dana thomas deluxe how luxury lost its luster

Afterward, we went to Xi’an to see the Terracotta Warriors. I was there to cover the opening of Giorgio Armani’s new retail complex on the Bund, the waterfront promenade in Shanghai. In April 2004, my husband and I traveled to China for the first time.

Each year, more than twenty million tourists-primarily Chinese-travel to Xi’an to see the warriors, making the site one of the country’s most popular tourist destinations.

Half an hour away by car is the site of the Terracotta Warriors, the eight thousand life-size soldiers and horses that were buried in the tomb of Shi Huang Ti (259–210 BC), the first emperor of Qin (or China), for more than two thousand years and discovered in 1974 by a farmer digging a well. It has some local industry -cotton textiles, chemicals, and high tech-but its most important business is tourism. The new wealth of China has not trickled down to Xi’an-at least not yet. Nothing has been painted in decades scooters are held together with string, tape, and hope and everything is covered in dust and soot. The people, many dressed in faded Mao suits, seem downtrodden. Unlike Beijing and Shanghai, which, thanks to China’s market reforms, have become vibrant international capitals, Xi’an suffers from the blight of communism. With a population of 8 million, Xi’an is a small city by Chinese standards, compared to Shanghai (17.8 million), Beijing (15 million), and Chongqing (12 million).

Many considered it the greatest city in the world. It was said that Xi’an was as cosmopolitan and influential as Baghdad, Constantinople, and Rome. Xi’an was so beautiful-with its elaborate Buddhist temples, mosques, bustling souks, and eighth-century walled imperial city-that Japan’s emperors used it as a model for their imperial capitals of Kyoto and Nara. Painting, poetry, dance, and music thrived in Xi’an, and l’art de vivre-the refined art of living-was an essential component of everyday existence. The famed Silk Road, the trade route that linked the Far East to Europe, started there in the second century BC and turned the city, then known as Chang’an, into a throbbing metropolis of nearly two million and an epicenter for culture and politics. From 221 BC to AD 907, Xi’an served on and off as the capital of the vast Chinese empire. Xi’an, pronounced Shee-ahn, is one of China’s oldest cities, settled by humans since prehistoric times. DOWN THE DUSTY ROADS of Xi’an the motor scooters zoom, weaving around potholes and rickety bicycles, bip-bip-bipping their horns as they circle the city’s sixteenth-century bell tower.

Dana thomas deluxe how luxury lost its luster