4 September 1999
I had just stepped off the plane from Tibet to Chengdu and decided that I wasn’t going to spend another minute in Sichuan. Asked staff if there was a connecting flight to Xian and luckily there was one within an hour or so. There you go, two flights on the same day in China.
Signed up for a whirlwind one day tour of Xian which first took us to Lin Tong Museum. Second stop was an architect’s conjecture of what Emperor Qin’s underground mausoleum looked like. The Qin tomb is supposed to have rivers of mercury and a dome depicting the night sky. Our third stop was the Xian Incident Museum.
Back in 1936 Chiang Kai-shek and his lieutenant, Zhang Xueliang, had a difference of opinion. Chiang wanted to round up the Communists at the expense of neglecting Japan’s invasion of China; Zhang, on the other hand, wanted to join forces with the Communists and repel the invading forces.
Zhang decided to set old Chiang straight and thus came about the Xian Incident.
The fourth stop was the Terra Cotta Museum, but unfortunately we were only given a brief tour. I made use of the remaining half hour allotted to cover missed ground before we were whisked off to our final stop, Huaqing Pool. The pool is actually a spring where Tang empress Yang Guifei used to frequent. In modern times, it has also served as the location for Chiang Kai Shek’s short term internment by Zhang Xueliang.
5 October 1999
Arrived in Xian at 00:30 and got into a shouting match with some cab drivers.
The next day I purchased my train ticket to Guangzhou and took in the Big Goose Pagoda. My ticket stub mentions that Dayan Pagoda ( Big Goose Pagoda ) is situated inside Cien Temple. The pagoda was built in the Tang dynasty A.D. 652 and served as the residence for the monk Xuanzang to translate Buddhist scriptures.
END OF TRIP