Rainbow Lived in a Pretty How Town

Our overall tour director was named Hong, or in English, Rainbow. She was from Xi'an, so while we were in that city, she also acted as our local guide. And Xi'an was her town.

I really liked it. It was Beijing was more important, Chungching more beautiful, and Shanghai more, er, sexy, but I'm a small-town boy at heart. Not that Xi'an is small, but it had, for me, the feel of a city on the great plains. There's some room here to stretch out, and the city is laid out on what amounts to a plain, though there are rolling hills nearby. The streets were wide, with lots of traffic, but no traffic jams, and the pace of life seemed a lot more relaxed than in any other city we visited.

The food was great too. I liked it the best of any city we visited. Beyond all the yummy dumplings and noodles, the sauces were much lighter than other cities, and gave more weight to the natural, fresh taste of the meat and produce. This is a city where they grow the food they eat nearby.


Xi'an is one of the cities that retains its ancient walls. The city has, of course, spread beyond these walls, but we drove through the gates in the walls several times while touring the city. Really, they must be an impediment to development, I'm not sure why they were kept when Beijing's walls were torn down by Mao. But I liked them.

I've never visited a walled city before. Besides the Terracotta Warriors, we visited two important religious sites, remarkable in that they, like the city walls, seemed untouched by the cultural revolution. The first of these was the Wild Goose Pagoda.


The site of this pagoda celebrates the "Journey to the West" of a famous hermit and scholar who visited India and other places in the west, bringing back to Xi'an 60 scrolls containing Chinese translations of important Buddhist texts. The Wild Goose Pagoda was built to commemorate this trip and to house the scrolls.

But that was a different one, a smaller one, also in Xi'an, but, I'm guessing, not as impressive or in as good shape. The one we visited was about 400 years old, and still housed framed copies of those same texts. I climbed to the top and took a look at a greater portion of Xi'an. There are few skyscrapers in Xi'an, and it's flat, so the view was good, though the air was hazy with humidity, dust, and smog.

The Wild Goose Pagoda is part of a working Buddhist temple, and on the grounds one can light candles or incense, buying them for a modest fee. Also, freestanding on the grounds is a large bronze bowl with water in it. This is used for ritual purification, that is, when you've done something bad that you're sorry for, you come to the temple and wash your hands in the bowl to wash away the sin.

A lot simpler than confessing to a priest, though nearly as definite.


The other religious site that we visited in Xi'an was the Great Mosque of Xi'an. Xi'an was the first capital of China, and the terminus of the Silk Road. Many of the traders were Moslem, and they brought their religion with them. The Moslem faithful in Xi'an are all still Han peoples, though, it isn't really an ethnic distinction. And the architecture of the Mosque shows that.

To get to the Mosque, you must get off your bus and walk through the Bazaar, some very narrow streets with overhanging shades, and lined with open stalls. Our group had to walk single file through the street. We were warned to beware of pickpockets in the Bazaar, so I didn't bring my camera. The pictures of it were taken by someone else. Along the way was a public lavatory, Chinese style. Which was to say, it was enclosed and hidden from view, but otherwise was more like an outhouse than a water closet. The odor was distinctive and, er, quite a noticeable reminder that we were in another country.

Walking through those alleyways, I felt like I had just walked into the Arabian Nights or something. Many of the vendors wore more Middle-Eastern garb, and the narrowness and overhanginging tarps and covers added to that sense. I got the feeling that Ali Baba or the Forty Thieves might jump out from behind a corner and run off with my camera, if only I hadn't carefully left it on the tour bus.

One of the tenets of Islam is that representational art, or iconography, is forbidden within a mosque. This has led to a wonderful exploration of tiling and geometrical patterns in more western mosques. I found depictions of dragons on the outermost gate, and at the edge of the Visitor's Court, but no iconography anywhere further into the grounds.

The Chinese influence was obvious, of course, in the design of the gate shown above and this pagoda in the second court. The pagoda's floor plan is an octagon. Looking more closely, octogons are everywhere in the design. There are many small carved stone footstools or seats in the shape of octogons. And so on.

Well, I already knew that the octogon, or bagua, was important to Chinese thought. But it was on the grounds of the mosque that I realized why. To the Chinese, the square represents Earth, while the circle represents Heaven. If you cut the four corners off of a square, you make it more like a circle, and thus the octogon represents the position of humanity, both animal and spiritual being.

We saw the circle within a square at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. But no octogon there.

After a while, I strolled back into the Bazaar. With it less crowded now (our group by itself constituted a crowd in that space), I got a better sense of the place, and it seemed a lot less dangerous than it did before. A little boy walked his bicycle through the alleyways. A very little boy in diapers played in his mother's stall. The people tending the stalls were well dressed, if some were dressed exotically. And the stuff in the stalls was what I came to recognize as the usual tourist trap stuff.

In short, in China, as in the U.S. "Retail is Theater".

Leaving the Mosque for dinner, we walked a few blocks along the main streets of Xi'an. They also featured open stalls on the ground floors of multi-story buildings. These stalls were not up to Western standards of cleanliness and decor, but still I found myself wanting to sample them. After my immune system had adjusted, I decided.

It was the golden hour before sunset, and the light and smells and sounds of that street were real, and interesting. I think I liked the fact that this wasn't staged, it wasn't theater it was just a pretty how town that knew its business and was winding down after another day. With up so floating many pagodas down. (Apologies to e.e.cummings)