Travel book lookups regarding Porter's The Silk Road

I like to look up various spots in travel books. Porter starts in Hong Kong, and thrills us with tails of avoiding over priced travel.

Traveling the silk road with Bill Porter in The Silk Road starts in Xian:

I didn't know China is named after the Qin Dynasty.

Underground Warriors. Wikipedia calls it the Terracotta Army.

"Impressive thought it was, a person can only stare at such a sight for so long. After a half hour we had seen enough." (p. 14)

There's a TV show called Mysteries of the Terracotta Warriors (2024) on Netflix I probably won't watch.

Kukai, one of my many spiritual heroes, could have seen the Goose Pagoda when he was in Xi'an.

They went to the Emperor Wu's tomb, a hill, that those warriors were supposed to be guarding.

I'm not sure where I've read about Yang Guifei before, but I've seen those statues. She's among the 4 great beauties of ancient history.

Famen Temple. Supposedly there's a Buddha finger there. Ashoka supposedly sent it in the 3rd century, but it took till the 6th century for the Buddhists of China to realize what they had. “ For a nominal fee, Finn and I even got a certificate proving that we did, indeed, pay our respects to the same finger that pointed to the Middle Path 2,500 years ago.”

The flow of information flowed along the Silk Road, and Buddhism spread along it.

Later monasteries are repositories of information. Books carried portable information.

The internet is just the latest conduit.

Comments

Manet and Degas

Brilliant video explaining the exhibit. Go to the Met and see the exhibit! It's really quite special. In the last gallery the painting this sketch is based off of, of the execution of a Mexican president. The painting has been cut into sections, and the surviving Degas has reassembled them. NY Times review

Character list of Inherent Vice the novel

Fay "Shasta" Hepworth played by Katherine Waterston in the 2014 movie Larry "Doc" Sportello: Our hero, gumsandal. Shasta Fay Hepworth: Former beautiful love interest. Mickey Wolfmann: Real estate tycoon, Shasta's sugar daddy, paying for apartment in Hancock Park. Mrs. Sloane Wolfmann: wife. Has her own side piece Mr. Riggs Warbling Deputy DA Penny Kimball: lawyer from district attorney office, who fooled around with Doc for a time. Works next to Rhus Frothingham (female book, male in movie). Aunt Reet: Aunt in real estate. "Bigfoot" Christian Bjornsen: Hollywood detective and actor. Married to Chastity. Spoiler: His partner Vincent Indelicato is wacked by Adrian Prussia, but Puck did the actual job. Mrs. Chastity Bjornsen: Gets on the phone on page 260 of the paperback to defend Bigfoot's day off from work. Calls Doc Mr. Moral Turpitude, accuses him of running up Bigfoot's mental health bills. Denis: friend who he goes and gets a pizza with...

AOC

Dark Brandon meet Dark Alex. I see her advising the republicans to stick to their guns and never compromise. They don’t want to do anything, only obstruct. So they don’t actually need to be unified. Chaos isn’t organized. This is fine. Read all about it from Heather Cox Richardson , a historian who covers current events. "As their policies threatened to lose voters by concentrating wealth upward and hollowing out the middle class, Republicans increasingly warned that minority voters wanted socialism and were destroying the nation to get it. Trump rode that narrative to power, and now tearing down the current government is the idea that drives the Republican base." While we're at it, here's another funny photo from the Onion: And then: I listened to the Times podcast about George Santos . He basically lied about, I don't know, 80% of his resume, and has a mysterious $700k in his "corporation" which has no clients. So he's a Russian or Chinese plant, o...

Motley Kamuka

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