Skulls in the Stars

Still have a few posts on China to write, even though I’ve been back for over two weeks!  Can’t let all of these photos sit on my laptop with nothing to do.

My last day in China was a Saturday, which meant that I had time to see more of the sites.  My postdoc advisor Taco and his student Yundou and I went first in the morning to see a very historic location: the site of the starting point of the famed Silk Road, now a museum about it.

No, not the online black market known as the “Silk Road” that was shut down in 2014.  The original Silk Road was an ancient and long-lived trade route that connected the West and East, beginning in 130 BCE and ending in 1453 CE.  It was opened by Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty and lasted until the Byzantine Empire fell to the Ottomans, the latter of whom cut off all contact with the West.

Trading routes on the Silk Road around roughly 100 CE. Image by Shizhao, reproduced under the GNU Free Documentation License.

The Northern route of the Silk Road, which stretches West and splits into three branches in the middle of Asia, started at the ancient city of Chang’an, which is now Xi’an, which, of course, is where I was in China.  As seen on the map, there were in fact many different trade paths across the continent; in modern times, historians tend to refer to the “Silk Routes” rather than a solitary-sounding “Silk Road.”

So “road” is not quite accurate, but the “silk” part is: the Silk Road got its name for all of the Chinese silk that was in great demand in the West.  I would have a chance to see some samples of it during my visit to the museum.  The road also brought less welcome goods to the West: the bubonic plague of 542, which is estimated to have killed some 25 million people, likely was brought via the Silk Road.

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There have been two books sitting on the shelf in my office for as long as I can remember.  They are picture books about the Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, constructed to serve the Emperor in the afterlife and buried around the time of his death in 210 BCE.  The books I’ve had are children’s books, but at the time I became interested in the Army, there really weren’t any other books I could find on the subject.

I mention this to illustrate how it has long been a dream of mine to see the massive Terracotta Army in person, and on my recent trip to China I was finally able to visit this magnificent array of sculptures that has reasonably referred to as a “wonder of the world.”

I took a lot of pictures.   This will be a long blog post.  As always, you can click on individual photos to see them larger. But before we begin, let’s talk about what the Terracotta Army is, and its history.

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I arrived in Xi’an late on a Saturday night, two hours later than expected due to a weather delay flying out of Beijing.  So I was pretty exhausted on Sunday, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to get out and see some of the sights!

After a nice lunch, my former postdoc advisor and his graduate student took me to see the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda, a historic and still active Buddhist temple which is also a popular tourist destination.  It was a great opportunity for me to practice making stitched panorama photographs using PTGui, an excellent piece of software which I haven’t played around with for a long time.  I uploaded most of the panorama pictures, and many of the other ones, at high resolution, so be sure to click on them if you want to see details.

Front of the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda.

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The blog has been quiet this past week because I’ve been literally halfway around the world!  I was invited to China to give a pair of scientific talks and plan out some collaborative work.  The trip was productive and fun, and already I’ve been invited to return again, which I will be seriously considering (though not right away — 20 hours of flying is brutal!).

My hosts at Northwestern Polytechnical University were very hospitable, helping arrange a number of fun activities.  My former postdoctoral advisor has also been working there for several months every year, and he not only helped arrange an invitation for me but showed me around and helped me, as a clueless American, navigate a very different culture.

There was so much to see and do, and I tried to do as much as possible and take pictures of everything.  I’ll write a number of posts about my trip, and I’ll start with a general overview and some impressions of China, stretching over the entire trip.  This wasn’t my first visit to China — I visited Shanghai some ten years ago — but everything was still quite novel to me.

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