Xi'an

As the result of my inability to plan ahead and get a ticket to the South, I am instead going to be spending this week in Xi'an (pronounced "shee-an"), the capital of Shaanxi ("shan-shee") province, formerly the capital of the Han Dynasty (although under a different name), close to the site of the Qin (pronounced "chin") Dynasty capital (many people consider the Qin to have been the first dynasty to rule a unified China; note that we took our name for China from Qin, the Chinese people took their name for themselves from the Han Dynasty, which followed the Qin). Within striking distance are the tomb of the first emperor of China and the third-most-famous site in China, the terracotta army. Given this, I expect Xi'an, or at least the major sites there to be almost as crowded as Tian'anmen was during national day two years ago when I was in Beijing; that is to say that I expect that to see the terracotta army of the Qin, I will have to force my way through a flesh and blood army of Han.

I am somewhat more interested in other things to be seen in Xi'an, and potentially in other parts of Shaanxi, however. In particular, the Muslim quarter of the city is supposed to be quite interesting and home to some tasty snacks. Xi'an is also the city where General Zhang from the Dongbei (the Northeast, Manchuria), a sometime ally of the Nationalists under Jiang Kaishek, took the Generallisimo (Jiang that is) captive and ultimately forced the Second United Front between the Nationalists and the Communists, which was probably nessisary in enabling the Reds to force out the Japanese. Actually, this entire period of Chinese history reads like an adventure novel, especially the Long March and the capture of Jiang, and I highly recommend Red Star Over China to anyone who has not read it.

I have no fully formulated intellectualizing for this post. I have only to say that I have been reading a fair amount of Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Soul of Man, bits and peices of various plays), which has served to reaffirm my belief in socialism and individualism and my schepticism about compromise and democracy. Furthermore, I am even more convinced than ever that the appearance of paradox is a good indication that you are actually thinking.

I will end with an incomplete meditation. There is a passage in the Dao De Jing which I think is both one of the most easily understood and one of the deepest. It talks about how utility is brought by what is not there even if value is brought by what is there. For example, a bowl is only useful because it has space in the middle to put things in. At the same time, it is only a bowl because of what is around that space. This seems to me to be both a powerful statement about value and about aesthetics which requires far more thought than I have here to fully unravel. But consider this thought from Oscar Wilde (paraphrased as well): when people are poor, all they worry about is money (because they need to get by); when people are rich, all they worry about is money (because they have so much to keep track of). In both cases, money, or property, is the problem. If you have no clay, you can't make a bowl, if you have a ton of clay, then there is no space in the bowl to fill with stuff, but if you have some clay, then you can make a pretty nice bowl. So I ask, wouldn't it be better to give everyone some clay, and see what kind of neat stuff they can make?