Country: Canada
Date: 2026-07-05
Number: 2 Person
Rate:
After a good night’s sleep and Jing Courtyard breakfast we bid them good-bye and soon found ourselves on another bullet train rocketing across the N China Plain and through the NE mountains toward Xi’an. The trip was magnificent, made very interesting by a happy, AI-Translator mediated conversation with a gal and her grandmother seated across the aisle from us and travelling home to Sichuan from Beijing.
Our schedule allowed only one full day for activities in Xi’an. Thus we were extremely lucky to be connected by our guide Michael in Beijing to one of his friends, Albert He, who served us well as a fantastic guide. During our first evening in the Xi’an area we enjoyed a fabulous and most memorable hotpot supper with Albert and his wife, Lily. The next day we did two things. Albert first took us to the winter residence of the Tang emperors of a united China, the Hauqing Palace, located at the hot springs in Lintong. The palace is the center of a hugely rich history, dating back to the Tang Dynasty, about which I knew nothing previously. Much of the history of the palace is romanticized in Wang Anyi’s classic Chinese novel, Song of Everlasting Sorrow, which has been translated to English. The novel borrows its general tone and title, I gather, from a classic 9th C poem by the Tang Dynasty poet, Bai Juyi. You can find an excellent translation on-line at https://www.classicalpoets.org/the-song-of-everlasting-sorrow-by-bai-juyi-translated-by-evan-mantyk/. Albert provided excellent and richly interesting information about what we saw at the Hauqing Palace, and there were many plays and performances to watch. The stories about what happened there, including the capture of Chang Kai-shek by Zhang Xueliang’s and Yang Hucheng's forces in 1936, were amazing.
After a fine lunch, we visited the tomb of Emperor Qin Shi Huang. It did not disappoint; in fact, it was even more spectacular than we had expected. I cannot overstate how we marveled at the terra cotta warriors, and the fact that they’d been commissioned about 250 BCE, and then lost for 2000 years. This had been a bucket list item for me, and now having seen them, they clearly qualify as another wonder of the world. The story of how these came to be, as told to us by Albert, is fascinating and represents an awesome episode of human history. The Chinese have put huge effort into restoring the thousands of life-sized warriors, horses and weapons buried with the Emperor, as discovered in 3 massive pits. We visited all three and came to understand that this awesome project is far from finished. The pictures below speak for themselves.
What a marvellous day it was!!
