Little Tiny Baby Dumplings (01/04/11)

Wow, y'all! 

Today was jammed packed with all sorts of amazing and fun things. Even though the city Xian isn't my favorite place, it showed a large part of its exciting and compelling history. The city itself has been the capital of China through 12 different dynasties, which is a huge deal since there's only been about 23 (as far as I remember and as well as I can check facts against wikipedia... :/). Aside from this little nugget of info, we also learned about the Terra-Cotta Warriors at a terra-cotta factory where they told us how terra-cotta is made (and how to tell the good stuff from the fake stuff). Then we went to tour part of the lacquer area where they made these absolutely beautiful pieces of furniture. 

If I were an emperor, I would look like this. Small head. I know.

Headless warriors. They get their heads later. It makes them unique. Cool, huh?

This is an example of some of the ceramic work we saw. It was lovely.

After we went through the factory and shopped around (the thing we do best besides take group photos) we went to the actual museum for the Terra-Cotta soldiers. Now, let me take a little time to do some back story logging on this excursion. I know I haven't done too much of that so far, but this place just made such an impact on me that I really want to share what it means and the significance of this find with everyone. 

So back in 210 BC, this emperor (the first one, mind you) who went by the name of Qin Shi Huang, decided that he needed a vast army of terra-cotta soldiers made of "twenty households" to watch over his burial site. Now, the cool thing about this is: to this day there are still only about 20 villages in the vicinity--interesting! The other cool thing is that each of the soldiers was made to look like a different individual. They have on relatively similar clothing and poses which signify their rank, but every face--all 8,00 of them--were made to look different from the next. Now, the whole point of having this huge army buried with him was so that the emperor, who was kind of a control freak, could continue to rule in the afterlife. The site that now houses the all the soldiers was unearthed in 1974 by local farmers. Over the past 30 years, archeologists have spent a great deal of time excavating that site and three others near it.  Something else I found extremely interesting was that all of the soldiers on the outside lines face the wall, as if to stave off invaders from all sides. Our guide mentioned that the emperor was really only worried about invaders coming from the east, so he set up this army about a mile away from his tomb to the east to protect him against anyone who dared to challenge him, even in the afterlife. Crazy, right? Especially since later, pillagers came and burned and trampled most of the soldiers, shattering them to pieces. Presently, archeologists have been working diligently to piece together the soldiers, even though they have yet to touch other areas of the largest vault.

Referring to rebuilding the statues, I think it’s important to point out how much the Chinese really respect the work of their ancestors and respect how important it is to distinguish work done centuries ago, versus work that can be done now. These scientists could reform many of the statues with missing pieces by making parts that blend evenly into the original work of the statue, that way no one is any wiser as to what is real and what is rebuilt. But, rather than masking their work as the original, they make it a different color so that their work stands out against what was part of the first statue…amazing. Here are photos of the site…I’m pretty proud of them, actually:

This was a statue in the museum. Look at that detail.

Photos of all the different soldiers. See how all of them are different?

Small replicas

Biggest chamber of soldiers

Close-up shot 

Close-up shot. Some are missing heads...it's kind of creepy

They look like toys in this picture, but they're life size and some are almost 6' 5" tall if they were lucky enough to be classified as a General.

Protector of an outer wall. He just looked so lonely. :(

Please let me explain this next picture. I'm telling you now it was one of my favorites, not because there was anything too special about this statue other than that it retained some of the original coloring on its back. I like this photo because of what's going on in it. If you look closely, and I blew it up so you could see it in detail, the statue is looking off in the distance; the guy in front of it is looking up in awe; it looks like the statue has a ghost form of a hand on this guy's shoulder and it looks like the guy behind the glass is reaching up to take the statue's outstretched hand. How cool is that?! I don't think I could have planned it if I tried!

Cool camera trick

After all of the excitement about the museum and seeing the soldiers, we went to eat dishes that are special to the region. The meal was all about some dumplings. Every kind of dumpling you could imagine! Pork dumplings, duck dumplings, carrot dumplings, fish dumplings. We had 14 different dumplings for dinner and they all came in (pretty much) the shape of the meat (or vegetable) that was in them. Check out the picture below. Can you tell what it is??

I stole this from Conrad's photos. It was a duck!

Everything we ate was so delicious; all this right after I didn't think the food there could get any better. Then to top off the whole meal, the last dumpling set was a soup. Now, this soup is magical. It has little tiny baby dumplings in it and depending on the number of dumplings you got in your soup, the better your luck would be. I don't remember exactly what the stipulations were for the whole thing, but I got two of them in my soup, which meant I was going to be a pretty lucky lady this year... Let's hope that pans out. The funny thing about the whole situation was that we tried to ask our waitress to clarify what the number of dumplings signified, but she didn't seem to understand. So the only answer we got out of her was: "Little tiny baby dumpling. Bring good luck." It was precious. :)

Then we watched a dinner show about the Tang Dynasty--photos to ensue:

Emcees

Instrumentalist. Look at that head piece!

Ribbon dancing

I wish I could show you all what their sleeves did. It was really neat how they were able to manipulate them to flow like ribbons.

Male dance. Lookin a little demonic there, but that's all right.

Three princesses dance

I think I just really liked her costume... lol

And the queen bee! Also, check out that crazy head piece! It looks like it weighs a ton!

Well, everyone.... with a full belly and a truly entertained mind, I bid you goodnight. May all your tiny baby dumplings bring you good luck and lots 'o joy. :)
Whitney