages, and being overtaken in turn by thundering coal trucks.
The country roads turned into toll expressways lined with mile upon mile of high-maintenance topiary. Here the hilariously transliterated road signs – "Easy Hair of Front Trouble" was my favourite – added to the sense of unreality that tinged the whole trip. And then we would drop off the expressway and turn a corner into this or that Dynasty. Or, in the case of my favourite site of all, we would find ourselves floating in air.
Suspended from a sheer cliff face some 150ft above the base of a valley, the so-called Hanging Temple – Xuankong Si in Chinese – could be the flotsam from an Ice Age shipwreck. The first structure was built here in about AD 500, on timbers cantilevered into the rock face, and it has been periodically patched and shored up ever since.
When it functioned as a monastery it was a particularly mellow place because monks of China's three ancient religions – Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism – lived and worshipped alongside each other. The last monks moved out in the Forties but, as I clambered along the temple's galleon-like companionways, I fancied their good karma still suffused the wood and tiles and multicoloured religious art.
The site, in the foothills of the sacred Heng Mountain, was well chosen. The sloping cliff face above provides a protective overhang, the sun's rays do not shine directly on it and it was sufficiently elevated from the world for the sounds of earthly life – dogs barking, people laughing – scarcely to reach it.
This is no longer the case as its peace is now shattered daily, and its equilibrium tested, by swarming, babbling tourists who pour over it like rivers of mercury. But they – we – are the least of its worries. For not 300 yards away is a dam.
As I gazed up at the towering concrete wall of the dam the sound of a piledriver smashing into rock reverberated around the valley. It is hard to imagine an engineering project more likely to destabilise the fragile structure that clings like a swallow's nest to the rock face alongside it.
In this moment I realised that virtually every precious thing we had seen in this "cradle of Chinese civilisation" is under threat, either from development or from the pollution that attends it. Turning my back on the dam I gazed into a tiny pavilion where a golden Buddha gazed back with a smile that cannot be rated.
Nigel Richardson's journey was arranged by China specialist CTS Horizons (020 7836 9911; www.ctshorizons.com).
A 16-day tour of the Yellow River region, starting in Beijing and ending in Xian, costs from £1,995 per person (sharing), including international flights, all transfers, provision of a car, driver and guides, breakfasts, and sightseeing.
In one musical tableau three women brought to life a famous mural of the Tang Dynasty called "Watching Bird" and "Catching Cicada", starting and ending as silhouettes that looked like paper cut-outs. It was captivating, haunting. At the end of the evening, as the empty bottles of Tsingtao beer and plates of half-eaten dumplings were being cleared away, the waitress presented us with a "Guest Comment Form" to fill in, then looked away anxiously.
Was the smile of the waitress Excellent, Good, merely Fair or downright Poor? It was Excellent of course, but it did leave me wondering how much fear there was behind it. This episode was an insight into just how well-oiled the tourist machine is in the home city of the Terracotta Warriors.
This was my second visit to Xian and this time the purpose was not just to see the clay army of the tyrannical Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a united China (and, come to think of it, just the sort of man to think up the idea of rating a smile). Xian was also to be the jumping-off point for a tour of China's Yellow River region, referred to in tourist literature as "the cradle of Chinese civilisation".
RELATED ARTICLES
Wuzhen West: Sanitized village is China's Venice 17 Jan 2011
More China travel 10 Sep 2010
Chengdu: welcome to panda country 28 Aug 2010
The Opposite House, Beijing 02 Aug 2010
Pingyao: holding out in the rush to the future 23 Oct 2010
China's great leap forward 10 Sep 2010
In the contiguous provinces of Shaanxi, Shanxi and Henan, through which China's second-longest river flows south then abruptly east, man made the first written records of his existence – on animal bones – and established China's earliest political and artistic cultures. Until power shifted north and east from the 10th century, the region remained the hub of a succession of dynasties, the one called Tang being generally considered the high point of Chinese civilisation.
These days the Yellow River plateau has swapped imperial robes for a boiler suit. Its coal mines and power stations feed the monster that is industrial China. But its past lives on in a succession of outstanding historic and archaeological sites that deserve to be rated world-class.
That they are not better known is partly because they are located in the heart of a vast country that only relatively recently, after nearly 4,000 years of civilisation, has been made accessible to foreigners (a region, moreover, that makes few concessions to Western tourists); and partly thanks to the Terracotta Army effect.
So far as foreign visitors are concerned, these endlessly celebrated and reproduced figures have eclipsed almost every other notable site in China (bar the Forbidden City and the Great Wall), just as Machu Picchu dominates the rich and varied archaeology of Peru. This is both a shame and a marvellous excuse for the reasonably adventurous tourist to go exploring.
Yes, yes, we did the Terracotta Warriors – and were glad to get it over with. Since I was last there, in 1998, the car park has been relocated half a mile from the actual museum so that visitors must run a gauntlet of souvenir shops to get there, battling not just through hawkers and fellow tourists but through the wall of heat that is reflected off the vast acreages of new paving stone.
After a long gap, excavations were resumed last year and 100 more figures have been unearthed and put back together. But for me, the impressiveness of the Warriors lies not merely in the sight of them, lined up in their earthen parade grounds, but in the knowledge that they represent only a tiny fraction of what still awaits discovery.
If you imagine Xian sitting at the centre of a necropolis the size of a football pitch, the pits containing the Terracotta Army occupy an area less than the size of the penalty spot. Driving from the airport towards the city, you see the telltale burial mounds pimpling the fields.
The actual tomb of Emperor Qin, remember, still awaits excavation, though fabulous stories of what it may contain, including rivers of mercury and elaborate booby traps – are legion. But other tombs have been opened up, notably that of Emperor Jing Di, who ruled China from 157 to 141BC, less than a century after Qin Shi Huang (and was, by all accounts, as enlightened as Qin was monstrous).
Jing's tomb was discovered during the building of the airport road in the early Nineties, and a museum opened on the site in 2005. It provides a poignant counterpoint to the commercial hoopla of Terracotta-Land.
Undisturbed by camera-clicking hordes, we walked along glass floors above 10 excavated burial pits containing miniature clay figures of men, women, eunuchs, pigs and chickens. The armless human figures once had wooden arms and real clothes. There were lacquer boxes and collapsed chariots, and a sense of intimacy, as if these artefacts were family heirlooms.
In this part of China, farmers and construction workers are only ever a spade's depth away from such treasures. And the vicinity of Xian is not the half of it. From Xian railway station we took a bullet train 200 miles east, and into the next phase of China's ancient history.
Our destination was Luoyang in Henan Province, which both preceded and succeeded Xian as the centre of the Chinese universe. Nowadays it is better known as the Tractor Capital of China, but it does have, up its grimy sleeve, one of the most breathtakingly audacious of China's historical sites.
A short distance to the south of the city, on the west bank of the Yi river, a stretch of limestone cliffs and hills more than half a mile long has been carved into innumerable caves and niches featuring more than 100,000 figures of the Buddha and his disciples. Known as the Longmen Grottoes, the carvings date from AD 493 to the ninth century and vary in height from an inch to nearly 60ft.
Neither foreign looters, who took some of them home to Japan and the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries, nor Red Guard thugs, who knocked bits off in the Cultural Revolution, nor the clicks of a billion cameras have disturbed the self-possession of this amazing cast, the greatest of which rival Abu Simbel, in Egypt, in size and majesty.
Many of the rulers and patrons who supported the creators of the Longmen Grottoes now lie in the landscape surrounding Luoyang. Every year, as roads are built and suburbs expanded, new tombs are discovered – or rediscovered, for most were robbed many centuries ago.
The tombs lie beneath burial mounds that look like the Neolithic tumuli of Wiltshire. If, like me, you have ever itched to walk into the centre of Silbury Hill, at Avebury, you owe yourself a visit to the Luoyang Museum of Ancient Tombs.
It's a maddening place in one sense. Twenty-eight tombs dating from the Han Dynasty to the Song – AD 200 to early 13th century – have been moved here stone by stone and "reconstructed", though you are never quite sure whether you are looking at the real thing or a copy.
But there is no such doubt about the centrepiece of the museum: the excavated burial mound of an emperor of the Northern Wei Dynasty, the rulers who first inspired the Longmen Grottoes. This is the real thing – as conical as a peasant's hat, as dark and mysterious as fear itself.
An earthen ramp slopes deep beneath the cone to a beehive-shaped chamber of blackened brick containing a stone platform and vast stone coffin. Standing there alone in the cool of the hill, my thoughts ran beyond Wiltshire to the daddy of them all, Cheops' chamber in the Great Pyramid at Giza.
From Luoyang we were driven north into Shanxi Province, following an approximate timeline of Chinese history. Our guide for this part of the journey, Peter Lou, was proud of the treasures that lurk beneath the industrial patina of his home patch.
"Shanxi Province is like a pearl buried in the sand," he said. "You just see a small part of it, but then you uncover it and see how big it is."
The analogy is a good one. Pearls there are – wooden towers and pagodas, Buddhist and Daoist temples, more vast and astounding Buddhas at Longmen's sister site, Yungang Caves – often bizarrely juxtaposed with heavy industry.
Guangsheng Temple, for example, containing the 150ft-high Flying Rainbow Pagoda – built of coloured, glazed tiles during the Ming Dynasty – sits above a smoggy landscape of factories and construction sites like a butterfly poised on the edge of a tar barrel.
Indeed, as well as a history lesson, our journey was a lesson in the irreconcilable paradoxes of modern China. In our V W Santana, with the air conditioning thrumming against the heat and grime outside, we were driven along country roads lined with melon sellers, overtaking donkeys-and-carts and homemade tractors that looked like Edwardian invalid carriages, and being overtaken in turn by thundering coal trucks.
The country roads turned into toll expressways lined with mile upon mile of high-maintenance topiary. Here the hilariously transliterated road signs – "Easy Hair of Front Trouble" was my favourite – added to the sense of unreality that tinged the whole trip. And then we would drop off the expressway and turn a corner into this or that Dynasty. Or, in the case of my favourite site of all, we would find ourselves floating in air.
Suspended from a sheer cliff face some 150ft above the base of a valley, the so-called Hanging Temple – Xuankong Si in Chinese – could be the flotsam from an Ice Age shipwreck. The first structure was built here in about AD 500, on timbers cantilevered into the rock face, and it has been periodically patched and shored up ever since.
When it functioned as a monastery it was a particularly mellow place because monks of China's three ancient religions – Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism – lived and worshipped alongside each other. The last monks moved out in the Forties but, as I clambered along the temple's galleon-like companionways, I fancied their good karma still suffused the wood and tiles and multicoloured religious art.
The site, in the foothills of the sacred Heng Mountain, was well chosen. The sloping cliff face above provides a protective overhang, the sun's rays do not shine directly on it and it was sufficiently elevated from the world for the sounds of earthly life – dogs barking, people laughing – scarcely to reach it.
This is no longer the case as its peace is now shattered daily, and its equilibrium tested, by swarming, babbling tourists who pour over it like rivers of mercury. But they – we – are the least of its worries. For not 300 yards away is a dam.
As I gazed up at the towering concrete wall of the dam the sound of a piledriver smashing into rock reverberated around the valley. It is hard to imagine an engineering project more likely to destabilise the fragile structure that clings like a swallow's nest to the rock face alongside it.
In this moment I realised that virtually every precious thing we had seen in this "cradle of Chinese civilisation" is under threat, either from development or from the pollution that attends it. Turning my back on the dam I gazed into a tiny pavilion where a golden Buddha gazed back with a smile that cannot be rated.
Nigel Richardson's journey was arranged by China specialist CTS Horizons (020 7836 9911; www.ctshorizons.com).
A 16-day tour of the Yellow River region, starting in Beijing and ending in Xian, costs from £1,995 per person (sharing), including international flights, all transfers, provision of a car, driver and guides, breakfasts, and sightseeing.
