Xi’an and the Terracotta Warriors
Since our only real item on our agenda for Xi’an was to see the Terracotta Warriors, we pretty much just dropped out things off at the hotel and jumped in a car for the one hour drive to the site. The history of the Terracotta Warriors and the first Emperor of China is quite fascinating but much to long to cover here so for anyone interested, there is a pretty good summary at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terracotta_Army.
The excavation site is quite built up with facilities now to accommodate the tourist traffic, with four very large buildings encompassing the areas being worked on and a museum showing some of the other artifacts they have recovered so far (work on the actual Emperor’s tomb has been stopped while they figure out how to preserve all of the things they believe they will find once they enter it (including man-made rivers of mercury if the legends are true). The biggest of these is Pit 1, where about 1,000 warriors have been recovered and 5,000 more are believed to be still buried.
Seeing the warriors for the first time is truly breathtaking. As amazed as we both were with the Great Wall, this experience may even have surpassed that. For those following our travels through the picture gallery, you’ll quickly see that we couldn’t help but take picture after picture. The detail involved in assembling this army of warriors is simply incredible. It is very easy to forget looking at it that what exists here was created over 2,200 years ago.
I won’t go into detail here, but for anyone interested, there are all kinds of stories in the pictures we took about how the warriors were arranged, how they were differentiated by rank, what kinds of weapons they were built with, etc., and we’d be happy to tell them when we get home.
The second building houses a much smaller site with about 40 warriors. This is believed to be the headquarters for the army and contains only officers. The third building is another large pit (about half as big as Pit 1), but is not being excavated at this time, in part because there is still so much work to do at Pit 1, and in part because the archaeologists are trying to figure out a way to keep the paint from oxidizing as soon as it is exposed to air and flaking off (while the ones that you can see now are all a terracotta color, originally, each one was painted to look real, all the way down to fingernails on the hands). According to our guide, the current estimate is that it will take about another 100 years before the site is completely excavated and restored.
The final building houses mostly bronze artifacts elsewhere in the tomb complex. The most important of these are two chariots made to one-half scale to carry the spirit of the Emperor and Empress to the next life. Again with these, while the level of detail would make them impressive in pretty much any era, that they were crafted so long ago with only the technology of the time casts them in a whole different light.
The Terracotta Warriors checked off on our list, we headed back to the city and out to a restaurant not far from the hotel. That it was full of locals we took as a good sign, and after stumbling through a menu that was as confusing in the broken english they translated it into as it would have been in native Mandarin, we ended up batting about .500 (maybe .600 if the ribs were actually pork).
Our flight to Guiling leaves early in the morning so with that in mind, we’re calling it a day.