Drunk and Improper Clothes Not Allowed to Visit

Thus reads the sign at the entrance to the Yangling or Hanyangling Mausoleum to the north of Xi’an. One of the joys of this trip has been reading all of the fractured English. It’s always good for a laugh.

Monday was a pretty fun day overall. Breakfast was a bit noisier than normal as there was a large group of Chinese who were eating with us. (Thus far it has just been our group at breakfast.) Nice thing was that they had mini pancakes for us, and they weren’t half bad! No hidden surprises inside.

In Chinese class, I finally got my Chinese name. I am now Wú Qiáng. Language class is going well and every day we keep adding words to our slowly increasing vocab and we’re getting braver out in the “real world.” After Chinese we had a lecture on the Han Dynasty which was interesting and informative as always.

For lunch, my friend John and I went to the Mongolian restaurant that I’ve been to a couple times. He went on Sunday and wrote down a couple dishes that he had had and liked. When we sat down we were given the menu, which unfortunately is completely useless for us, as there are no pictures, English or pinyin (which is Chinese transcribed in Latin letters.) So John pulled out his notebook and showed her the two dishes that he had and the waitress wrote them down. Then we got brave. “Do you want some dumplings,” asked John. “Sure, why not.” So we asked for “jiao ze”. The waitress said something that we assumed was “what kind,” so we responded with “zhuro,” or pork. She rattled off a few things and we both sat there trying to figure out what she could be asking. We said pork again, and she repeated her spiel again. Finally a Chinese man at the next table turned to us and asked if we would like his help. “Yes,” we happily responded. So he asked the waitress what she had asked us. She had wanted to know what we wanted with the pork dumplings: shrimp, cabbage, etc. So we went with cabbage. We also ordered beer and rice, in Chinese. So we had the two dishes that John had the previous day: a dish of stewed tomatoes and beef and a dish of silken tofu and hard boiled eggs soaked in soy sauce with vegetables in a delicious savoury sauce. We were quite full, then came the dumplings that we had forgotten all about. Two big plates of them. Ugh! We each managed to eat just a few before giving up. Besides, we had to be back for our afternoon excursion. We felt bad wasting so much food, but dumplings really don’t keep well. Our meal came to a total of $8.50.

In the afternoon, we drove an hour to the north of Xi’an to visit the Yangling Mausoleum, which dates from the Han Dynasty. This was similar to the style of burial of the Terracotta warriors, but those are associated with the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty. I was blown away by Yangling. Again, there were effigies of thousands of soldiers, civil servants, servants, dancers, etc., but these were done on a 1/3 scale. They were also anatomically correct. You may ask yourself, why are they naked? They weren’t. When they were made, they had pottery heads and bodies, wooden arms, were painted and were clothed in silk. However, after being buried for over 2000 years, the silk and wood rotted away, leaving these strange, almost alien looking bodies lying around the tomb in disarray. In addition to people, there were thousands of animal figures: horses, bovines, pigs, dogs, chickens, sheep, goats, etc. These were all buried to feed the emperor in the afterlife. I think we were all pretty enamored by the animals. The museum itself was far and away better than what was at the Terracotta Warriors. This museum was all enclosed, air conditioned, lighted in a way to try to preserve the paint on the figures and it actually took you down into the pits where many of the figures still are. So we were walking down in glass cases, looking right, left and below us to examine all of the figurines in situ. Most of us agreed that this was our favourite museum visit yet. We were all ready to buy animal figurines, but unfortunately, the gift shop only sold large, expensive reproductions, so I and others settled for the museum book. Next time I go to the mausoleum, I will be sure to leave my drunk clothes at home.