The End of the Silk Road

I thought I would start out with a picture today. I am the one with the beard. I thought a beard would be appropriate for a visit to the city where the Silk Road ends (from the Chinese perspective, the Silk Road starts here), but none of the chinese muslims sport beards. In every other way, however, the Silk Road has made its presence known here. This is the first city where people who really look and act differently are all living together in an integrated and organic way. It is a sense of mature multiculturalism that Shanghai, for all its international businesses and people, does not have.

One nice thing about Xi'an leapt out immediately. I saw a schoolyard with kids for the first time on this trip. This town has lots of children running around. I even saw toddlers wandering around. The kids have the strangest alternatives to diapers. Their pants are split at the crotch, so that when they squat, their bums are in the open air. The toddlers go right there in the street, both No. 1 and No.2. The city seems friendly to all of the young and innocent; even puppies and kittens look happier. In Nanjing I saw cats tied with leashes on the porches of storefronts, and they looked stressed and lost. Here in Xi'an I saw a puppy playing with a piece of paper. I later saw a second school, and in the Muslim Quarter I saw baby buggies, multi-child families, and 10 and 15 year old sons running restaurants.

There are 60,000 Muslims here in Xi'an. The Muslim Quarter has an outdoor market that looks like a bazaar, not a farmer's market. The streets are lined with merchants selling all kinds of trinkets (similar to most tourist districts in China) but also a wide variety of food I have not seen anywhere else in China. They specialize in breads and fruits, and of course the best stuff is when they combine the two to make dessert. We had dinner at a place where dinner's first step is to shred your own breadcrumbs to put into the soup. The soup itself was a mix of broth, rice noodles, beef, tofu, and other assorted vegetables. Eating it made us all sweat. Its a good thing the meal came with plum juice. We spent more on plum juice than we did on the soup. We were waited on by an 11-year old and a 14-year old. We got a look at the kitchen ou our way out, and the oldest son was standing in front of a 5x12 foot oven cooking with a wok over three foot high flames. When he sat the wok down on the oven, the flames would flare out around the sides of the wok with the look and hear of flames from a blowtorch. We saw a few more outdoor coal-burning jet engines being used to heat water and recycle plastic. They use coal here for all the cooking that I could see.

Later that evening we went to a shadow puppet show in a villa near the center of the Muslim Quarter. The villa and show were traditional Chinese. The puppets were pretty to look at, and the songs were done with the classic Chinese voices and instruments that I know only from TV. That show ended with a tea tasting that again reminded me of wine tasting (tasting is in order of lightest teas to strongest teas), and a presentation by an Australian woman who has lived here in Xi'an for several years on how Xi'an has developed recently. She told us that the city wall and moat have only recently been restored, that the South Street district was created in its historical style only last year after razing the old block-style apartment buildings that previously occuppied the site, and that the smog was not as bad as it used to be (she sometimes sees more than one blue-sky day a month now).

One of our group is almost confined to air-conditioned spaces because of the smog, and everyone has either burning eyes or stuffed sinuses. Still, its better than Nanjing by far, and all of us who braved the smog found that it did not prevent us from enjoying a 14 km bike ride around the top of the city wall. The wall is 50 feet wide at the top, and forms a square around the old town. The streets within are laid out in a grid, so you can get a good view across town along the main streets from the East Gate to the West Gate, and so on. The moat is another 300 feet wide, and has a park, a path, several ponds, public meeting areas, and mini-ampitheaters in the corners. It is all well used except for the top of the city wall, for which they charge admission. The walls themselves are about 100 feet tall.

Near the entrance to the gate where we entered the wall was a little historic district where the calligraphers and artists sell their goods to tourists and other artists. This is South Street, colloquially known as Calligraphy Street, and you can get nice trinkets here without being hassled too much by hawkers. Prices are marked on the goods. I bought a carve-it-yourself soapstone stamp for 30 cents. This is the district that was created from scratch to look historical, after some old apartment buildings were torn down. We went back to this district in the evening after our visit to the Muslim Quarter. They were very accommodating. When we expressed disappointment that the beers were not cold, they sent someone out to get cold ones for us. We had beef-kebab skewered on bicycle spokes, with a pinch of Cumin.