Shanghai'd

Xi'an - Home of the Terracotta Warriors

After 4 days in Beijing, we boarded a train for Xi'an. We had heard mixed reviews about this city. Some people day there is nothing there. Some people love it for hos laid back it is compared to the metropolises of Beijing and Shanghai. I don't know if our day and a half was enough time to come to a solid conclusion. The weather didn't help.

We stepped off our over night train from Beijing at 6am and boarded a public bus directly for the terracotta warriors. An interesting thing was, it was dark at 6am in Xi'an - partly because winter is coming, partly because of its location 1000 miles west of Shanghai in a country with only one timezone. We got to the site an hour later and got in just as the park opened. For those of you who are not familiar with this attraction, please read about it on Wikipedia, it is pretty fascinating (and kind of crazy): Terracotta Warriors. The site itself was fascinating. This was the highlight of Xi'an.

The rest of the trip was food, Tang Dynasty performance (actually cool), and then rain. We really wanted to get to ride bikes up on the wall that surrounds the city, but were prevented by weather. Next time, I suppose. Maybe, though for Xi'an, there won't be a next time.

Language Notes (since this blog is about Chinese language too!):

Xi'an

Maybe you were wondering about why this city name is divided with the apostrophe. Maybe you were also wondering how the heck to pronounce it. Well, for the first question, if you look at the Chinese, there are two characters, they are the characters for "West" and "Peace". Without the apostrophe, "xian" would only be one character, and could have a multitude of meanings, including line, salty or first (all separate characters). Also, the pronunciation is different with and without the ' : Xi'an (Shee Ahnn) vs. xian (she-en)

There are 2 provinces in China with the same name. Or so it seems. Xi'an is located in Shaanxi. Next door, you have Shanxi. The characters for these provinces are different, but the pinyin is the same (both should be "shanxi"). I guess to avoid confusion for the western world that only uses a 26-character alphabet, they had to add the extra A. All the reason why China will be on the 30,000-character system for a long time.