Dali

An amazing change from the polluted north, the mountains of Dali served as a much-needed breath of fresh air. I even went swimming!

Guilin

The karst landscape around this town makes it ideal for tourism and mountain climbing

The Dragon's Back

These pics were taken outside of Guilin, China. They are of mountains that have been largely cleared and that are being used mostly as rice fields. It was quite lucky that we came upon them because we were hiking without a map, and it was dark when we arrived at the village. The village is a semi-popular tourist attraction but not yet developed enough to be expensive or unpleasant.

Xi'an's Stele Forest, etc...

These steles are two of about 3000 at the largest stele museum in China. It is located in Xi'an and started with steles from the 7th century A.D. The stones represent a great variety of script, including traditional, simplified, and archaic symbols.

The earliest surviving characters are inscribed in oracle bones and only about a half of them can be related to (and therefore deciphered) later writing styles. These bone artifacts are scattered throughout the world's museums but I didn't see any in Xi'an. There are several legends that explain when and how characters where brought about. One states that they were inspired by different vein patterns, and another suggests that a scholar thought of the idea after observing the distinctive patterns of various bird footprints.

I've been asked by several folks now about what it is like to read from top to bottom. Although Chinese characters, like other East Asian characters, were traditionally written from top to bottom and from right to left, in modern times, due to western influence this is not the case. It is also worth mentioning that over the years, the characters have gone from being pictorial symbols, to traditional symbols (of which there are dozens of versions), and then to the simplified characters used today in mainland China.

The majority of simplified characters were introduced during the 1950's and 1960's. During this same period, Pinyin was also introduced to schools as a method to attach a common pronunciation to each of the characters. It is important to understand that before these changes, the Chinese language consisted only of written characters and scholars' pronunciation (passed down and memorized). This explains why throughout China there are 10 or so major spoken 'dialects' (each of which can be divided into dozens of sub-categories) that are mutually unintelligible. However, as I have traveled to various cities, I have come to notice that youth often use the new standardized Chinese (Putonghua) as their first language, while their elders use the area's accepted 'dialect' and understand as much Putonghua as their job requires. This being the case, most educated Chinese are now bilingual at minimum, but with several generations, the dialects may begin to completely die out. Interestingly, the same process is going on throughout Arabic speaking counties.

Xi'an

The Terracotta Army was discovered by local farmers outside Xi'an in 1974 while they were digging a well. Since then, it has been discovered that the army was buried as funerary art in the years of 209 and 210 BC. The idea was that the army would accompany Shi Huang Di (the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty) in his afterlife and help him rule his next kingdom there. A large majority of the site has yet to be excavated, but it is estimated that there are over 8,000 human figures altogether, not to mention horses, chariots, and other artifacts. The number of workers involved in the project is estimated to be 700,000, many of which are thought to have been buried alive to prevent them from telling others of the tombs. Aside from warriors, there are horses, remains of weapons and chariots, generals, acrobats, musicians, strongmen, and other officials. Each statue is unique and may be replicas of real people and horses of that time.

This was undoubtedly one of the most interesting sites I've visited thus far!!