China Tour 2013
April 10th – 23rd, 2013
 

April 15th
We enjoyed a city tour this morning. First stop was the Xi’an wall. This is massive and is the most complete city wall that has survived in China. It is 8 miles around, with two miles down four sides. At 600 years old it is a beautiful piece of work. It took 8 years to build and this is what is fascinating about the building of the wall….it was made with the soil that was used from the moat that they dug to build the wall. They used a mixture of moat dirt, sticky rice, kiwi and lime powder. The sticky rice was useful for helping everything stick together. I just cannot fathom how much sticky rice they would have used to build this was as it is very thick. There were four tower gates when first built but that had changed to 15 because of the traffic.

Then to visit the Pagoda. It is now in a very wealthy area and you can tell that just by looking at the big stately homes, beautiful manicured areas and the shopping centers! The Pagoda is run by the monks. We picked a very good time to visit as it was not busy so could get up close to everything and learn about it. The Pagoda is listing to one side and we hear it was because there were four wells in the area and one was drained which caused the soil to move. Now that they are not using these wells any more the listing has stopped. It is worth saying that this Pagoda has been standing here for 1300 years. The gardens surrounding the Pagoda are lovely as well and filled with peonies.

There was a little man who was selling these musical instruments that were made of clay. The sound was like a flute…we bought some and then found out that they have been around for 7000 years. Imagine…it is called a Xun.

Then to the train for our trip to Luoyang