By Elizabeth Zhang
This week we traveled to China’s current capital, Beijing, and its past capitals, Luoyang and Xi’an.
Because I have visited Beijing before, I have been to some of the historical cites before (like Temple of Heaven, Great Wall of China, etc), but this time I tried to be more observant and focus on the little details. Beijing is a city where ancient historical cites and modern buildings coexist. Walking down the street, you can see towering skyscrapers and shopping centers to your right and beautiful ancient palaces to your left. The architecture is really unique with older looking houses down the “hutong” streets, modern apartments and glass buildings, as well as buildings with both ancient and modern designs.
The food in each city was amazing!!! Besides eating traditional Beijing food like Peking duck, we also tried different street foods like tang hu lu (glazed Hawthorne and sometimes other fruit on a stick) and fried scorpion! Walking down the street in each city, I was able to interact with the local people, observe their daily life, and hear the different dialects they spoke. As we traveled further from Beijing, the accents and dialects sounded sounded less and less like the “pu tong hua” I was used to hearing. I think it’s amazing how the country is unified under one written language but the dialects and accents sound like completely different languages.
“If you go to Shenzhen, you can see 50 years of changes, 500 years in Beijing, but 5,000 years in Xi’an.” As the capital for 13 dynasties, Xi’an is rich in cultural relics including pottery figures, mural paintings, Terracotta warriors, statues, and many more cultural relics that tell the story of Xi’an and its people.
Xian not only has thousands of years of China’s history, but it also has been the home of my ancestors. Xi’an is my grandmother’s hometown as well as her seven other siblings. A huge part of my family was born and raised in Xi’an and most of them still live there today. I have 4 great aunts, 3 great uncles, and 14 cousins from Xi’an! Although my family is from Xi’an, I have never actually stepped foot into this city. Through this trip, I got the opportunity to explore the same streets my relatives grew up in, try traditional foods from my family’s hometown: Biangbiang noodles and 肉夹馍 ”Chinese hamburgers”, and learn more about the history of the city and my own ancestors.
I’m so thankful I got the chance to explore these important cities and learn more about China’s history and my own family’s history.