Xi'an: Street Life

Xi'an is not just a museum of art and culture. It is also a vibrant city of nearly seven million souls. Here are a few of them going about their daily business. This particular day happens to be during Golden Week, THE National Holiday in all of China, thus the heavy presence of China's flag.

http://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/XiAnLifeOnTheStreets#

Xi'an: Art and History

Xi'an is home to two unique museums that chronicle China's cultural past. The first of these is the Shaanxi History Museum, a collection of nearly 400,000 artifacts ranging from prehistoric skulls and stone tools up through artworks from the end of the Qing dynasty (1912). The museum is especially famous for material from the pre-Ming period (before 1350) of Xi'an's golden age. The album shows just a few samples from this vast collection:

http://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/ShannxiMuseum#

The second collection, the Forest of Stelae Museum, is housed in a complex of seven separate halls that are all on the grounds of a former Confucian academy. The stelae are massive stone pillars -- more than 1000 in all -- that are inscribed with the definitive versions of classic texts such as the Confucian Analects and the I Ching (Book of Changes) dating from as early as the ninth century. Students and scholars could make rubbings of the stelae, thus eliminating the vexatious problem (for medievalists, at least) of scribal errors made by copyists.

Muslims were not the only religious minority welcomed in this cosmopolitan city. One stone pillar crowned by a cross and dating to 781 CE preserves a text brought to Xi'an in 635 CE by Nestorian Christians fleeing persecution at the hands of their co-religionists.

Craftsmen still make hand rubbings of the stelae for visitors. We purchased an ink rubbing that is about 7 feet by 3 feet. Its Chinese characters form a famous poem hidden among the stalk and leaves of a bamboo plant. http://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/Stelae#

Xi'an: The Muslim Quarter

Since Xi'an was the former imperial capital and the eastern terminus of the Silk Road, it became the home of many Muslim immigrants from as early as the 8th century when Islam was still a young religion. Today, the Muslim community in Xi'an boasts a population of more than 30,000, most of whom are of the Hui ethnic minority. They maintain a number of historic mosques and populate a very lively Muslim Quarter in the heart of the old city. It was one of our favorite places to walk and eat, although the evening crowds were so dense as to make the narrow streets nearly impassable. Here are a few pictures of life in the Muslim Quarter:

http://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/MuslimQuarter#

Xi'an: Ancient Walled City

October 1 is National Day, the 59th anniversary of Mao Zedong's proclamation of the founding of the People's Republic of China. (Thus making me almost two months younger than the PRC!) As a result, the entire nation celebrates "Golden Week," giving Susie and me ten days off to travel along with several hundred million Chinese families. We chose two completely different destinations for our getaway: the ancient imperial capital of Xi'an (Shaanxi Province) and the mountain capital of Lhasa, Tibet.

In 1066 BCE, the Western Zhou dynasty was centered near Xi'an. The city became the imperial capital of China when the nation was unified by its first real emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, in the year 221 BCE. Qin Shi Huangdi organized the effort to build the Great Wall, standardized money and measurements, and established the basis for the legal system. He is best known as the creator of the mausoleum with the terra cotta army (subject of another blog coming soon).

The high point of Xi'an's prosperity was during the golden age of the Tang dynasty (618-907). As the imperial capital and eastern terminus of the Silk Road, Xi'an became what was probably the largest (more than 1 million inhabitants) and wealthiest city in the world. Today it is still a major

city, the capital of Shaanxi Province and the home of a very diverse population numbering about 6.6 million inhabitants.

The inner ring of Xi'an's defensive walls was built by the first Ming emperor in the late 14th century. The outer ring of walls, which once enclosed a city covering more than 30 square miles, has now disappeared. We took a couple of walks along the walls:
http://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/XiAnWalls#

Adventures in Shopping: The Sequel

A few days ago, Susie posted a blog entry and some photos about the challenges of shopping in a supermarket (Adventures in Shopping . . . or WHAT am I buying??). This is a sequel that offers a glimpse of another way to shop in Dalian. A few blocks from our flat there is a very long, narrow street -- really more of an alley for pedestrians -- that runs for two or three blocks. It is lined with numerous small vendors selling fresh food: meat, fish, grain, fruits, and vegetables. In the evening, the street is packed with a crowd of shoppers picking up items to take home for dinner. Everything is fresh (some items are still very much alive, in fact) and your purchase is always cut, cleaned, trimmed, weighed, counted, or measured to your individual order. You don't have to worry about the environmental costs of buying pre-packaged food at this market!

http://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/AdventuresInShoppingTheSequel#

Two Festivals

There are two national festivals in September. The first is Teacher's Day (September 10), begun in 1984 in response to the violent anti-intellectualism of the Cultural Revolution. When I entered the classroom on Wednesday, my students surprised me with a very thoughtful gift: a beautiful piece of red knotwork to bring Sue and me luck. The "class monitor" gave a short speech thanking me for my energy and diligence in teaching him and his classmates. After the brief formalities, a few pictures of these energetic future English teachers were definitely in order: http://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/TeacherSDay#

The second holiday is the Zhong Qiutian -- the Mid-Autumn Festival -- that occurs on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month (September 14) when the full moon is thought to be at its brightest and most beautiful. The tradition dates back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907), when Chinese emperors offered sacrifices to the Moon God. Today, the festival is celebrated with family reunions (or groups of classmates going to a restaurant or a karaoke bar). Family and friends gaze at the full moon, drink tea or wine, and eat delicious round "moon cakes" filled with candy, fruit, nuts, eggs, or meat. As "foreign experts," the city government of Dalian treated us to a free concert of traditional Chinese music. The program included symphonic arrangements of well-known folk songs, arias from the Beijing opera, virtuoso soloists on tradtional instruments like the erhu and flute, and even an arrangement of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" scored for a Chinese instruments: http://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/MoonFestival#

The Freshman Experience

As we mentioned in a previous entry (First Day for Freshmen), the life of first-year students at a Chinese university is quite different from that of their American counterparts. Classes have already been meeting for two weeks when the freshmen arrive. Sophomores clean the dorm rooms of the incoming students, meet them at the train and bus stations, help them register, conduct campus tours, and even carry their bags and belongings to their dormitories.

On their second day on campus, however, all of that changes. The freshmen are issued uniforms, divided up into platoons, and assigned to the supervision of a drill instructor from the People's Liberation Army. For the next two weeks, the freshmen learn military discipline, march in formation, sing patriotic songs, learn martial arts, and engage in various group-building activities with a cohort of classmates that they will stay with for the next four years.

Here are a few pictures showing the first days of a new student's life at LNU:

http://picasaweb.google.com/SteveDC505/FreshmanExperience#