We went to a Uighur Restaurant
Have you ever thought about what it would be like to visit a restaurant run by the oppressors of one of your country’s most oppressed ethnic minorities? Do you like lamb, onions, yoghurt and sesame seeds, all in the same meal, and potentially all in the same dish? Would you be willing to patronize an establishment quite literally run by the Deep State? If you answered yes to all those questions, then you may enjoy eating at the official Liaison Office of the Uighur Autonomous Region in Beijing!
The Uighurs, if you aren’t aware, are a Muslim ethnic minority living in Xinjiang province on the border with Kazakhstan. They are most well known in the West for getting low-key ethnic cleansed of their religion by being sent to “labor training camps” meant to indoctrinate them into Chinese Socialist Thought, and abandon this Allah and God stuff that has always made Beijing a bit twitchy. But Beijingers seem to appreciate their food, cultural difficulties aside, and to date I’ve dined in two Uighur restaurants, one of which is managed by the Governmental Ministry of Xinjiang.
Uighur restaurants lean into the exoticism of the region. Han Chinese waiters wear uniforms meant to look like traditional Uighur clothing, although I think the only actual Uighurs there are probably some of the kitchen staff. There are baked things that seem vaguely Turkic, like round flat bread covered in sesame seeds, some accompaniments that seem very Mongolian / Steppe people, like the horse meat sausages and bowls of lightly sweetened plain yogurt topped with walnuts, sesame seeds and raisins. It’s quite different from Chinese food, but it’s a little funny that the Liasion Office recreates the culture they’re trying to wipe out to enhance your dining experience.
We Took a Sleeper Train to Xi’an
My husband and I left the baby with her grandparents and took a trip to China’s western cities. China has a really excellent modern high speed rail system, but this time we took a sleeper train, which runs on the ground level tracks at a much lower speed. If your destination is about 12 hours away, you can conveniently depart at 8pm and arrive by 8am, getting to lie flat and snooze the whole way. (Or you can sit in bed and watch the scenery roll by, I like to do that as well.)
This sleeper train was fully booked; not a cabin to spare. And although we were in first class, it was a little bit hairy with so many other people aboard. Our car seemed to be the foreigner car, besides us there were a bunch of Romanians and Russians on holiday. And we could only get top bunks
The real estate of a sleeper train cabin is pretty tight. Top bunks are a little cheaper than bottom bunks, and the bottom bunk has to yield some of their legroom so the top one can climb up and down. There’s a little retractable foothold set up for this, but I still thought getting up there was a bit tricky.
A First Class sleeper bunk,
Xi’an
Xi’an is a hell of a town. It’s really dusty and polluted there, so every breath feels like you’re inhaling cement dust. It’s a two pack a day city, in the sense that living there is equivalent to smoking two packs a day! As the name implies, it’s on the Western border of the Empire, and was traditionally the eastern terminus of the Silk Road. If you know the legend of the Journey to the West, it also begins and ends here in Xi’an. Ming dynasty Xi’an is more or less the same place as Chang Dynasty Chang’an. They’re a little ways apart because Chang’an managed to grow its way into ecological collapse (dust bowls, rampant erosion, no more timber to be had, the wells are all dirty etc.) So the western capital was moved a little ways in the Ming dynasty to a site that wasn’t as dilapidated.
The progress in Xi’an is uneven. The city is way cleaner than it was when Alex went there in 2009. There used to be trash, gutter oil and grey water all over the street, now the downtown is being continually power washed by laborers, so there’s barely a cigarette butt or a wad of gum to be seen. However, the cost of labor and living in Xi’an is still very low, and that affects the quality of services you get.
The Shanxi food is delicious if you enjoy lamb meat and carbohydrates. There are three standout specialties: poumou (lamb-bread soup), the Chinese burger, and biangbiang noodles. Lamb-bread soup is a mild lamb stock, served with lamb slices, a bunch of bread cubes and glass noodles. It’s a nice comfort food. The Chinese burger is basically a burger of ground lamb and groin onion on a baked bun. Biangbiang noodles are a lamb stock soup with these super thick and chewy noodles, like lasagna noodles in your soup. All the food is very starchy. Until very recently, if you could afford to eat a lot of white flour, it meant you were eating well.
The Great Wild Goose Pagoda (not brought to you by Grey Goose Vodka)
There is not much left of Tang era Chang’an, with the exception of the Great Goose Pagoda. The pagoda commemorates the return of Xuan Zhang, the monk who brought the sutras to China. Below the pagoda was the library where those works were translated and copied for distribution all over the empire. But pretty much everything but the pagoda had to be rebuilt several times over. I don’t know what the pagoda has to do with geese, though.
The Great Goose pagoda is huge brick and mortar pagoda stands the test of time like an absolute unit, 63.8 meters tall and walls fifteen feet thick. There’s not internal architecture, it’s just solid masonry and hollow on the inside like a salt shaker.
You can climb the tower, and I did, but it was more impressive to take pictures of myself on the roof deck of the nearby mall with the pagoda standing in the background. Many people come here as pilgrims to the Buddha and I take my time to be respectful, but also careful not to do anything that might amount to worshipping a foreign God.
The Terra Cotta Warriors
You may have heard of these guys, but in short: once upon a time in 260 BC there was a powerful and vain warlord, Qinshi Huang, who united China by military force and purged its many other languages and ethnic minorities by killing their scholars and burning their books and taking their people as prisoners to do hard labor. He’s an important emperor, but not an especially beloved one. Once he crowned himself emperor, Huang went about setting up his mausoleum, which is a yearslong endeavor emperors start as soon as they take the throne.
Huang lived for a good long time, and he wanted his mausoleum to be the best one ever. So he made up a whole city in effigy, with terra cotta acrobats and tradesmen, a menagerie of bronze waterfowl, a 1:1 palace with a room that housed a scale map of China, complete with rivers of pure mercury to symbolize the waterways and lakes, not to mention the "living space"; banquet halls and bedrooms and reception halls staffed with terracotta eunuchs. But what imperial mausoleum would be complete without a life-size army of effigies ready to defend the emperors' afterlife? (a: all the rest of them, not that it matters.)
And so Huang commissioned the construction of an entire army of tens of thousands of terracotta warriors in a state of military readiness. these were sculpted by master craftsmen and lined up in formation in burial pits and then covered with earth, along with the memorial palace, the ersatz town, all of it. And then, after Huang passed away and the whole thing had been covered with earth, the empire passed to a new dynasty and the location and existence of the tomb was deliberately erased from history, so that contemporary accounts of it were considered fantastical and impossible.
Then one fine day in the 1970’s, a farmer in the area was digging a well on his property, which had numerous weird square sinkholes and footprints in the ground. He dug into one of these and exposed a terra cotta warrior, life size. He called the cops, who called the authorities, who began to excavate a little more, until the huge scope of the site was realized, and the archaeologists noted that the painted warriors lost their colors within hours of exposure to air. At that point, they stopped opening the pits and began a more thorough investigation of what had already been exposed. today, 80 percent of the total grave goods in the mausoleum site have yet to be exposed, though it’s known they exist by telemetry.
When you get through the fucking crowd and through the door to Pit 1, the structure opens up on the inside like an aircraft hangar and hundreds of terra cotta warriors stand in situ, in the same positions they would have been in when they were buried. It’s something that one needs to see for yourself to feel the full impact, though there are plenty of VR tour options.
The warriors themselves are great, 10/10, but the crowd to get there is insane. In the off season, you still have to battle a crowd ten people deep to get a look into Pit 1, and Pits 2 and 3 are not much better. In an effort to spread out the traffic, the government relocated the bronze carriages (another crown jewel in this set of grave goods) to the emperor’s mausoleum mound. Otherwise, the plaza would be prone to stampeding and totally unpleasant to visit. It is said that in the high season people have to get out and walk 9km to the museum entrance, because there’s no parking to be had anywhere nearby.
It’s hot and dusty at the terra cotta warriors. The taste of dirt gets stuck in your throat, it’s still stuck in mine. As I was there I felt a little resentful, because I have seen authentic terra cotta warriors from this site in New York, as part of a temporary exhibition in the Met. (The museum has a lot of them, and will spare a few for an exhibition tour.) I liked that better because one could get closer to the warriors, they weren’t behind glass or in a pit twelve feet down, and I wasn’t fighting other people for a peek at them. But the grandeur and impact of the warriors are impossible to really replicate by just showing a handful of them, when part of their remarkable nature is just how many of these guys there are, and each one was sculpted by hand. Every face is different, and thought to be modeled on the sculptors who made them. It looks very much like a real Qin era army turned to stone.
The imperial mausoleum museum is new and much less crowded and cooler in temps, more advanced in curation as well. I liked it more in hindsight. The bronze carriages are a scale model of the Qin emperor’s ride in life. He has a battle whip and a leisure whip. They are very detailed, gilded with tin alloys in cloud and dragon patterns. There is more to be said about these, but you can look it up.
We Rode a Tandem Bike on the City Wall
In an effort to live out the Velodrome exchange logo, my husband and I went to the Ming era city wall in Xi’an to rent a tandem bike to ride along the top of the wall. This was funny if I’d been an observer but kind of scary being on the bike. I’d never ridden a tandem bike before, so we mostly just took turns pedaling instead of both going at the same time (if you pedal out of phase with your partner the bike fishtails.) it’s a remarkable way to take in the sights; xi’an has the most complete ancient city wall in all of China, in the sense that it’s basically 100% complete except for some tunnels dug around the gates for car traffic. The top has been resurfaced to be flat and smooth, and a marathon is run on it annually- 2 laps around the walls. We went for half a lap on the bike before turning it in, mostly because the tandem bike’s rear position was sized for a child, and all the settings were bolted shut. If we’d gone for the less funny looking single bikes with adjustable seats, I’d have happily rode along for a whole lap or longer.
There are many people in costume in Xi’an, even more than in Nanjing. This is I think because of a hit Chinese TV show, “the longest day in Chang’an”, about a terrorist plot on the day of the lantern festival (15th day of the first month) and a police detective who is trying to foil the terrorists. One of the main set pieces are a bunch of signal towers with sliding paper windows in different colors, sending messages across the capital city in code to the police. So there are a lot of wide shots of these towers sending code messages by sliding windows back and forth while tense music plays. If you know the American TV show “24”, but set it in Tang dynasty China, you would have a pretty good idea of the gist of this show.
That show and another one, “The Legend of Zhen Huan”, have really spiked interest for Chinese tourists to rent out period costumes and have photos taken of them in historic zones. There were costume shops complete with hair and makeup service, photographers, and even outdoor studios with lights and props for customers to hold. Seeing all the period costumes inspires me to make some for the baby when she is a bit older (the kids all have very fantastical and cute costumes.)
Muslims in China
In the center of Ming era Xi’an there’s a big drum tower that was formerly used to tell time and where the official long-term calendar was kept. Next to that is the Muslim quarter of Xi’an. There are two types of Muslims in China; the ethnic Turkic/central Asian kind, which I talked about before, and the ethnic Han kind, which live in Xi’an. (More about Xi’an soon.) the Xi’an Muslims have faced an 1862 genocide, an 1873 counter-genocide, and a death toll of gorillions. (Well, 7.1 in Shanxi province and 22 million across all provinces.)
Muslims went from being 40% of Xi’ans population to less than 5% today. But that is still a lot of Muslims, and their presence in Xi’an is quite noticeable, especially in the Muslim Quarter.
For the most part, the Muslim Quarter is known for its food. They sell Turkish sweets, meat kebabs, the lamb-bread soup, and meat sandwiches on fresh baked bread that are quite like hamburgers, but also nothing like burgers. Some restaurants are so serious about the Muslim thing that they don’t sell alcohol, and they won’t let you open any bottles brought in from the outside. So if you want to get drunk, do it beforehand. They also sell a bunch of cheap tourist souvenir crap and they have some animatronic indoor attractions, like dragons spouting CO2 fog from their mouths and whatnot. It’s the kind of place where I’d mind my wallet quite carefully. Nothing bad happened, but according to my husband the Muslim Quarter used to be pretty rough.
As we made our way deeper into the Muslim Quarter we saw what I think may have been the best, and most unexpected attraction in Xi’an; the Great Mosque of Xi’an. The Great Mosque is a functioning mosque; we got in just as the men were leaving the hall after noontime prayers. The style of the mosque is really curious: very Chinese architecture with very Islamic motifs and art. There is a stele and a large dragon stone tile in the center of the minaret, commemorating several imperial inspection visits to the mosque.
At the end of the garden and libraries and other outbuildings, there’s a main prayer hall. Dhimmies like me and infidels like my husband are not allowed inside, but there are CCTVs hooked up in the porch rafters for when the number of worshippers exceeds capacity and people are praying on the plaza in front of the hall. It’s an unusual way to use a hall like this, and it was oddly comforting to find some other people of the book all the way here in China, even though they’re worshippers of a false prophet and the sort of people I’ve been trained to be wary of in the states (because of 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Charlie Hebdo Shooting, Israeli Palestine slapfight, etc. etc.) The Chinese Muslims seem a bit more peaceful than that, if only because China barely tolerates their presence today.
I tried to post some photos from Xi’an, but it’s pretty clunky uploading photos while I’m in China and it seems like I can only insert one per post without busting something. A full photographic accounting may need to wait until I return to America, sorry bout that. Your patience is appreciated! 
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