(Author’s note: this blog is from a 19-day trip across China’s Silk Road in September 2009. Above is the sprawling Qin Terracotta Army Museum.)
I have arrived in the midst of a controlled explosion.
Purposeful movement is everywhere. In the grimy, industrial city of Xian, several hundred miles southwest of Beijing, my driver and escort pick our way out of the airport onto a superhighway that rings the city. A stubborn gauze of pollution shrouds the city in an unwelcome incense of grime.
As we hurtle along, I watch giant cranes heave new apartments skyward. A schizophrenic mural washes past my window. Ancient, subtle rhythms are shoved aside by the urgent hustle of capitalism. Homes and shops spared by the Cultural Revolution clutch their skirts against inevitable winds of change. An awkward adolescence has descended on this city where the fabled Silk Road begins.
I have come here to connect with the whispers of history. I have long conjured the ghosts of Ghengis Khan and his armies; Zoroastrian priests sipping sacred haoma before the fires; Buddhists; Muslims; the exhausted armies of Alexander the Great - they and others like them, have sluiced back and forth across China for centuries in an avalanche of fire, blood, power and profit.
The ring road around the city is four lanes wide but as we near our destination, five lanes of cars struggle with the geometry of possibility and patience. Drivers are stoic, resigned to perpetual inching and yet, somehow it all seems to work. Trucks groaning with everything from shoes to sheep trundle through the melange - bleating like cattle to to no one in particular. Artful dodgers scoot in and out of traffic like otters. Pedestrians risk the laws of physics. Shopkeepers hawk their wares. And beyond, one senses Mao watching in silent astonishment.
Having arrived at the restaurant, I alight from the car and am escorted inside. Within, grimy windows veil a sullen skyline. For the first time in my life, I feel my breathing and I wonder what this generation has bequeathed to its children.
As we wait for the group I am joining, I make small talk with my escort - a Chinese tourism and hospitality management student who shares my name - Peter. It seems odd to address a Chinese with my name. I learn many Chinese have adopted Western-style first names. Peter is recently married and as we pick our way through a gallery of shared vocabulary, I wonder how he will cope with the strains of unfettered capitalism. His is an optimism borrowed from a society still riven by its own contradictions. It is an unsteady, somewhat qualified confidence and yet, it is Peter’s generation that will most benefit from what is being wrought here in this place. If he survives.
Our search for shared meaning ends suddenly as my fellow travelers arrive. I am joining a tour that will carry us across thousands of miles of terrain and thousands of years of history. I am uncertain of what to expect, but eager to begin....
(The Zhong Luo or Bell Tower below was originally built in 1384 and refurbished in 1740. It was moved to the southern section of this walled city in 1582.)
