It is now Tuesday afternoon. A rare few hours off during the day as we relax before partaking of the famous 17 course Xi"an Dumpling Dinner experience. I admit - you can too - that you never heard of this, but enough people on our trip have so I expect this evening will be fun.
We took a walk at 7:00 in a pretty thick coal smog, typical of the city but amazingly this lifted in a few hours. We have had sun and clear weather for most of each day we have been in China, something the guides admit is very unusual.
I just learned that the Dodgers lost and well as the Football Giants. With the Yankees out rooting for Joe Torre is all we have left and that seems to be about to end. The Red Sox beating the Phillies which now seems inevitable will have little appeal except for the Constitutional Convention crowd who will read something into it relating to the election at hand. Who are the modern day Federalists anyway?
Yesterday we visited the Qin Dynasty's first (and only) Emperor's tomb suburbs w
here the life-sized Terracotta army is shown off in one of the most amazing museums anywhere. A good friend from back home who was here recently just Skyped me with the news that he is convinced that the exhibit of soldiers is just too perfect to be real. The ones on display must have been made in Xi'an back alleys just as the ones for sale for a few hundred dollars around town. Take a look at the pictures and you decide if this so called 8th Wonder of the World is the true world heritage site it has been proclaimed or if its 
a "Sinowood" set of epic proportion. Seriously, whether the 1,200 of 8,000 soldiers and horses on display have been enhanced or not it seems clear this was created by 750,000 workers sometime around 220 BC.
In a remarkable display of national self control the Chinese have not dug up the actual Qin tomb nor have they even finished 70% of the excavation of the warriors themselves. One reason is that warriors were originally painted and it seems when excavated the paint flakes off within hours, so leaving them under 15 feet of dirt until a 
better method of preservation is found makes sense.
Now, it is important, and perhaps comforting to learn that as soon as the first Qin Emperor died a large majority of the workers and a sizable contingent of tax payers rose up, crushed his son and pretty much leveled anything above ground left by him. The clay soldiers, 15 feet below the surface, may have been bashed or may have been smashed when the football field sized roof collapsed...e
either way the Qin Dynasty (which did build roads, modernized language and defeated six warring tribes) was history. The pique of spending most of the middle kingdom's GDP to prepare dad for the afterlife just did not sit well with the Chinese people. Very sensible...are there road blocks on the way out to the Hamptons yet? Just kidding.
Anyway, the tourist traffic now amounts to more than 15 million visitors a year and has put Xi'an back on the map after a millennium in the shadows.
Last night we visited a section of town that dates to the 8th century, the Muslim quarter. The other great thing that the town is famous for is being the start of the Silk Road. So it is sort of the St. Louis 
of China given that towns role as the start of the Oregon Trail. The difference here is that The Silk Road was a two way highway and so it was more than a place to load up your wagon. Until the sea routes got going this was the way that riches, goods and people from the west met those from the west. With the desert and mountains in between it was Tashkent or bust once you set out from Xi'an...
So in 750 AD Muslim traders needed a Mosque and paid local workers to build on in the local style. The Mosque has been in use of 1400 years and has an entire community around it. We wondered off the typical hotel
and museum circuit last night and went to a local restaurant with a few other cou
ples. The food was great and the night life in the back streets of the quarter was teaming and global...in the way that back alleys in Indonesia, Afghanistan, India and Brazil can be. Last night it felt like little had changed in 1,000 years and that travelers from Arabia or Delhi had just brought their wares.
We also visited a foreign language and business university yesterday and were taken around the campus by a group of fluent and charming students. My guide came from Inner Mongolia, a 48 hour train ride f
our times a year. Studying English and foreign trade he was up o American politics but polite enough to not ask me any questions about the election.
Today we went to the other building still standing from 700 a tower on the edge of downtown and we went to a museum of Chinese carved tablets dating from 1100 AD but representing Confucius's work from 600 BC. Given the propensity of Emperors to destroy books and works that predated them the survival of many key Chinese texts are due to this collection.
We are off to our Dumpling dinner now and tomorrow will be flying to the Yangtze River for a three day cruise to the Three Gorges Dam. I am not sure we will have internet connections until Friday so until I connect again I am signing of from the end of the silk road.
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