ICKL Conference

	23rd Biennial Conference of ICKL
	Beijing Normal University, China July 23 (Arrival Day)–July 29 (Departure Day), 2004

Information

Detailed Tour Description

NOTE: Since the Forbidden City and the Great Wall will be on a tour during the Conference, those have been replaced with the Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven and Lama Temple as shown on the itinerary.

Beijing - Forbidden City - Badaling Great Wall - Dingling - Xi’an - Army of Terracotta Warriors - Huaqing pool - Shaanxi History Museum - Big goose pagoda - Shaanxi Provincial Museum - City Wall - Banpo Neolithic Village - Great Mosque - Longmen Caves - White Horse Temple - Luoyang Museum of Ancient Tombs - Shaolin Monastery
Beijing The mountains are high and the emperor is far away’ says an ancient Chinese proverb, meaning that the further one strays from Beijing’s grasp, the better. Beijing, capital of the People’s Republic of China, is where they move the cogs and wheels of the Chinese universe, or try to slow them down if they’re moving in the wrong direction. History: Although the area south-west of the city was inhabited by cave dwellers some 500,000 years ago, the earliest records of settlements in Beijing date from around 1000 BC. It developed as a frontier trading town for the Mongols, Koreans and tribes from Shandong and central China. By the Warring States Period it had grown to be the capital of the Yan Kingdom. The town underwent a number of changes as it acquired new warlords — the Khitan Mongols and the Manchurian Jurchen tribes among them. During the Liao Dynasty Beijing was referred to as Yanjing(capital of Yan), and this is still the name used for Beijing’s most popular beer. Beijing’s history really gets under way in 1215 AD, the year that Genghis Khan set fire to Yanjing and slaughtered everything in sight. From the ashes emerged Dadu (Great Capital), alias Khanbaliq, the Khan’s town. By 1279 Genghis Khan’s grandson Kublai had made himself ruler of most of Asia, and Khanbaliq was his capital. With a lull in the fighting from 1280 to 1300, foreigners managed to drop in along the Silk Road for tea with the Great Khan — Marco Polo even landed a job. The mercenary Zhu Yanhang led an uprising in 1368, taking over the city and ushering in the Ming Dynasty. The city was renamed Beiping (Northern Peace) and for the next 35 years the capital was shifted south to Nanjing. In the early 1400s Zhu’s son Yong Le shuffled the court back to Beiping and renamed it Beijing (northern Capital). Many of the structures like the Forbidden Cioty and tiantan were built in Yong Le’s reign. The first change of government came with the Manchus, who invaded China and established the Qing Dynasty. Under them, and particularly dring the reigns of the emperors Kangxi and qianlong, Beijing was expanded and renovated, and summer palaces, pagodas and temples were built. In the last 120 years of the Manchu Dynasty, Beijing and subsequently China sere subjected to power struggles, invaders and the chaos created by those who held or sought power: the anglo-French troops who in 1860 marched in and burnt the Old Summer Palace to the ground; the corrupt regime under empress Dowager Cixi; the boxers; General Yuan Shikai; the warlords; the Japanese who occupied the city in 1937; and the kuomintang after the Japanese defeat. Beijing changed hands again in January 1949 when People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops entered the city. On 1 October of that year Mao proclaimed a "People’s Republic" to an audience of some 500,000 citizens in Tian’anmen Square.
Forbidden City The Forbidden City, so called because it was off limits to commoners for 500 years, is the largest and best-preserved clusterof ancient buildings in China. It was home to two dynasties of emperors — the Ming and the Qing — who didn’t stray from this pleasure dome unless they absolutely had to.The Beijing authorities insist on calling this place the Palace Museum. Whatever its official name, it’s opendaily from 8:30 am to 5pm. The basic layout of the Forbidden City was built between 1406 and 1420 by Emperor Yong Le, who commanded up to a million labourers. From this palace the emperors governed China — often rather erratically as they tended to become lost in this self-contained little world and allocated real opwer to the court eunuchs. One emperor devoted his entire career to — carpentry — when an earthquake struck (an ominous sign for an emperor) he was delighted, since it gave him a chance to renovate. The buildings now seen are mostly post-18^th century, as are a lot of restored or rebuilt structures around Beijing. The palace was constantly going up in flames — a lantern festival combined with a sudden gust of Gobi wind would easily do the trick, as would a fireworks display. The moat around the palace, now used for boating, came in handy since the local fire brigade was considered too lowly to quench the royal flames. In 1664, the Manchus stormed in and burned the palace to the ground. It was not just the buildings that went up in smoke, but rare books, paintings and scrolls. In this century there have been two major lootings of the palace; by the Japanese forces and the Kuomintang. The latter, on the eve of the Communist takeover in 1949, removed thousands of crates of relics to Taiwan where they are now on display in Taipei’s National Palace Museum.
Badaling Great Wall Also known to the Chinese as the "10,000 Li Wall", the Great Wall stretches from Shanhaiguan Pass on the east coast to Jiayuguan Pass in the Gobi Desert. Standard histories emphasise the unity of the wall. The "original" wall was begun 2000 years ago during the Qin Dynasty (221-207 BC), when China was unified under Emperor Qin Shihuang. Separate walls, constructed by independent kingdoms to keep out marauding nomads, were linked up. The effort required hundreds of thousands of workers, may of them political prisoners, and 10 years of hard labour under General Meng Tian. An estimated 180 million cubic metres of rammed earth was used to form the core of the original wall, and legend has it that one of the building materials used was the bodies of deceased workers. The wall never really did perform its function as a defence line to keep invaders out. As Genghis Khan supposedly said, "The strength of a wall depends on the courage of those who defend it". Sentries could be bribed. However, it did work very well as a kind of elevated highway, transporting men and equipment across mountainous terrain. Its beacon tower system, using smoke signals generated by burning wolves’ dung, transmitted news of enemy movements quickly back to the capital. To the west was Jiayuguan Pass, and important link on the Silk Road, where there was a Customs post of sorts and where unwanted Chinese were ejected through the gates to face the terrifying wild west. During the Ming Dynasty a determined dffort was made to rehash the project, this time facing the wall with bricks and stone slabs — some 60 million cubic metres of them. This Ming project took more than 100 years, and the costs in human effort and resources were phenomenal. The wall was largely forgotten after that. Lengthy sections of it have reurned to dust. The wall might have disappeared entirely had it not been rescued by the tourist industry. Several important sections have recently been rebuilt, dressed up with souvenir shops, restaurants and amusement park rides. Oddly, the depiction of the wall as an object of great beauty is a bizarre one. It’s often been a symbol of tyranny, as the Berlin Wall once was. The majority of visitors see the Great Wall at Badaling, 70 km north-west of Beijing at an elevation of 1000m. This section of the wall was restored in 1957, with the addition of guard rails. Since the 1980s, Badaling has become exceedingly crowded with visitors so a cable car was added to enhance the flow of tourist traffic.
Dingling Dingling was the first of the Ming tombs to be excavated and opened to the public. In total, 13 of the 16 Ming emperors are buried in this 40 sq km area, which is why another name ofr this site is the thirteen Tombs. Besides Dingling, two other tombs, Changling and Zhaoling, are open to the public.
Xi’an Xi’an once vied with Rome and later Constantinople for the title of greatest city in the world. Over a period of 2000 years Xi’an has seen the rise and fall of numerous Chinese dynasties, and the monuments and archaeological sites in the city and surrounding plain are a reminder that once upon a time Xi’an stood at the very center of the Chinese world. Today Xi’an is one of China’s major attractions. The big draw card is the Army of Terracotta Warriors, but there are countless other sights scattered in and around the city. There is also an Islamic element to Xi’an, found in tucked-away mosques and busy marketplaces, that lends the city a touch of the exotic rarely found in Chinese cities further east. History: The earliest evidence of human habitation in the Xi’an area dates back 6000 years to Neolithic times, when the then lush plains proved a perfect area for primitive Chinese tribes to establish villages. In time, the legendary Zhou established a capital on the banks of the Fen River near present-day Xi’an. Xianyang Between the 5^th and 3^rd centuries BC, China split into five separate states locked in perpetual war, until the state of Qin conquered everyone and everything. Emperor Qin Shihuang became the first emperor of a unified China and established his capital at Xianyang, near modern-day Xi’an. His longing for immortality gave posterity a remarkable legacy — a tomb guarded by thousands of terracotta soldiers. The Qin Dynasty crumbled shortly after the death of Qin Shihuang. In 207BC it was overthrown by a revolt led by a commoner, Liu Pang. Pang established the Han Dynasty, which lasted a phenomenal 400 years, during which time the boundaries of the empire were extended deep into central Asia. But the dynasty was never really secure or unified. It collapsed in 220 AD, making way for more than three centuries of disunity and war. Nevertheless, the Han empire set a precedent that lingered on in the dreams of would-be empire builders, a dream that came to fruition in the Sui and Tang dynasties, which ruled from the city of Chang’an. Chang’an: After the collapse of the Han, the north of China was ruled by foreign invaders, and the south by a series of weak and short-lived Chinese dynasties. When the Sui Dynasty united the country, it built the new capital of Chang’an in 582 AD as a deliberate reference back to the glory of the Han period, a symbol of reunification. The Sui was short-lived and in 618 it was replaced by the Tang. Under th Tang, Chang’an became the largest city in Asia, if not the world. It attracted courtiers, merchants, foreign traders, soldiers, artists, entertainers, priests and bureaucrats, and embarked the Tang on a brilliant period of creativity. The city’s design encompassed outer walls which formed a rectangle, 10km east-west and just over 8km north-south, enclosing a neat grid system of streets and wide avenues. The walls, punctuated by 11 gates, were made of pounded earth faced with sun-dried bricks, and were probably about 5.5m high and between 5.5m and 9m thick at the base. Within these walls the imperial court and government conducted their business inside yet another walled city. Communications between the capital and the rest of China were developed, mainly by canals which linked Chang’an to the Grand Canal and to other strategic places-another system that was also developed and improved by the Tang. Roads radiated from the capital, with inns for officials, travelers, merchants and pilgrims. This transport infrastructure enabled Chang’an to draw in taxes and enforce its power. The city became a center of international trade, and a large foreign community established itself. Numerous foreign religions built temple s and mosques, including Muslims, the Zoroastrians of Persia, and the Nestorian Christian sect of Syria. The growth of the government elite and the evolution of a more complex imperia court drew vast numbers of people to serve it. By the 8^th century the city had a phenomenal population of two million. Towards the end of the 8^th century the Tang Dynasty and its capital began to decline. From 775 onwards the central government suffered reverses at the hands of provincial warlords and Tibetan and Turkic invaders. The setbacks exposed weaknesses in the empire, and although the Tang still maintained overall supremacy, they gradually lost control of the transport networks and the tax-collection system on which their power depended. The dynasty fell in 907 AD and china once again broke up into a number of independent states. Chang’an was eventually relegated to the role of a regional center.
Army of Terracotta Warriors Ranking up there with the Great Wall and the Forbidden City as one of China’s top historical sights, the 2000 years old Army of Terracotta Warriors remains stunningly well preserved: a perpetually vigilant force standing guard over an ancient imperial necropolis. In 1974 peasants digging a well uncovered what turned out to be perhaps the major archaeological discovery of the 20^th century: an underground vault of earth and timber that eventually yielded thousands of life-size terracotta soldiers and their horses in battle formation. In 1976, tow other, smaller vaults were discovered close to the first one. The first underground vault measures about 210m east to west and 60m from north to south. The pit varies in depth from 5m to 7m. Walls were built running east to west at intervals of 3m, forming corridors. In these corridors, on floors laid with gray brick, are arranged the terracotta figures. Pillars and beams once supported a roof. The 6000 terracotta figures of warriors and horses face east in a rectangular battle array. The vanguard appears to be three rows most end of the army. Close behind is the main force of armoured soldiers holding spears, dagger-axes and other long-shaft weapons, accompanied by 35 horse-drawn chariots (the latter, made of wood, have long-since disintegrated). Every figure differs in facial features and expressions. The horsemen are shown wearing tight-sleeved outer robes, short coats of chian mail and wind-proof caps. The archers have bodies andlimbs positioned in strict accordance with an ancient book on the art of war. There is speculation that the sculptors used fellow workers, or even themselves, as models for the warriors’ faces.
Many of the figures originally held real weapons of the day, and over 10,000 pieces have been sorted to date. Bronze swords were worn by the figures representing the generals and other senior officers. Surface treatment made the swords resistant to rust and corrosion so that after being buried for more than 2000 years they were still sharp. The weapons are now kept in storage, out of public view. The second vault, excavated in 1976, contained about 1000 figures. The third vault contained about 1000 figures. The third vault contained only 68 warriors and one war chariot, and appeared to be the command post for the soldiers in the other vaults. Archaeologists believe the warriors discovered so far may be part of an even larger terracotta army still buried around Qin shihuang’s Tomb. Excavation of the entire complex and the tomb itself could take decades. Almost as impressive is a pair of bronze chariots and horses unearthed in 1980 just 20m west of the Tomb of Qin Shihuang and now housed in a small museum within the enclosure of the warriors site.
Huaqing pool The Huaqing Pool is 30km east of Xi’an below Lishan. Water from hot springs is funneled ito public bathhouses that have 60 pools accommodating 400 people. During the Tang Dynasty these natural hot baths were a favoured retreat of emperors and their concubines. The Huaqing Pool leaves most visitors cold. If you don’t fancy strolling around the gardens with swarms of excited Chinese tourists, try the museum up the road or take a walk on one of the paths leading up through the forest behind the complex. There is a Taoist temple on Lishan dedicated to the "old Mother" Nu Wa, who created the human race and patched up cracks in the sky after a catastrophe. One the mountain’s summit are beacon towers built for defence during the Han Dynasty.
Shaanxi History Museum Built in huge, classical Chinese style, the museum was opened in 1992 and is rated by some as the best museum in China. The collection is chronologically arranged and includes material previously housed in the Provincial Museum, although may objects have never been on permanent display before. The section on the ground floor deals with Chinese prehistory and the early dynastic period, starting with Palaeolithic Langtian Man and the more recent New Stone Age settlements at Lintong and Banpo Between 7000 and 5000 years ago. Particularly impressive are several enormous Shang and Western Zhou Dynasty bronze cooking tripods, Qin burial objects, bronze arrows and crossbows, and four original terracotta warrior statues taken from near the Tomb of Qin Shihuang.
Upstairs, the second section is devoted to Han, Western Wei and Northern Zhou Dynasty relics. There are some interesting goose=shaped bronze lamps and a set of forged-iron transmission gears, which are surprisingly advanced for their time. The final, third section has mainly artifacts from the Sui, Tang Ming and Qing dynasties. The major advances in ceramic making techniques during this period are most evident, with intricately crafted terra-cotta horses and camels fine pale-green glazed misi pottery and Buddhist-inspired Tang Dynasty statues.
Big goose pagoda This pagoda stands in what was formerly he Temple of Great Maternal Grace in the south of Xi’an. The temple was built around 648 AD by Emperor Gao zong (the third Emperor of Tang Dynasty) when he was still crown prince, in memory of his deceased mother. The buildings that stand today date from the qing Dynasty and were built in a Ming style. The original pagoda was built in 652 AD with only five storeys, but it has been renovated, restored and added to many times. It was built to house the Buddhist scriptures brought back from India by the traveling monk Xuan Zang, who then set about translating them into 1335 Chinese volumes. This impressive, fortress-like wood-and-brick building rises to 64m. You can climb to the top for a view of the countryside and the city. .
Shaanxi Provincial Museum Once the Temple of Confucius, the museum houses a fine collection devoted largely to the history of the Silk Road. Among the artifacts is a tiger-shaped tally from the Warring States Period, inscribed with ancient Chinese characters and probably used to convey messages or orders from one military commander to another. One of the more esxtraordinary exhibits is the Forest of Steles, the heaviest collection of books in the world. The earliest of these 2300 large engraved stone tablets dates from the Han Dynasty.
Most interesting is the Popular Stele of Daiqin Nestorianism, which can be recognizable by the small cross at the top and engraved in 781 AD to mark the opening of a Nestorian church. The Nestorians were an early Christain sect who differed from orthodox Christainity in their belief that Christ’s human and divine natures were quite distinct. Other tablets include the Ming De Shou Ji stele, which records the peasant uprising led by Li Zhicheng against the Ming, and the 114 Stone Classics of Kaichen from the Tang Dynasty inscribed with 13 ancient classics and historical records. Because of this collection, the museum is sometimes referred to as the Forest of Steles Museum.
City Wall Xi’an is one of the few cities in China where old city walls are still visible. The walls were built on the foundations of the alls of the Tang Forbidden City during the reign of Hong Wu, first emperor of the Ming Dynasty. The form a rectangle with a circumference of 14km. On each side of the wall is a gateway, and over each stand three towers. At each of the four corners is a watch-tower, and the top of the wall is punctuated with defensive towers. The wall is 12m high, with a width at the top of 12m to 14m and at the base of 15m to 18m.
Air-raid shelters were hollowed out of the walls when the Japanese bombed the city, and during the Cultural Revolution caves were dug to store grain. Most sections have been restored or even rebuilt, but others have disappeared completely(although they’re still shown on the maps), so unfortunately it’s not possible to walk right around Xi’an along the city walls.
Banpo Neolithic Village Officially rated as Xi’an’s No 2 attraction, surpassed only by the Army of Terracotta Warriors, the Banpo Neolithic village gets mixed reports from travelers. The general consensus is that it’s tacky and boring, but the occasional traveler comes away singing its praises. The best advice is to limit your visit to the Neolithic village itself(referred to as the Banpo Museume) and avoid the adjacent Matriarchal Clan Village, where matriarchs in Neolithic garb, high heels and reinforced stockings merely reinforce the feeling that you’re in modern, not ancient, China.
Banpo is the earliest example of "Yangshao culture", named after the village where the first of these was discovered. It appears to have been occupied from 4500 BC until around 3750 BC. The village was discovered in 1953 and is on the eastern bank of the Chan river in a suburb of Xi’an.A large hall has been built over what was part of the residential area of the village, and there are adjacent buildings houseing pottery and other artifacts. Pottery found south of the Qinlingshan mountains has suggested that even earlier agricultural villages may have existed here.The Banpo ruins are divided into three parts: a pottery-manufacturing area, a residential area and a cemetery. These include the remains of 45 houses or other buildings, over 200 storage cellars, six pottery kilns and 250 graves.The residential part of the village was surrounded by an artificial moat, 300m long, about 2m deep and 2m wide. It protected the village from attacks by wild animals and drom the effects of heavy rainfall in what was originally a hot and humid environment. To the east of the residential area is the pottery kiln center. To the north of the village lies the cemetery, where the adult dead were buried along with funerary objects like earthen pots. The children were buried in earthen pots close to the houses.
Great Mosque This is among the largest mosques in China. The present buildings only date back to the middle of the 18^th century, although the mosque might have been established several hundred years earlier. It stand north-west of the Drum Tower and is built in a Chinese architectural style with most of the grounds taken up by gardens. Still an active place of worship, the , the mosque holds several prayer services each day. Luoyang: Founded in 1200 BC, Luoyang was the capital of 10 dynasties until the Northern Song Dynasty moved its capital to Kaifeng in the 10^th century AD. In the 12^th century Luoyang was stormed and sacked by Jurchen invaders from the north and never quite recovered from the disaster. For centuries it languishes with only memories of greatness. By the 1920s it had just 20,000 inhabitants. It took the Communists to bring life back to Luoyang, constructing a new industrial city that now houses mor than a million people. In other words, today it’s hard to imagine that Luoyang was once the centre of the Chinese world and home to more than 13–Buddhist temples. There are reminders of Luoyang’s historical greatness scattered about town, but the main point of interest is the Longmen Caves, 16km out of town.
Longmen Caves In 494 AD the Northern Wei Dynasty moved its capital from Datong to Luoyang. At Datong the dynasty had built the impressive Yungang Caves. Now in Luoyang, the dynasty commenced work on the Longmen Caves. Over the next 200 years, more than 100,000 images and statues of Buddha and his disciples were carved into the cliff walls on the banks of the Yi River, 16km south of the city. It was an ideal site. The hard texture of the rock, like that at Datong, made it eminently suitable for carving. The caves of Luoyang, Dunhuang and Datong represent the peak of Buddhist cave art.
Apart from natural erosion, at Luoyang there has been much damage done to the sculptures during the 19^th and 20^th centuries by western souvenir hunters who beheaded just about every figure they could lay their saws on. These heads now grace the museums and private paperweight collections of Europe and North America. Among these were two murals which were entirely removed and can now be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Atkinson Museum in Kansas City. The cultural Revolution also took its toll when the Red Guards arrived with hammers. The Ten Thousand Buddha Cave was particularly damaged during this period. The art of Buddhist cave sculpture largely came to an end around the middle of the 9^th century as the Tang Dynasty declined. Persecution of foreign religions in China began, with Buddhism as the prime target. Although Buddhist art and sculpture continued in China, it never reached the heights it had enjoyed previously.
White Horse Temple Founded in the 1^st century AD, the white Horse Temple was the first Buddhist temple constructed on Chinese soil. Today, Ming and qing structures stand at the site of the original temple. Five hundred years before the journey of Xuan Zhuang, the Tang Dynasty monk whose travels are fancifully immortalised in the classic Journey to the West, two envoys of the han Dynasty court went in search of Buddhist scriptures. In Afghanistan they met two Indian monks and together they returned to Luoyang. The story goes that they carried Buddhist scriptures and statues on the backs of two white horses. In due course the temple was founded to house the scriptures and statues, and it was named after the horses. The temple is 13km east of Luoyang.
Luoyang Museum of Ancient Tombs This is a new museum that has a number of restored tombs ranging from the Han to the Song dynasties and includes the Han tombs formerly located in Wangcheng Park. The museum is underground and basically consists of brick-lined vaults with painted murals, carvings and burial items that were discovered when the tombs were excavated.
Shaolin Monastery China’s most famous martial arts tradition was indeed developed by Buddhist monks at the Shaolin Monastery, 80km west of Zhengzhou.
Each year, thousands of Chinses enrol at Shaolin’s martial art schools. Large classes of enthusiastic young trainees, many no older than nine or 10, can often be seen in the monastery grounds ramming a javelin through their imaginary opponent’s body or kicking into a sparring dummy with enough force to wind an elephant. According to the legend, Shaolin was founded in the 5^th century AD by an Indian monk, Bodhidharma, who preached Chan(Zen) Buddhism. The story goes that for relief between long periods of meditation, Bodhidharma’s disciples imitated the natural motions of birds and animals, developing these exercises over the centuries into a form of unarmed combat.
The monks have supposedly intervened continually throughout China’s many wars and uprisings — always on the side of right-eousness, naturally — and, perhaps as a result, their monastery has suffered repeated sackings. The most recent episodes were in 1928, when a local warlord had a go, and in the early 70s, courtesy of bands of Red Guards. In spite of the fires and vandalism, may of the monastery buildings are still standing, although most have had any original charm restored out of them. One of the more interesting sights is the Forest of Dagobas outside the walls past the temple; each dagoba was built in memory of a monk

23rd Biennial Conference of ICKL