U China Travel Blog

Marco Polo and Christofer Columbus

In a very famous and popular book, The Travels of Marco Polo, a merchant named Marco Polo from the ancient Venetian Republic, traveled with his father and uncle, Niccolo and Maffeo, through Asia, Persia, China and met the Kublai Khan in Dadu–today’s Beijing.

At that time, under the hegemony of the Kublai Khan’s Mogol Empire, valued goods like China, silk, spices from China and India were safely transported to Europe via the land passage.

Today we don’t debate whether or not the Polos reached to China, it’s very important that their pioneering journey inspired many other Europears in search of the oriental treasures.

With the fall of Contantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the land route between Asia and Europe became very difficult, this made Europeans seek a new route—a sea route.

American Indians Smoking Pipe

A great navigator and Colonizer, Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), who was commonly believed to be born in Genoa, part of modern Italy, read Marco Polo’s Travels repeatedly and he was dreaming to reach Indian，China for gold. By the 1480s, He planned to travel to the Indies by directly sailing across the “Ocean Sea” the Atlantic Ocean. But he reached Central America and brought back exotic things to Europe among which tobacco became popular across the whole world today.

Lao Long Tou, Starting Point of the Ming Great Wall

Along the northern China, there lays an ancient dragon outstretching his body in a region which is several hundred kilometers from North to South and several thousand kilometers from East to West to defend our ancient civilization for over two Millennia. He puts his head in the ocean, coils the body along the ridges of mountains, and extends the tail into the western desert.

2,500 years ago, to defend its border, Qi State (today’s Shandong Province) built a long wall against Jin State and Chu State, which was the earliest great wall in Chinese history.

221BC, Emperor Qin founded the first centralized feudal empire (which was 1/3 of today’s China in territory) after annexing other six ducal states and ordered to link walls of several states together to defend the northern nomads; the conceptions of the Great Wall appeared in recoded history for first time.

Continue reading →

Han Warrior and Qin Warrior

Terra-cotta figures were well made for the purpose of accompanying the deceased in their afterlife, a concept strongly believed by ancient Chinese. Our ancestors considered death a beginning of another life, the dead should be looked after as if they were still alive. They buried food, jade, pottery, weapons, implements, and sometimes, even human beings in the tombs for a prosperous afterlife.

Because human sacrifice had always been considered too cruel to be human, Chinese began to make terra-cotta, wooden, and metal figures to replace the real life sacrafices. The style of burial figures varied throughout different periods of time: Qin Dynasty Terra-cotta warriors and horses were made full-sized, while Han Dynasty terra-cotta warriors were made 1/3 of the life-size. Also, Han Dynasty burial horses were made of wood.

Continue reading →

Naked Han Terra-cotta Warriors

In 41BC, Han Dynasty Emperor Jing Di Liu Qi passed away after 16 years of struggle against his kinsmen and the Huns. He was buried in a chamber covered with a huge earth mound, which was surrounded by an imperial mausoleum known as Yangling Mausoleum, and his stories became legendary and even mythical.

He was almost forgotten until more than 2,000 years later. In May 1990, a highway connecting Xi’an city (the city where full-sized terra-cotta warriors were discovered in 1974) and airport was under construction. Because one part of the planned highway was in the protected archaeological site of the Yangling Mausoleum, construction workers were very careful not to disturb the emperor’s afterlife.

Continue reading →

circular walled courtyards in Fujian Province

I’ve been to many relics of different walls: Qin Dynasty Great Wall, Ming Dynasty, Great Wall, Xi’an City Wall, my home town village wall etc, I can say in China almost everywhere you could find a wall.

6,000 years ago, our ancestors settled down thanks to the discovery of agriculture, fertile land along the Yellow and Yangtze River Valleys nourished the lives of several matriarchal villages which were encircled by huge ditches, which served as the best protection against wild beasts and seasonal floods. The earliest protection around the ancient communities started from this kind of circular ditch which later evolved into the moat.

Continue reading →