Mary didn’t believe me at first when I said we should go to Beijing on this trip just to have roast duck. But I was serious. I had Peking Duck for the first time when we were here 2 years ago and it was a life altering experience. I vowed then that whenever I returned to China, I would come back to Beijing for dinner. She quickly succumbed to my plan and so we find ourselves now in Beijing.

We returned today to the 150 year old restaurant near the Forbidden City where they actually track the number of ducks they’ve served during that time to emperors, kings, presidents and us. It’s a magical place, from the duck to the atmosphere, to the giant LED sign on the wall that tells you that duck number 115 million just popped out of the oven. Yeah, maybe it was a little touristy, but mmmmmm.

As we passed Tiananmen Square today, focused on our impending happiness, we stumbled not across the gate that leads to our ducky wonderland, but a giant wall enclosing block after block of the Qianmen district.

In preparation for the upcoming Olympics, this historic area that was home to houses, shops and our dinner is being razed to make way for a Chinese Santana Row which will have none of the character or charm of the original. Since this blog is being censored here anyway, I’ll just say that it stinks that China is tearing chunks of real history and culture out (not to mention displacing how many families and small businesses) just to give Olympic tourists a Disney-fied China.

Fortunately for our stomaches, the Quanjude restaurant does have a temporary location until the reconstruction is complete, so we did get our fix. But it just wasn’t the same. So tomorrow we’ll try our host’s recommendation for the new best roast duck in Beijing, serving #15,621.

-Steve

Our last (only?) Everest base camp warm-up hike before the real thing was to Huashan, a group of five mountain peaks a 2 hour bus ride from Xi’an. Locals go in droves to take the cable car up to the lowest peak and walk around a bit. Younger locals start at the bottom around midnight and hike up to the 6000ft eastern peak to catch sunrise. We’re not local and no longer young, so we took the middle ground and started up the windy path from the bottom at 8am, did a circuit of all 5 peaks and stopped for the night at a hotel on the eastern peak at 7pm so we could more leisurely catch the 6am sunrise the next day. That’s 10 hours (1hr for breaks) on an unrelenting stairmaster.

We don’t know how to speak or read mandarin so when it came to reading Chinese menus we were sadly useless. We found the best way to satisfy the stomach was to point at what other people were chowing down. This ended up working very well as we got to taste some great stuff that we otherwise wouldn’t have known to order.

Bowl of crossing bridge noodles famous in Xian. It only comes in one size, enormous.

Hot pot with spicy goodness, a Sichuan specialty.

Grilled skewers of pork, eggplant, stuffed buns, quail eggs, lotus root, tofu, mushrooms and so much more . Street food at its best in Jiuzhaigou.

Jiuzhaigou is one of the premier Chinese tourism locations with tens of thousands of locals visiting from all over China each week. The beauty of this national park is astounding if you can only get around all the other tourists shouting into their cell phones while bumping you to take a picture of their spouse in a Tibetan fur hat. It’s an absolute zoo at the popular sights. We did our best by starting as soon as the park opened and walking the back country paths instead of taking the bus. That allowed us to take photos that make it SEEM like there aren’t a thousand people around, but there really are in most cases.

All good destinations start with a good meal.
Pearl Shoals waterfall

The amazing color of 5 Flower Lake. No photoshop here.

Grilled skewers to finish off the trip

In 1974 a farmer was digging a well for water after a 3 month drought. Five meters down he pulled up a clay head. He had hit a far corner of the pit that housed the now famous pit of terracotta warriors near Xian containing an estimated 6000 big life-sized statues. It’s an estimated number because maybe a fifth of it has been excavated. The rest is still under layers of dirt and clay waiting to be released. Every night a team of archaeologists painstakingly brush away the debris then piece together the parts. All the soldiers were found in pieces so now it’s a giant jigsaw puzzle of history.

The army was created by the first emperor of China. Before Emperor Qin China was made up of seven dynasties each with their own currency, spoken and written language. In 221BC he conquered all seven kingdoms under heaven and united them, the new nation named after him. Part of his lasting legacies is a common language and money. One mile to the west was his mausoleum, and here stood his army facing the east to protect him from invaders. After his unexpected death on the way to an inspection his eleven year old son became the second emperor and his stone army was placed inside the ground, covered with a timber and straw roof and sealed from the world. Peasant uprisings spread throughout the country and the inexperienced emperor lost his head. The new ruler broke into the pits smashing the statues and setting fire anything that would burn. For two thousand years the remnants of the soldiers laid buried under ash and dirt.

Since the first excavation two other pits had been discovered, with the first being the largest by far. The clay that was used to make the army and their tunnels were brought from 50km away and is attributed to the strength and resilience that allowed these terracotta time capsules to last through the ages. They were made hollow to minimize weight and lower the risk of explosion during firing. Each is unique and vary not only in the hair, shoe tread, clothes, height and girth but expressions and proportions. Two hours after exposure to air their color dries up and disappears leaving them the earthy yellowish brown of dirt. To see them stacked in their reconstructed formation is equally as impressive as seeing the partially exumed shards. There is decades if not centuries of work left to be done.