The
terracotta warriors are one of the major tourist attractions in all of China. When they tour some of the life-sized clay warriors to different museums around the world, they get
turnout like they do for Tutankhamun. I realize that sentence contained an unclear pronoun, but I don't care.
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| Jon and me inside Pit #1. |
So, the deal with the terracotta warriors is, essentially, that people are crazy. I will elaborate. In the 200s BC the
first emperor of united China took over. He decided at some point that he didn't want to die like the rest of us and roam the afterlife unprotected and without anyone to boss around. So he mobilized 700,000 people* to build him an immense army of warriors made of terracotta clay to be buried with him.
The estimated 8,000 warriors were built in an assembly line fashion, each individually carved with unique faces, hand painted and provided real weapons to hold. Then they were carefully lined up in huge ditches in the ground, covered with wood beams to form a roof above them, and buried underground near the tomb of the emperor they were to guard. In the afterlife. Yeah.
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| Terracotta warriors: always willing to lend a hand. |
Most of the weapons were pilfered shortly after the warriors were placed, at which time many of the warriors were also broken and the tombs set fire. (Early form of "going postal", perhaps?) Then, over the next two thousand years or so, they were mostly forgotten during which time the wood roofs above the ditches degraded and collapsed, breaking every single soldier into a zillion pieces.
Then some farmer found them while digging a well in 1974, and excavation/restoration has been taking place ever since. That farmer was signing books at the site when we were there. Or, I suppose, it could have just been some dude, I have no way of knowing.
Jon and I flew to Xi'an, the ancient capital of China (now just a regular small-ish city), stayed overnight, and then took a tour to the warriors the following day before flying back to Beijing. Our tour consisted of a bus ride to one of the shops where they supposedly make the replica warriors, then to the pits where the warriors reside.
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| Creating warriors in 2012. |
There are three pits, and an enclosed building has been built around each for tourists to view the pits. The area surrounding the pits has been made into a nice complex with foliage and well-kept pathways/quads.
The first pit is the largest and coolest. It has an estimated 6,000 warriors in it, only a few hundred which have been excavated and re-assembled. I think this was the most disappointing part of the visit -- I expected to see a sea of thousands of warriors, but there were really only a few hundred assembled. But it was still cool.
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| Pit #1 |
The second pit was the second largest and has not been excavated at all. It's just a building built around all the caved in pits where soldiers still remain broken inside their 2200 year old tombs. One reason they haven't ripped them all open is because when the painted clay is exposed to the air, any remaining paint falls right off. They are trying to develop some method of retaining the paint while they excavate before they take them all out. Plus, it's a huge task that will cost lots of money and take tons of time.
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| Pit #2 is unexcavated. There are warriors in there! |
Pit three was the "command center" of the army and is the smallest pit. It has been fully excavated and the figures re-assembled. Which wasn't as difficult because there were only a few dozen figures here.
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| Pit #3: The Command Center. |
This attraction wasn't super easy to get to (2 hour flight from Beijing then an hour bus ride outside of Xi'an), but it certainly could have been worse and I'm glad we went. Plus, any trip with Jon is fun!
*China
probably didn't have quite the population they do now. This is a ridiculous number of people to have doing any one thing (except, like, breathing) 2200 years ago.
