In Xi’an, I did the tourist stuff and met the first foreigners I had seen so far on this trip. They were a family of Russians, staying at the hotel I’d chosen near the gateway of the Terracotta Warriors (兵马俑, Bing Ma Yong) on the outskirts of Xi’an. It was an awkward encounter, with the war in the Ukraine at its height. The Russians didn’t speak Chinese and by necessity had to use English - grudgingly - to communicate with the manageress of the hotel. They regarded me with suspicion when I spoke Chinese to the hotel staff, and there was an uncomfortable moment when the manageress asked me to translate something from Chinese to English for them. Beyond that, we didn’t chat.
I was suitably impressed by the Terracotta Warriors when I saw them the next morning. I had been one of the first in line before the gates opened at 8.30 am, and yet even so I still only managed a few minutes of unobstructed views of the warriors in the massive hanger-like building before the walkways were crammed with crowds of visitors.
I’d seen photos of the displays, but being there to see them in real life made me realise the huge scale of Qin Shihuang’s burial chamber. It was astonishing to see how much design, labour, craftsmanship and artwork had gone into the creation of the thousands of terracotta warriors, and their weapons chariots, horses that had been put in this burial chamber for China’s first emperor.
Being able to get up close to see the individual warriors I was fascinated by the attention to detail that the artists had paid to the clothes and the individual facial expressions, and this was done by people more than 2000 years ago. It also made me wonder how any state could afford to divert the efforts and resources of more than half a million people working for 40 years to construct such an elaborate tribute to a single person. It also made me think about the power and ego of Qin Shihuang, that he was able to order such a massive monument to himself and have the expensive project carried out continuously for decades.
When I learned that this was not even the main burial site of the Qin emperor, I could only speculate as to what treasures may still lie buried there, awaiting to be uncovered. Would it ever happen in my lifetime?
From a revered emperor, I next went on a visit to another one of China’s five revered mountains. At Huashan, it was raining and I took a cable car up to the summit rather than spend a day walking up almost 10,000 steps to reach the top of the 2155 metre mountain.
Huashan was most westerly of the sacred mountains and had a reputation as the “Most Dangerous Mountain Under Heaven" because of its sheer cliffs and challenging trails around its five main peaks.
The scenery was breathtaking, and scary for someone like me who has a fear of heights. On the narrow, rounded rock ridges I just could not face tackling some of the un-fenced walkways that led to lookouts with steep drops on both sides. There was no way I would contemplate doing the notorious "Plank Walk” along wooden boards and narrow ledges set into a near-vertical cliff face. c,
With its dramatic mountain scenery and mystical rock formations, Huashan became a place where Taoists came to pay homage to the mountain deities. The summit was also the location for one of the most famous stories in Chinese folklore. When a female deity married a mere mortal, her brother became enraged and imprisoned San Sheng Mu beneath the mountain. Her son Chenxiang vowed to rescue his mother. When he grew up he trained long and hard and used his strength to wield a magical axe to split open the mountain and release his mother. This legend made Huashan a symbol of devotion, courage, and filial piety. The split rock - and a symbolic axe - can now be seen on the summit trails of Huashan.
After an hour of weaving and shuffling among the crowds around the Huashan summit trails and its restaurants and shops, I took the cable car back down, keeping my eyes closed most of the way because I was too scared to look down.
Back in Xi’an, I ‘did’ the other sites such as the Drum Tower, City Wall, and the very commercialised Muslim Quarter, where the beggars proffered laminated WeChat QR codes to solicit donations. I ate Biang Biang noodles and jianbing pancakes and the city’s famous yangrou paomo (羊肉泡) - crumbled bread in mutton soup.
As with Kaifeng and its historic Jewish community, I visited a Xi’an museum to try to see the Jingjiao Stele (景教碑) which recorded the history of a Christian community in the old Chinese capital, which was then known as Chang’an, in the eighth century.
At the Beilin museum, there was a stele entitled the “Memorial of the Propagation in China of the Luminous Religion from Daqin (Roman Empire)”. The stone was erected in the year 781 with an inscription composed by a Christian named Alopen (Aluoben). Scholars now believe this was a Syrian Christian called Abraham, a bishop of the Nestorian ‘Church of the East’ who had come from Persia to China along the Silk Road.
The inscription in Chinese and Syriac characters described how Christianity had been introduced to China by a missionary called Alopen in 635 AD with the approval of Emperor Taizong. The stele inscription provided details of the ‘Roman’ religion's doctrines and its presence in China over 150 years up until the stele's erection.
I found it fascinating to note that China had flourishing Christian churches centuries before Scandinavia or Germany. Here in China’s capital in the 7th century, a Christian community had become established and was building churches with the approval of the Emperor Taizhong. This was the same era when Christianity had yet to become established in much of Europe, and where it was regarded as a foreign ‘Roman’ religion by the Woden-worshipping pagan Vikings and Saxons until the 10th century conquests by Charlemagne.
As with the Jewish community in nearby Kaifeng, the rulers of ancient China seemed to have a ‘live and let live’ approach to foreign religions and settlers being in the country, so long as they accepted the authority of the Middle Kingdom’s government.
However, the small Christian community in China became ‘collateral damage’ in a later 9th century persecution campaign against foreign religions introduced by the Tang Emperor Wuzhong. Wuzhong, whose court was in Chang’an (Xi’an), was a fervent believer in Taoism, which he regarded as the native Chinese faith. He was opposed to Buddhism which he saw as a ‘foreign’ religion from India and harmful to Chinese tradition and culture. Wuzhong’s impoverished court was also eyeing the wealth and power of Buddhist monasteries and temples.
Rather like the Reformation of Henry the Eighth of medieval England, Wuzhong ordered dissolution of the monasteries and for monks to return to lay life. The crackdown on Buddhism was part of a campaign to "cleanse Tang China of foreign influences". It also meant the end for the smaller communities of foreign religions in Chang’an, such as Zoroastrianism and Nestorian Christianity.
Buddhism would survive and revive in Xi’an after the end of Wuzhong’s reign. And when I visited the beautiful and serene Xi’an mosque, it was evident that Islam had later flourished in the city and beyond. The mosque was built during the Ming Dynasty, starting in 1392 AD and was said to have been the place where China’s famous Muslim admiral Zheng He, came to recruit an Arabic translator to take with him on his epic sea voyages to India, Arabia, and East Africa.
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| Hangu Guan to Xi'an (click on image to enlarge) |
I had to think of my own ‘epic voyage’ when I returned to the youth hostel where I was staying near the Drum Tower. I had done 1500 kilometres of the Yellow River already, but would have to pedal another 4500 kilometres to reach Maduo at the source. The hostel staff were intrigued by my folding e-bike and full of praise (你很棒! ‘Ni hen bang!’) for my progress so far. But I needed a bigger and more powerful bike for the remaining two thirds of my journey in more mountainous terrain.
After a day trawling around Xi’an’s many bike shops, I found an e-bike that seemed to suit my needs . The Giant Tour E+ 200 e-bike had dual batteries, with a claimed range of 200 kilometres. It was designed for touring and had pannier racks, ‘fat’ gravel tyres, disc brakes and mudguards. I selected a step-through frame version for ease of stopping and starting in urban traffic. After a test ride up and down the street, I handed over 8000 yuan for it.
I couldn’t find any reports or articles from other cyclists or travellers who had done the Yellow River route by this route from Shanxi to Inner Mongolia, but it seemed feasible. The main feature of this stage of the Ordos Loop would be the start of the loess terrain. From the flat plain of the eastern China river basin, I would suddenly enter a new landscape of low mountains that stretched from a place called Dragon’s Gate (龙门, Longmen) all the way up to the Inner Mongolia border.
The Yellow River was hemmed into a canyon by the Longmen mountains, and the map showed me there was some kind of road along the river for much of this section. However, there appeared to be some remote sections north of a feature called the Hukou waterfalls (壶口瀑布) where the steep sides of the river canyon forced the road to move away from the riverbank and divert over the nearby hills for 50 kilometres or more before regaining the river.
The only way to know for sure was to go there, and this meant backtracking past Huashan and the last bend in the Yellow River.
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| Route map: Stage 2 along the Shaanxi/Shanxi border into Inner Mongolia |
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