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| A rock animal in Qian Ling 乾陵石獸 | The hill of Qian Ling behind a rock animal 乾陵 |
We walked on the road until there were no rock statues beside the road. We saw a big monument 碑, but there were no words on it, so it was called "Monument without words 無字碑". The Queen Wu Zetian 武則天 set up a monument like this, the meaning was to let the people in the future to comment on her. But I don't remember whether this monument was the one set up by the Queen or not, probably it is. After taking photos of it, we were given some time to have a walk. Somebody like Kelvin walked up the hill of Qian Ling, but Joe, Fat Boy and I chose to walk around the place around us only. At the main entrance of Qian Ling, we saw two rock animals guarding on each side, beside one rock animal, there was a place which we could find a group of statues. We walked past the main entrance, and saw a small monument saying the name of this place "Qian Ling 唐高宗乾陵". After that, there was a long road leading to the hill, and there were trees beside the road. Joe, Fat Boy and I walked to the right of the road, and we could see a wide view of the plain.
We saw many stalls selling necklaces, old coins etc., and there were a man there, when tourists gave their name to him, he drew pictures with showed the characters of the names. Some of us asked him to draw one. We came back to the car park and had a look of the stalls there. They all asked people to buy their things and even followed the visitors to persuade them. I bought a set of imitate old currencies, a jade figure (they were expensive I must admit, although I know all the tactics they used to persuade me as a psychology student, I still couldn't get out of it). Also, I bought an imitate piece of bronze wine cup. But I found something cute and cheap, which was little tigers made of fancy cloths. They were very cute and I bought 3 of them, and each of them was only RMB$1, I should have bought more of them! (Recently, around Chinese new year, MTR had their special commemoritive tickets sold with cloth tigers, and they were very similar with the dolls I bought). Really, there were many nice things. We waited on the coach for a long time because some of us were waiting for the man to draw pictures of our names. Finally our coach was able to take off.
Then we had the main thing, which was going to the tomb of Wing Tai Princess. We went down a long path which was quite steep. On each side, there were small windows, and we could see small pottery figures inside them, they were buried together with the Princess. We came to a rock which words were carved on it. A tour guide was telling the story of the rock to other tourists, and I listened for a while. After that, we walked further down the slope, and finally came to the bottom. It was congested there. I was disappointed with the things we saw, because we could only saw a huge black container, supposed to be containing Wing Tai Princess. The container was surrounded by metal gate, so we could not even touch it. It was quite cool down there.
We had our lunch at a restaurant nearby. I was not happy with the dishes, they were not my favour.
Firstly, we listened to ancient music played by presenters there. They used ancient bell-set 編鐘(metal bells in different size, arranged in an order and made different tones), another presenter played Gu Zheng 古箏.
The tomb was inside a space looked like a backyard of a house. It was quite simple, and was an upper part of a sphere, with a steele 碑 in front. There were rock horses, we sat on them to take photos. There was a statue of Yang Yu-Huan standing, a special characteristic of the statue was that there was a flower in the hair of Yang, just like Sammi Cheng in the poster of her concert "X dimension". Maybe Sammi saw this statue and copy the image of Yang!
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| Tomb of Yang Yu-Huan 楊貴妃墓 | Statue of Yang Yu-Huan 楊貴妃像 |
The scenery around the tomb was excellent. We climbed up an arbour 亭, and fields were around us, we could see distant fields, trees and roads. We did not stayed for too long, and went to another spot.
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| Tomb of Huo Qu-Bing 霍去病墓 | Mao Ling 茂陵 |
There was also a man drawing pictures with clients' names, and I asked him to draw one for me, the price was about RMB$10. We saw a stall selling badges. As others were still on the arbour, I had a walk around the whole garden.
At 7:30 p.m., we went to a room in our hostel and had a party 聯歡 with STU students. We sat in different tables with STU students. Kitty and I were in a table with two fourth year STU students, and the one I talked to was called Haung Yu 黃玉. Firstly, it was them to perform. They were very well prepared and their performance was very good. They performed singing, martial arts, calligraphy, and western dances, we enjoyed it very much. While they were performing, Haung Yu and I talked about the systems of HKU and STU. Then, we demonstrated our cheers, which was a characteristic of HKU. I gave an introduction to each cheers, and Kitty talked about the history of cheers. We taught them our cheers together with the body movements matching the words. They were quick to learn them, and the atmosphere was very good. Cheers boosted our morale effectively. When I explained the words in the cheers, I made a mistake in a pronunciation of a Mandarin word, what a fault. When I felt that I must have said something wrong, Mr. Cheung corrected me. Our performance was very well too.
These were the three cheers we demonstrated.
| HISO Guys | Up the sky | Beat them cheers |
| HISO guys -- We are here Where are you -- Xi'an U Working hard and playing hard in Xi'an Xi'an U You and I will never fall for we belong to (repeat the above) HISO guys HISO guys HISO guys |
Up the sky we are flying high Down the hill we are marching by Left, right, left and right All the way we are HISO guys |
Though we are small we beat them all Though we are few we never withdraw So look at us, hear what we call We are, we are, we are HISO guys We are, we are, we are HISO guys We are, we are, we are HISO guys |
Then, we sang karaoke (Huang Yu said they went to karaoke sometimes). There were lots of songs to choose, Joe and I sang Zhang Yu's famous song "Thinking hard for you 用心良苦". Some STU students sang Lo Da-You's 羅大佑 "Pearl of the Orient 東方之珠", which was my favourite, and I had never thought of singing the song in such a situation and such a place.
Suddenly the light turned dark, and there was strong music. The room suddenly turned to a disco. The students there seemed to dance a lot. Joe invented the "worm dance 蟲舞", in which we moved sidewards with our hands moving up and down. Quite a funny dance, and some of us followed the worm dance. It was the first time I sweat in Xi'an (The daytime temperature usually rose to about 33 degrees, but we did not feel it was very hot, since it was dry there and we did not sweat even when we were exposed to the strong sunlight. It was comfortable, we felt like autumn in Hong Kong). After the dances, we were all very tired. All of us talked happily with STU students.
We had another performance too, we sang the song "Big sea 大海", which was a local traditional song taught by Mr. Tung.
| Big Sea | 大海 |
| When I was a child, my mother told me, The big sea is my home. I born in th sea, I grew up in the sea Oh, the big sea, the big sea! It is the place of my birth. Wind blows, waves rise. Following me to anywhere in the world. Oh, the big sea, the big sea! It is just like my mother. I travel around the world, it is still being with me. |
小時候, 媽媽對我講 大海就是我故鄉. 海邊出生, 海裡成長. 大海啊大海, 是我生長的地方. 海風吹, 海浪湧, 隨我飄流四方. 大海啊大海, 就像媽媽一樣, 走遍天涯海角, 都在我的身旁. |
When the party ended, we were back to our rooms. We had a chat that night.
Leave me a message if you have any additional information or correction.