Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, Hui Muslim neighborhood

Shaanxi Provincial Museum
Our first stop was the Shaanxi Provincial Museum, reputed to be the best museum for ancient and medieval Chinese history, particularly of the Shang, Zhou, Han and Tang dynasties. The ground floor covers prehistory and the early dynastic period. Especially impressive were several enormous Shang and Western Zhou dynasty tripods (ding), Qin burial objects, bronze arrows, crossbows, and four original terracotta warrior statues.

Upstairs the second section is devoted to Han dynasty relics, including 40 terracotta figurines from the Xianyang tombs, bronze lamps, Wei figurines, and mythological animals. (The Portland Art Museum has a small collection of artifacts from this era, particularly figurines and mythological creatures.)

The third collection focuses chiefly on Sui and Tang artifacts: impressive tomb murals depicting a polo match and a series of painted pottery figurines with elaborate hairstyles and dress, including several bearded foreigners, musicians, and braying camels. Very interesting--and most of the exhibits at this museum had labels and explanations in English.

Shaanxi Province
Lonely Planet: Shaanxi province is part of China's loess plateau, an area covered by thick layers of microscopic silt that began blowing down from Siberia during the ice age. The hallmarks of China's "Yellow Earth," are cave houses (ya'odo'ng) and a fissured, treeless landscape.

Running across the south of the province are the Qinling Mountains, the major north-south watershed in China and home to a number of endangered species, such as the golden-haired monkey, the crested ibis, and the giant panda. (We didn't visit any of the wildlife areas.)

Xi'an
Lonely Planet background info: Xi'an, formerly Chang'an, was a thriving city of emperors, courtesans, poets, monks, merchants, foreigners, and soldiers; a place where many of the world's religions and cultures coexisted and Chinese culture reached an apogee of creativity and sophistication. Chang'an was the fabled beginning and end of the Silk Road, a colorful town with lute music, desert dust, where camel caravans unloaded goods from the Eurasian continent and packed up Chinese goods for the return trip.

Home to 11 Chinese dynasties, stretching back to the Zhou dynasty in the 11th century BCE, modern Xi'an sits in the fertile Wei River (tributary to the Yellow River) valley. Remnants of the ancient world are everywhere, from the first emperor's terracotta warriors to the Muslim influence that still characterizes the city today.

Destroyed in rebellions that marked the end of the Tang dynasty, by the 10th century Chang'an was no more. After that, the capital was moved to Beijing.

Xi'an retains the same rectangular shape that it had when first designed and built as Chang'an. The streets and avenues form a neat grid pattern that was later copied exactly in Osaka and especially Nara, Japan. The central block is surrounded by city walls that are wide enough to walk on. Today the city walls are a popular place for bicyclists and pedestrians. At the city center is an enormous Bell Tower.

Xi'an originally had two markets: the western market was for non-Han Chinese, i.e. all the traders on the Silk Road. There was also a neighborhood around the western market where foreigners were permitted to live. Required, actually, as they were not permitted to live elsewhere in the city. Their neighborhood district was walled in, an interior wall within the walled city itself. There there was an eastern market for Chinese goods. Han Chinese lived in that part of the city.

Hui (Chinese Muslims) Neighborhood

In the evening we walked through the old town western market area. These are the back streets behind/north of the drum tower. They've been home to the city's Hui community for centuries. The narrow lanes are full of butcher shops, sesame-oil factories, and small mosques. Lonely Planet recommends Xiyang Shi, Dapi Yuan, and Damaishi Jie streets to stroll along; they run off of Xi Dajie through an interesting Islamic food market. We saw these sorts of shops, but I don't know exactly which streets we walked on. We just wandered about as a small group.

After about an hour's stroll through the Hui quarter, Dr. Li led us to an unpretentious Muslim restaurant to try a local specialty: ya'ngro' u pa'omo' a soup dish that involves crumbling a flat 5" diameter disk of bread into a bowl, to which is added noodles, mutton, and broth. After a few minutes, the bread acquires the texture of matze squares, 1/4" in size. It was quite good.

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