SHAANXI
PROVINCE

Xi'an (Sian)
Xi'an has been the capital of China for a longer period of time throughout history than Peking. A total of ii dynasties have used it as their capital for more than 1100 years, beginning with the Zhou dynasty 3000 years ago. As a result, Xi'an and the surrounding country are an archaeological treasure trove, with more finds being made all the time.

The earliest of the sites is the remains of the Neolithic village at BANPO which have been covered with a large dome-like building and opened to tourists, who can see the remains of living quarters, some graves and a pottery kiln. It is the best-preserved example of New Stone Age life ever found in China. (Take a No.1 I bus from outside the Liberation Hotel and get off at the seventh stop. Walk to the next intersection, turn right and you're there. From the People's Hotel, take a No.3 bus to the end of the line near the Liberation Hotel, then a No.11 bus.)

The main reason most people go to Xi'an is to see the TOMB OF QIN SHI HUANG, the first emperor of China, who decreed that he be guarded in death by a huge army of life-size terracotta soldiers estimated to number over 6000 in all. Qin Shi Huang (259-210 B.C.) was the king of one part of north China, and he conquered six other kingdoms to form the first Chinese empire. Even today, more than 2000 years after his death, he remains a controversial figure, revered as the man who first unified China and masterminded the construction of the Great Wall to keep out the barbarians to the north, and hated for buming books and burying scholars alive.

He built his capital just to the east of present-day xi'an, and reportedly had 700000 workers conscripted to build his tomb, a job which took 36 years. According to historical records, the tomb con-tains a magnificent throne room full of jewels and precious objects and a river of mercury with gold ducks floating on it, but it has yet to be excavated. The hill under which the tomb is supposed to be situated is on the slopes of Mount Li. Tourists can view this rather ordinary mound of earth by the roadside, and wonder if any grave plunderers managed to find their way into the tomb during the past 2000 years, or even if the tomb is there at all.

But it probably is. Three vaults have been found around the mound, which contained the army supposed to protect Qin Shi Huang in the after life. The first vault was discovered in 1974 when peasants were sinking a well. The other vaults were found in 1976.

Vault No.1, the biggest of the three, has been covered by a huge hangar-like structure to protect it. More than 6000 pottery foot-soldiers, cavalrymen and chariot riders are believed to be in the vault, although only a few hundred have so far been unearthed and restored. The slow, careful work will continue for many years to come. The figures are all life-size, and each one has a different facial expression. They are arranged in battle formation, and carry real swords, spears and crossbows. In the vanguard are three rows of 70 soldiers behind which is the main body of the army, 38 rows of troops.

Vault No.2 contains about 1000 more soldiers, while the third vault, the smallest of the three, was apparently built as the 'command headquarters' for the other two troop formations.

The main vault was opened as a museum in 1979, and visitors are allowed to walk over the excavations on a wooden walkway. The taking of photographs is usually strictly forbidden unless a large fee is paid first, a ruling which naturally enrages tourists. People who are caught taking a couple of snaps on the sly are often forced to hand over their film.

Another regular item on tourist itineraries in Xi'an are the HUAQING HOT SPRINGS, a few miles northeast of the city. Various emperors through the ages have had palaces built on the site, the first in A.D.747. The hot springs and its attendant buildings nestling into a hillside are best known for being the scene of the so-called 'Xi'an Incident' in 1936 when Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek was kidnap-ped by a local warlord and forced to halt his war against the Communists and form a united front with them to fight the Japanese. The story is extremely bizarre: it began when Chiang flew into Xi'an to direct the sixth anti-Communist 'extermination' campaign, then in progress under the command of a local warlord. But the warlord was secretly in contact with the Communists, and sent troops to the Huaqing Hot Springs to kidnap Chiang at dawn on 12 December 1936. Hearing gunshots outside, Chiang fled from his bedroom and up the moun-tain slope behind, and was found there cowering among some rocks in his nightshirt. (A pavilion has been built on the spot which bears the inscription: 'Chiang was caught here.')

Having got their arch-enemy in their grasp, the Communists wanted to kill him, but Stalin, dreading the chaos which Chiang's death could unleash in China, warned against it, saying that Chiang was the only possible leader of a united front against Japan. After several days of intensive negotiations between the Communists, the warlord and his prisoner, Chiang was released on Christmas Day, but only after agreeing to a united front and the payment of a huge ransom to the warlord.

Captain Harald Herzog, a German pilot, was the man chosen to fly the ransom money from Shanghai to Xi'an. 'The Nationalists gave me a call and sent me over to a military base near Shanghai where a Junkers JU-52 had been filled up with banknotes to pay the ransom,' he said. 'The plane was so full of banknotes that the co-pilot and I could not get in by the normal door - the glass had to be taken off the cockpit, and we got in that way. When we arrived at Xi'an, we circled above the airfield until we saw Chiang's plane take off, and we handed the money over as soon as we landed.' (There are local buses going to Qin Shi Huang's tomb and other places of interest, from the bus station just outside the south gate of the city wall. However, it is probably more convenient to get on one of the cheap local tours, and take in all the sights at once. Tickets for the tours can be bought at the Liberation Hotel, among other places. A tour of the tomb, the Huaqing Hot Springs and the Neolithic village costs six yuan, but you're supposed to be a resident of the Liberation Hotel in order to buya ticket. The bus leaves at 7.00 a. m., with a boring three-hour stop at the hot springs to give tourists a chance to have lunch and a soak in the supposedly medicinal waters.)

In Xi'an itself, there are a number of important historical sites to see. The SHAANXI PROVINCIAL MUSEUM, just inside the south gate of the old city wall, is one of the best museums in China, although a couple of galleries are only open to foreigners on payment of an exorbitant fee. The museum is a former Confucian temple, and has China's best collection of stone-engraved calligraphy (steles). To foreigners who can't read Chinese, stone tablets are of little interest, but just inside the second pavilion, on the left, is a tablet which tells the story of how a branch of Christianity came to China over 1000 years ago.

The tablet, topped by a cross supported by two dragons, tells the story of how Jing Jiao - apparently Nestorian Christianity - was introduced to the Chinese empire and flourished for several hundred years. The Nestorians believed that Jesus Christ was two distinct persons, one divine and one human, and the sect's disciples spread out from Syria, and established colonies in all the cities along the Silk Road through central Asia. Marco Polo mentions finding communities of Nestorians in several cities in China, including Fuzhou.

The tablet in the Xi'an museum is signed by 'Adam, County-Bishop and Pope of China' and was engraved in 781 to mark the opening of a church. It tells of how a Syrian named Raban appeared at the Chinese imperial court in Xi'an (then called Chang'an) in 635 and presented holy scriptures to the court which were translated and read by the emperor. The emperor, the stone says, was impressed and ordered that a monastery dedicated to the new religion be established. In the end, the Nestorian religion is believed to have died out in China in the fifteenth century, just two centuries before the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci arrived in Peking to propagate the Roman form of Christianity. Ricci searched for some sign that Christianity had existed in China in the past, but found none. However, only 15 years after his death in i6io, workmen digging foundations for a building near Xi'an came upon the great stone now in the Shaanxi Provincial Museum, which proved what Ricci had been unable to discover.

The BIG GOOSE PAGODA, built in 652 to house Buddhist scriptures brought from India by the monk Xuan Zhuang, is well worth visiting. The monk, also called Tripitaka, is said to have brought back 657 volumes of scriptures with him and to have sat in the pagoda, with a Sanskrit expert on one side and a Chinese expert on the other, and translated the whole lot over a period of 14 years. The pagoda was rebuilt in i~8o. (The pagoda is outside the city wall. Take a No.5 bus from th' railway station and get off at the eighth stop, just before the bus turns right. The pagoda should be in front of you.)

There is also a small WILD GOOSE PAGODA, built in 709 (take a No.3 bus from the railway station and get off one stop after passing the south gate of the city wall. The pagoda is on the right, down Youyi Xi Lu), and the local mosque, a fascinating structure called the QINGZHEN 5'. The mosque, built in 1742, is on Xiyang Shi Jie, just northwest of the Drum Tower in the centre of town. The DRUM TOWER and BELL TOWER, dating from the Ming dynasty, are also both worth a visit.

There are many restaurants in Xi'an, but Shaanxi Province is not noted for any special dishes. One thing worth trying, however, is the local wine, called XifengJiu, which is milky in appearance and, unlike

most Chinese wines, very pleasant to drink. Some of the local restaurants are the Xianfang Fanzhuang on Dongda Jie, east of the Bell Tower, and the Baiyunzhang Dumpling Restaurant nearby; another dumpling restaurant is the Defazhang near the Bell Tower.

How to get there and where to stay
Xi'an is accessible by plane from Peking, Shanghai and most other major cities, and is also on the national railway network.

The main hotel used by foreigners is the Renmin Daxia (people's mansion) on Dongxin Jie, generally considered to be an appalling place. (From the railway station, take a No.3 bus, get off at the third stop on the square and walk another few minutes. The hotel is on your left.) One traveller has stated that the new Xi'an Hotel was preferable to the Renmin Daxia - 'A better class of cockroach,' he said.

Budget travellers usually stay at the Liberation Hotel opposite the railway station where a room costs 12 yuan and a bed-space six yuan.

Yan'an (Yenan)
This town on the barren plains of northern Shaanxi Province was once a regular stopover for foreigners doing the full China tour. But that, as they say, was in the days of the 'Gang of Four'. The town was the endpoint of the epic Long March undertaken by the Communist groups in southeast China to escape from the 'annihilation campaigns' launched by the Nationalists. The main column of 90000 soldiers and dependants left their bases in Jiangxi Province in late 1934, but only 5000 of the original number reached Yan'an in early 1936, the rest having dropped out or died in battle or of hunger, cold and exhaustion. Mao himself described the 6000-mile (9600-kilometre) march as the worst period in the struggle of the Communist Party to gain victory.

Those who took part underwent great hardships, and many displayed great heroism against often overwhelming odds. But at the end of it, the Communist Party had been completely re-shaped: Mao had taken control, and the trials of the march had welded the Party into a formidable force, ripe for expansion. 'For 12 months, we were under daily reconnaissance and bombing from the skies by scores of planes, while on the land we were encircled and pursued, obstructed and intercepted by a huge force of several hundred thousand men and we encountered untold difficulties and dangers on the way,' Mao said later. 'Yet by using our two legs, we swept across a distance of more than 6000 miles through the length and breadth of ii provinces. Let us ask, has history ever known a long march to equal ours' No, never.'

From 1936 to 1947, Yan'an served as the headquarters of the Communist forces, who lived for the most part in the caves used by the local peasants. The area became a symbol of the Communist Party's resilience and will to win and, almost immediately, people began to make the pilgrimage up to this primitive, poverty-stricken part of China to honour the future rulers of China. One of the first was the American journalist Edgar Snow, who wrote the classic Red Star Over China, based on extensive interviews with Mao and the other Communist leaders in the Yan'an caves.

Snow described Mao as being a 'gaunt, Lincolnesque figure' with an intellectual face of great shrewdness. 'Mao seemed to me to be a very interesting and complex man. He had the simplicity and natural-ness of the Chinese peasant, with a lively sense of humour and a love of rustic laughter ... He was plain-speaking and plain-living, and some people might have considered him rather coarse and vulgar. Yet he combined curious qualities of naivet¨¦ with incisive wit and worldly sophistication.'

In 1947, Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek attacked Yan'an and captured it. But it was an empty gesture. By then, the Communists had become a national force and no longer needed the town. Within two years, the Nationalists were on the run from the mainland and the Red Army took Yan'an once more.

There is little to see in and around the town except for various sites of revolutionary significance. There is a museum, and at least four places where Mao lived at one time or another. At WANGJIAPING, to the south of Yan'an, there is a replica of the hall in which the Party held its Seventh Congress. The original was destroyed by the Nationalists.

The town is strung out along the valley of the Yan River, which has cut itself a deep channel in the plain. Dominating the whole area is the BAOTA (precious pagoda), built in the Song dynasty, which became a potent revolutionary symbol, particularly during the Cultural Revolution.

How to get there and where to stay
Visitors to Yan'an usually fly there from Xi'an, the provincial capital, 300 miles (480 kilometres) to the south, although there are also local buses. There is a guesthouse which is suitably spartan for pilgrims.