Lima, Peru

Sunday, December 12, 2004:
After a few morning errands (blog catch-up, laundry, etc...) I had lunch on a small side street off of the Parque Central. Shortly after noon, I jumped in a taxi and had the driver take me to Lima´s famous --- and now partially infamous --- Museo d´Oro (Museum of Gold).

My $3 fare took me some 15 minutes away from Miraflores, through middleclass residential neighborhoods and streets lined with factories, gas stations and run-down strip malls. There was even a Domino´s Pizza, sadly enough. With a spattering of palm trees and an assortment of little ranch and two-story houses in pastel lilac, turquoise and yellow, it looked not altogether different from the suburban sprawl surrounding Miami International Airport. "Delightful," you must be thinking, "I surely must go there."

Finally, in a residential area altogether removed from anything else in Lima that remotely merited a visit, my driver dropped me off at a large walled complex spanning a full city block. It looked like a prison. I paid a $9 admission fee and entered the gate past a small shack serving as a guard post. The lonesome, chain-smoking guard gave me a bored wave through. Once inside, a pedestrian walkway led me past a row of little tourist shop huts (selling gold, jewelry, postcards, alpaca clothing) to a squat white building, itself quite prison-like, marked "Museo d´Oro" in big, gaudy bronze letters running across the rooftop. Were the letters supposed to look as if they were themselves made of gold? I hoped not.

I walked in.

The Museo d´Oro is actually two separate museums merged into one. The gold museum has always been the top biller, even after a scandal in 2001 raised grave doubts as to the authenticity of thousands of pieces of inventory. They´ve cleaned the place up a bit since, removing the objects of controversy and trying to fill in the space with other exhibits, but the museum´s reputation no longer has the same "luster" it did before. (Sorry.)

The first floor of the Museo d´Oro´s unattractive digs is barren of gold. It is occupied by Lima´s Museum of Arms, a vast collection of weaponry spanning centuries, cultures and continents. I had expected to spend less than an hour touring the Arms Museum and another two hours in the Gold Museum. It could not have worked out more differently.

The Museum of Arms is fascinating, and I do not think you would have to be military history buff to appreciate it. Name a type of weapon and, chances are quite good, you will find that manner of weapon here, so long as it is not of the modern, 20th century variety. There are no tanks or bazookas, for example. Japanese katanas, Chinese battle axes, Mongolian scimitars, Hungarian swords, early Balkan firearms, U.S. Civil War muskets and Persian daggers can be found in spades, however. But the history and origin of the weapons is not all that the museum has to demonstrate. The examples that have been collected here are extraordinary examples of craftsmanship that serve to illustrate the religious beliefs, superstitions and aesthetic tastes of the time and region each weapon originates from.

As one example, the blades of the Arabic swords and daggers from the 13th-18th centuries come in every size and shape imaginable, some having a saw-tooth design, others having a second blade that juts out under the first, and some running at a slant, lenthwise, as though the craftsman sought to make it resemble a bolt of lightening. Hilts are in ivory, jade, and turquoise among others, and there are precious stones embedded in some of the hitls. Arabic print runs along the blade or the hilt as well, usually both.

The Chinese, Japanese and Hindu weapons (from roughly the 14th century and on) also come in all shapes and sizes. Hilts in jade and ivory are shaped like Buddhas, nude women, various animals. No single weapon is identical to anything else and many appear to be works of extreme devotion by their creators, taking countless days, weeks or possibly months to finish. In looking at the collection, particularly the older pieces, you are reminded that many owners regarded their weapons with a spiritual or religous reverence --- they believed that they had some degree of "magical" or "supernatural" power in them, whether given by a God, Gods, or otherwise. The individuality of these pieces demonstrates a wide range of views, with nothing resembling an "assembly line" product in the slightest. Of course, this is a carefully assembled collection of some of the finest pieces available, so it only makes sense that the run-of-the-mill varieties would not be chosen to appear here.

If rooms filled with swords, daggers, axes, bows, arrows, crossbows and spears are not enough for you, you can find the earliest examples of rifles and pistols here as well. They are not all from Europe (though there are plenty of them --- glittering with silver, gold and jewel inlays --- from the 16th century and onward), but guns from all over Asia, Russia and India. A number of pieces are from the earlier part of the Ottoman Empire and Arabia.

All but buried in the middle of the collection are two of Francisco Pizarro´s swords, dating from the 1530s. Rounding the display off are numerous assorted military objects on the non-weapon variety: uniforms worn by 19th and 20th century South American leaders and generals; Allied and Axis World War II uniforms; hats and helmets from the U.S. Civil War (Union and Confederate); hundreds of old silver spurs and riding boots; ornate, engraved walking canes; suits of armor from medievel Europe; 15th-17th century rusted cannons... and countless other items.

I couldn´t wander around the Museum of Arms without beginning to wonder (perhaps a bit morbidly) just who owned the various deadly pieces on display. Spanning hundreds of years, ranging all around the world from pre-Incan spearheads to 17th century Japanese spiked knuckles to 19th Century Austro-Hungarian dueling pistols, there are thousands, if not tens of thousands of weapons. Because these were not cheap, mass-produced churn-outs, one expects they were, for the most part, manufactured because there was a demand for the item in question, meaning that there must have been thousands, or tens of thousands of owners. It raises a lot of questions: What wars did they fight in? Did they live or die? Who died at their hands with the weapon on display? There is, of course, no way of knowing, but the possibilities are endless. Did a weapon or an owner of a weapon make a pivotal imprint on history, albeit an anonymous one? The thought of it all made me want to down a few beers in rapid succession. Maybe with some nachos.

After nearly two hours in the Museum of Arms the Museum of Gold was not quite a let down, but not quite inspiring either. Most of the exhibits were discovered in or near Peru and date to the Pre-Incan Sipan culture that flourished from approximately 900 - 1200 A.D. Many pieces are far older, however. The problem with the museum, so far as I was concerned, was that little of the Sipan history was elaborated on, perhaps because little is known. The pieces, including necklaces, masks, rings and other pieces of ornate jewelry often include other jewels and sometimes beads. The gold is not very flashy or shiny, much of it looking like a blend between gold and silver. Intermixed with the precious metals and jewels are some other Sipan artifacts including spearheads and ceramics. Gruesome but far more interesting are the several decorated, deteriorated (but not completely skeletal) remains of un-earthed Sipans, close to 1,000 years old. These are cased in transparent plastic blocks. Some of the bodies are in the final poses they held at their death --- like the bodies you can see in Pompei, Italy, although these are more recent and the circumstances of their deaths are unclear.

After only thirty minutes or so, I had browsed the full collection. I returned to the Museum of Arms for another half an hour because I realized I had missed another room of Japanese Samarui artifacts, then made my way back out the gate to where the taxis were waiting. Of course, the dispatcher told me the rate to get back to Miraflores was twice what I had paid to get there, so I walked away from him until he chased after me and we negotiated a more reasonable rate. All of this haggling was getting tiresome and I was beginning to think that a nice Samurai sword or antique musket would be a nice thing to start carrying around.