Xi'an History Museum

The Shuyuan Youth Hostel did an awesome sweet-and-sour pork dish for lunch after our slight bit of oversleeping! A wander south through the gate took us by way of what we first thought was a stadium, but in fact turned out tobe some kind of exhibition market selling some revolutionary new non-stick pan which appears to be particularly adept at producing behemoth stacks of pancakes and omelettes. If the chef had come with it we'd have bought one each to feed us on our travels!

A wander through what seemed like a student precinct, past the tiniest McDonald's I've ever seen and making what must by now be nearly our thirtieth bakery stop, we got to the History Museum after nearly ending up at some army-painting exhibition stacked with tour groups of policemen.

The History Museum seemed, for the most part, to be a fine arts museum, documenting art from the various Chinese Dynasties from a fair few thousand years BC until the present-day. This meant an exhibition of bells, masks, vases, china (little-c), warriors and copper mirrors. A selection of the pottery had a heat-reactive substance in the clay which gave each pot an entirely unique colouration which had a tendency to resemble dribbling green paint (in a nice way though!). The copper mirrors had no glass. Copper was used instead which rendered them as pretty poor mirrors, though I suppose it blurred the features of any ugly people who used them!! The back though were really ornate and to be honest having glass so many thousands of years BC would have been quite an achievement. There was also a six-by-six puzzle where you had to make all diagonals, verticles and horizontals add-up to 111, regarded as a sacred object and also an extremely ornate national treasure - a bull-shaped wine flask.