Terracotta Warriors & The Home of Shaolin Kung Fu

Due to a spot of dodgy weather, the power hour and a plethora of quality clubs we didn't quite manage to do a whole lot on the sightseeing front in Xi'an but we did manage to make it to the Terracotta Warriors...an underground army of terracotta warriors discovered in 1974 by peasants digging a well.

Several hundred thousand workers spent 36 years building the tomb, which the Emperor, at the age of 13, ordered to be built shortly after he ascended the throne. It is said that workers and supervisors involved in its design and construction were buried alive within the tomb.

While there we were greeted by a far more fearsome army...hoards of old-age american pensioners whose hearing aids seemed to be defective and insisted on screaming to eachother non-stop..cheers for that.

The next in an unending series of sleeper trains brought us to Louyang. Despite having a population of over 6 million there wasn't a whole lot to do..we did manage to grab a few games of pool with the locals though (in between getting some serious stares...either my fly was open or we looked kinda outta place..not sure which)

Latest Pool Score:
D. Walsh - 3

P. Walsh - 1

Poor start from the pre-tournament favourite as the pressue of the Laoyang invitational tournament seemed to get to him...don't write him off yet though..there's a lot of games left to play .

An early start on Saturday morning brought us on a bus full of ancient chinese couples to Shaolin Si, the spiritial home of Zen Buddhism & Shaolin Kung Fu (...a bit of a contradiction if you ask me but I wasn't going to argue with any of them especially after I saw one of them break a metal bar in half using his face).

The history bit - In 495AD a Buddhist monk called Bodhidharma from India came to China to teach Yogic concentration (aka "Zen" Buddhism) but was refused admission at the Shaolin Temple. Because he had a bit of time on his hands he climbed high into the mountains to a cave where he meditated for nine years, aking to waiting to get on a Northern Line tube at 9am on a Friday...(It is believed <> that he sat, facing the cave wall for much of these nine years so that his shadow became permanently outlined on the cave wall).

After nine years, the abbot Fang Chang finally granted Bodhidharma entrance to Shaolin where he became the First Patriarch of Zen Buddhism. Supposedly Bodhidharma exercised in the cave to keep fit and when he entered Shaolin Temple, found that the monks there were not very fit. He developed a set of exercises that later became the foundation for the specialized interpretation of martial arts at Shaolin.

Ever eager to cash in on the tourist $ the Chinese government recently spend close to to $150m renovating the Shaolin Temple site and while it's a lot more tourist-friendly it definitely looks to have lost some of its soul and history in the process (I found fake "monks" selling buddha replicas in the temple itself a bit tacky)...the half-hour kung fu show really did make the trip worthwhile. Aspiring monks as young as 8 and 9 years old flying through the air like something from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon..I'm not sure if the picture below captures it but these lads were pulling off some crazy moves

Here's me checking out a statue of Confucius, founder of a religion (Confucinism) and reverred in China pretty much on the strength of being a sound lad and encouraging everyone to love one another...sound familiar eh?