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Xian, an ancient city once the capital of 13 dynasties in China, may be high up on

tourists bucket list. But Indians may also remember it as the city where President

Xi Jinping hosted Prime Minister Narendra Modi in May 2015, in an unprecedented

exchange of home-turf bonhomiethe snapshots of the Indian Prime Minister

taken with Xians famed terracotta warriors aroused much interest back in India.

The India connection

Of course, the Indian connection with Xian goes deeper. Xian rings with a name

familiar to IndiansXuanzang, the seventh-century monk, scholar, and traveller

(c. 600c. 664 AD), a Chinese Marco Polo. He journeyed nineteen long years to

reach India from China, traversing the vast, barren Taklamakan desert, the soaring
mountain ranges of the Pamirs, crossing the Bamiyan Buddhas that lay in present

day Afghanistan all the way to the Indian subcontinent, where he stayed for many

years. Xuanzangs travels were partly because of the Tang ruler Taizongs (reigned
62649) morbid fascination for longevity doctors in India. Xuanzang found no such

doctors; instead, he not only collected sutras but also turned into an emissary of

goodwill. The Indian historian Tansen Sen has pointed to historical evidence which
shows that Xuanzang went to the Kingdom of Kanauj in 637 or 638, where he
convinced King Harsha to open up diplomatic channels with China.

Most significantly, Xuanzang recorded his journey in a valuable treatise, the

Records of the Western Regions (also called Great Tang Records on the Western World;
Da Tang Xiyu Ji). The spirit of Xuanzangs journey even inspired later literature

particularly the core plot in Chinas immortal classic Journey to the West (Xi You
Ji). An episodic series of picaresque tales framed by a Buddhist pilgrimage to the

Western regions (the regions west of China), Journey to the West featured a monk
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in search of Buddhist sutras and was protected by a motley crew, the chief of whom

seems to be vividly drawn from Indian mythology, with the figure of Hanuman (the

Monkey God) possibly inspiring the character of the Monkey-King Sun Wukong

(many scholars have equally argued otherwise, however). Whatever the source of
inspiration, the story of the mischievous, supernatural Chinese Monkey King is a

well-known tale, one where ultimately good triumphs over evil. Upon Xuanzangs
return, the countless sutras that he had brought back were housed at the Great Wild
Goose Pagoda in Xian.

The draw of the Terracotta Warriors

At Xian, I landed myself at a neighbourhood near the train station one late
eveninga quarter that was decidedly grungy and down-market, pretty much the
equivalent of what you would find around a train station in India. I went up to the

first hotel I sighted and approved wholeheartedly of the dirt-cheap but neat little

room with clean white sheets, jasmine tea packets and, of course, the ubiquitous
flask for hot water.

Once I checked in, sheer excitement took over. Naturally, I asked around

about seeing the famous terracotta warriors at the mausoleum of Chinas first

Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi (259210 BC). Built by the megalomaniac emperor with
hundreds of thousands of conscripted slaves, the royal tomb was quite accidentally
discovered by farmers ploughing the fields in the 1970s and boasts an army of

terracotta warriors of infantrymen, cavalry, and archers in battle formation to

accompany the emperor in the afterlife (the emperor also embarked on another

ambitious project on the sidethe Great Wall of China). The eminent Chinese
historian Sima Qian (13685 BC) noted that the emperors tomb was envisaged as a

vast underground city which 700,000 conscripts took 36 years to create. Large parts
of the mausoleum still lie largely unexcavated.

To reach the mausoleum, located in the eastern outskirts of Xian, I was

directed to take a white bread van (mianbaoche), so-called as they look a bit like

a loaf of bread. Literally at the crack of dawn, when all of China chatters and stirs
(the Chinese are a morning people), I got on a crammed rickety contraption of a

van that rattled and shook, spewing ferocious clouds of dust on the tarmacnot a
particularly memorable journey, to say the least.

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I hurtled through the ancient city. Given Xians reputation I had expected

a more traditional skyline of pagodas, temples and such. Instead, the tired old bread
van flew by a resolutely urban skyline. The outskirts offered not an Oriental vista of

lush bamboo and willow framing pagodas, as I often imagined ancient China to be,

but a cut and dried rote copy of a Chinese citya tad tamer, humbler, and poorer in

looks in comparison to Beijing or Shanghaibut which had hitched its bandwagon

to a star tourist attraction. A noted sinologist, Simon Leys, has bemoaned Chinas

monumental absence of the pasta strange paradox as China is loaded with so

much history and so many memories. Well, here I was seeing it.

The suburbs got scruffier, lined by generic bicycle repair shops, small

threadbare restaurants along the long road, and a countryside parched to the bone.
Not that the heat deterred the bus conductor; he hung out of the door and shouted
out enticing niceties at all possible bus stops, trying to pack in as many people as he

could. He had funny lines up his sleeve: Get on! To the world famous TERRACOTTA

WARRIORS! Dont let go of this chance of a lifetime! This beauty of a bus will take
you safe and sound! I was unhappily reminded of the horrible old red line buses
that plied Delhis roads in the 1990s.

The glories of Changan

Throughout history, Xian served as the capital during various dynasties, stretching

back to the early Zhou dynasty (in the Springs and Autumns Period, 1100 BC700

BC), as well as major dynasties later on. The acme of Xians fame was perhaps when
the city was known as Changan (The City of Everlasting Peace) during the Tang

dynasty (618907 AD) at the height of Chinese civilisation and influence. Changan

flowered thanks to the revival of what the nineteenth-century German geographer

Baron Ferdinand von Richtofen famously called the Seidenstrasse or the Silk Road
in 1877. Rather than just merely about silk or for that matter an earmarked route to

follow, the Silk Road was essentially a large network, dating back centuries before,
of both overland and maritime routes that carried much more than silk.

Trade transformed Changan into a lively metropolis that attracted monks,

merchants, soldiers, entertainers and foreign embassies. Convoys docked in the

capital after traversing hundreds if not thousands of miles over rice paddies, plains,

and hill passes, laden with precious goods such as the delicate tea leaves from the
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lush green hills of Hangzhou not too far from the Yangtze River, and gorgeous brocade
from the Sichuan basin held in esteem as poems of the weavers art; meanwhile,

porcelain came from the bustling kilns of Jingdezhen. Traders converged at Changan

to rest, trade, and re-provision before they (or other traders) embarked westwards
through the vast tracts of desert where China met Central Asia, across ancient cities
such as Turfan, Kashgar, Bukhara, Samarkand, through Persia and Mesopotamia, to

Mediterranean ports such Antioch and Tyre, through to Alexandria, Constantinople,

and all the way to Venice. The Silk Road during the Tang dynasty was far grander and
more extensive than it had ever been before; the trading network also went all the

way to the southern port of Guangzhou, criss-crossed the peninsulas and islands of
Southeast Asia, and over to India and beyond.

The renowned American historian Arthur F. Wright suggests that Changan

became more than just a city, but the essence and epitome of a window to glimpse

the values and ideas that men lived by. Indeed, Changans fame became woven
as a magnificent capital that produced the finest arts, silks, porcelain, and urban

planning. Japan, importing many ideas from China, sought to replicate and capture

the magical spirit and beauty of Changan in the meticulous urban grid that underlies

Kyoto and Nara, both Japanese cities renowned and revered as artful masterpieces
(it is rather ironic that Japan arguably improved on the idea of Changan into a
higher art form in their conception of urban planning).

For a fact, the Chinese themselves bemoan the lost magic of Changan,

increasingly lost in the urbanisation of the Chinese kindwhere a modern day

monstrosity of a Bell Tower Hotel (1983) sits next to the historic Bell Tower (built
in 1384, rebuilt in 1582), marring and wrecking the view.

Tourists delight?

Once at the site of the terracotta warriors, I found a long snaking queue at the ticket

counteras if the squeeze of sweaty bodies and the shrill shrieks of the conductor
were not damning enough. It was the usual China tourist ordeal. Tour operators

screeched over microphones and waggled flags, followed on by crowds of rustic

elderly peasants clutching their oversized plastic bags and straw hats, their teeth
stained, hands roughed and hardened by tedious labour.

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An effervescent American researcher at Fudan University had