We were up early on Sunday morning to catch a flight to Xi’an at the eastern end of the Silk Road. It was sad to say farewell to Wen and Yantai, as we had been made to feel so welcome and had a great introduction to the Chinese people and culture. Ruth hopes that she can return to swim in the Yellow Sea and maybe bring our Silk Road exhibition, together with paintings and sound works back to Yantai in the future. The flight took us across the plains and mountains inland to Xi’an, the furthest point west on our journey, but the accepted easterly point of the ancient Silk Road, even though silk and other commodities would have travelled much further east across China and to Korea and Japan. The patterns of the mountains are reminiscent of Chinese landscape painting and it was interesting to see the variously coloured blues of the roofs of buildings which could be mistaken for pools of water. We shared a very fast taxi from the airport (Stuart thought he had bought a bus ticket) with some locals which dropped us near the south gate. This was still a reasonable distance from our Airbnb so we halted a green and orange taxi, which took us to the destination, a large complex of high rise apartment blocks of 33 storeys, bringing us much closer to the towers that you can see in abundance from the sky. The city is ancient and has many impressive buildings, including the drum tower, bell tower, south gate, and the huge wall that encompasses the whole 5 square miles of the old city. We had read a lot of advice that said to avoid China, and in particular Xi'an during Golden Week (a national holiday with 700 million people (!) travelling to visit family or going on vacation), as it would be very crowded and full of queues for everything. But we're glad we did as there were amazing light shows from the city walls, buildings were lit up with light displays, there were live music performances and dancing in the street, with a festival feeling all week long, especially in the evenings and everyone was friendly! Throughout the week we braved the queues and made visits to culturally significant places, especially those with connections to silk and the Silk Road. We patiently queued for four hours to visit the Shaanxi Museum but there wasn’t as much evidence of silk in the collection as we had anticipated. The first thing we encountered in connection with silk was a gilded bronze silkworm - small, but used as something of an emblem for the museum. The collections had some early fragments of silk from the Tang Dynasty, some plain and lightweight, others woven cream and brown, a little heavier but all were very fragile. We also saw pottery camels laden with silk, reaffirming this city as the main trading point at the eastern end of the Silk Road. A trip to Xi'an wouldn't be complete without visiting the Terracotta Army, and we booked with the taxi driver we had used previously, which was a rather fast and exhilarating ride, especially in the vast amount of traffic heading to Lintong. We made it in one piece and were greeted by an artist, friend of another artist in Xi'an who we'd been in touch with, who had kindly arranged tickets for us, which helped a lot as we didn't have to queue for them. We arranged a guide, Mountain, who expertly took us round which proved very helpful to navigate the huge 'people waves' (as Wen described them). At the other end of the scale was the 'world of decorative cloth' which was a building we had passed on several evenings on our way home, which almost looked derelict. But by day it is a bustling market of stalls and traders dealing in textiles and fabrics for the domestic market, with plenty of curtains and furnishings and about ten people, women and men, working treadle sewing machines. A trip to Xi'an wouldn't be complete without visiting the Terracotta Army, and we booked with the taxi driver we had used previously, which was a rather fast and exhilerating ride, especially in the vast amount of traffic heading to Lintong. We made it in one piece and were greeted by an artist, friend of another artist in Xi'an who we'd been in touch with, who had kindly arranged tickets for us, which helped a lot as we didn't have to queue for them. We arranged a guide, Mountain, who expertly took us round which proved very helpful to navigate the huge 'people waves' (as Wen described them). At the other end of the scale was the 'world of decorative cloth' which was a building we had passed on several evenings on our way home, which almost looked derelict. But by day it is a bustling market of stalls and traders dealing in textiles and fabrics for the domestic market, with plenty of curtains and furnishings and about ten people, women and men, working treadle sewing machines. There were plenty of shops around the city selling silk and other fabrics. Silk was also visible across the city with lanterns and silk knots, symbolic of friendship decorating entrances to buildings and the streets themselves. We saw less evidence of silk manufacturing in Xi'an but as we'll see in the next leg of the journey, much of that happens further east where the conditions for sericulture are much more favourable.
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AuthorProject updates from Ruth and Stuart. Archive
September 2019
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