China Xi'an

At Xi'an Normal University

Bank power

The Terracotta Army is the reason why everybody goes to Xi'an. Having seen an early exhibition of the prize pieces in the Luisiana Museum, back in the nineties, I was doubtful whether we should join our friends going there. I am glad we did. Paul had an invitation to a university there; and once we decided to go, we got the invitation too. For the price of giving one lecture, we were taken care of for two days. It turned out that Xian is an 8 million city, with 40 universities - with all the external attributes of a fully modern place, so we were suprised to run into a power outage, which everybody else took in their stride, most shops just started up their gasoline generators (and put them out in the street, to avoid the noise inside). One striking difference between Shanghai and Xi'an was the air quality. It is absolutely horrible in Xi'an, buildings a few hundreds meters away are in haze.





In Paradise

The city seems to be immensely proud of being the capital of China (Chang'an) during the Tang dynasty. On our first day, it was not considered wise to go into city center. Antijapanese demonstrations were expected, which would lead to the center being cordoned off by the police, so we were taken to Tang Paradise, once the grounds of the palace of a Tang imperial concubine. A huge outdoor park with a replica of Tang palace, complete with wall paintings and famous litterary scenes recreated as groups of lifesize figures. One of these shows a scene with the emperor, varius court officials, foreign ambassadors and the poet Li Bai (Li Po). Li Bai has been asked to write some mundane text for the emperor, and requests in his turn that the prime minister should prepare his ink, and the first imperial concubine rinse his brush. Whetever the truth of this story, history books record that Li Bai drack a lot, and was expelled from the court. Another story says he drowned trying to embrace the reflection of the moon in a river.



Poetry is literally written large in Xian. In the park, there is a huge rockery with poems chiselled in the rocks everywhere, and especially Tang poetry is in the highest esteem - but so are politbureau generals, to judge by the fans on the souvenir stand.

Rock poems

Poetry written large



There are genuine old buildings in Xian as well. Ming period walls enclose the old city - with Ming Drum Tower and Bell Tower in city center surrounded by traffic and illuminated by night. A labyrinth of souvenir and food bazaars stretches from the Drum Tower into the Muslim part of the city -  we did some lighthearted shopping and serious haggling there.

The 65m Great Wild Goose Pagoda going back to 652 stands spectacularly in the center of another large park outside the Ming city, but it used to be within what at Tang time was world´s largest (84 km² ) city. Big and spectacular would be the words for a lot of other things things in  China - eg a shopping mall which changes colour.

The students who took care of us spoke very good english (many of the teachers did not) and we could discuss a variety topics. I was surprised to hear that for Chinese mothers to leave their child to study or postdoc abroad, something we often seen in Sweden, was far from being considered acceptable.