National Day Travel Notes
"Tianjin University's Beiyangyuan campus is really beautiful—vast, new, and well-designed."
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Tianjin
Tianjin University’s Beiyangyuan campus is really beautiful—vast, new, and well-designed. The library building is striking.
The Porcelain House in Tianjin was a bit unsettling—not in a supernatural sense, but in an aesthetically overwhelming way. Fragments of antique porcelain cover every surface, giving the impression that someone smashed a museum’s entire collection and glued the shards onto a building. Tianjin’s Five Great Avenues have the same kind of feel as Qingdao’s Badaguan—European colonial architecture repurposed into a park promenade.
Xi’an
Xingqing Palace Park is right next to Xi’an Jiaotong University and is quite pleasant to stroll through. The Wild Goose Pagoda at night was disappointing in person: the sky glows reddish-amber from light pollution, making it more atmospheric than photogenic. The Furong Garden area felt like watching a BBC documentary on China from the inside—Huawei stores every ten meters.
Coming to Maoling to pay respects at Huo Qubing’s tomb, I finally understood why Han Wudi sobbed at his passing. That funerary stone sculpture of a warhorse trampling a Xiongnu warrior: the horse’s expression is entirely ordinary, as if a Xiongnu warrior under its hooves is nothing extraordinary. The relief carvings here are bold and simple, cut with very few strokes. The horse trampling the Xiongnu and the lying-down horse are the most famous.
Qianling Mausoleum: the Wordless Stele for Empress Wu stands across from the述圣记碑 (Stele of the Record of the Holy Ruler) for Emperor Gaozong—a magnificent pair. Climbing Li Mountain is exhausting but the view from the top is wide. The Huaqing Palace hot springs are still steaming. The Beacon of Fire tower is in decent shape. The Chongyang Monastery is where the Quanzhen sect was founded; the “Tomb of the Living Dead” from Jin Yong’s novel is a bit of a letdown in person.
