Here is a small video from our trip to the Terracotta Warriors. It was spectacular. For those who haven’t used embedded video from you tube before: when you first hit play it will play our video and then when it is finished it will give you the option to watch videos on the same subject from other people – they aren’t as good as ours… =) But I guess they might be watchable.
On the Thursday in Xi’an we really only did one thing.
We went to the Underground Army of the Terracotta Warriors.
The bus left from our hotel at 10am and was supposed to arrive one and a half hours later. But Xi’an is a city of 8 million people, and once you’ve gotten outside the old city walls there’s still a lot more roads, cars, motorbikes, bicycles, tuk tuks and old ladies peddling a trolley full of whatever to get through. I tried to go to sleep but couldn’t quite do it.
Our guide recommended we stop on the way at a Terracotta Warrior factory, which is the official government factory where they actually make quality little models which will last and stay the same colour and are made out of the proper terracotta. Subtext being if you want to buy a decent model buy it here. Sub-Subtext: buy something. They also make a lot of very nice wooden furniture and other ornate little things, and the walk around the factory was pretty entertaining. They showed us the lady globbing bits of clay together in a mould to make warriors, the kiln, the ladies painting models, the people making the nice furniture, and so on. A few people were severely tempted by some of the smaller wooden pieces, seeing as the prices were quite good (for such quality) and included shipping and insurance. But we restrained ourselves, and got back on the bus, where I noticed for the first time that our bus driver looked like a Chinese version of Kerry O’Keefe.
Moving on.
Then we got back on the bus and settled in for the last half an hour which took about an hour and a half. As you get towards the park which encloses the museum you go off the expressway and onto a two-lane road. You go onto sitting very still in your bus and looking like an idiot while the Chinese people walk past you on the shoulder. 45 minutes of sitting very still, occasionally creeping forward, or getting a burst now and then of advancement by driving up the wrong side of the road when there was a gap was enough to convince us that we too should get out and walk.
And it wasn’t even that far. The guide that we hired for the day told us that there is not just one National Holiday, it’s actually a three or four day period normally, except that this year they had taken some other holidays from May and stuck them in October to make a holiday week which people have been referring to as Golden Week. So we had picked the single worst day to get into the Terracotta Warriors in the last 10 years.
Before you go in the museum there is a big statue in the carpark of Tsin Shi Huang (or if you like, Qin Shi Huang), the first real emperor of China, the man who ordered a garden wall built between himself and Mongolia, and the man who had the Terracotta Army built to guard his burial chamber. Now I knew before going that the Army was very large, and underground, but I didn’t know that it was 2,500 years old. Or that it was part of a burial chamber. Or that only 1,000 of the Warriors are on display, and the other 6,000 are still further underground and haven’t been touched yet. Final thing I didn’t know: that construction of the tomb was begun years beforeTsin Shi Huang died, and that just four years after he died the tomb was broken into and set alight by soldiers from the dynasty which took over from Tsin: the Ming dynasty. And that’s why many of the soldiers are buried today; they were housed in huge wooden chambers, but the wood burned for around 90 days and eventually collapsed.
There are five parts to the tour;
1. a film showing the history of the site, and how the Warriors were built, and then discovered in 1974 by a Chinese farmer
2. the first (and largest hall, filled with the ordinary foot soldiers of the Army)
3. the third (medium sized) hall, which we went into second because it encloses the command centre of the Army
4. the second (slightly larger) hall, which we went into third because it shows some of the current archaeological work and a lot of half-buried soldiers, as well as a glass-cased general, officer, archer, and a sword which appears to have some kind of chromium plating on it. Apparently chromium plating wasn’t ‘invented’ in Europe or America before about 1900, although I looked this upon the internet and there is another plausible explanation which involves a high chromium content in the metal to begin with, and the extremely lengthy fire causing that chromium to rise to the surface. Anyway, when someone goes into the unburnt, uncollapsed chambers downstairs, we’ll get our answer.
5. A chamber containing the Bronze horses and chariot of the Emperor, and another chariot with more horses which rode ahead of the Emperor as a guard. This chamber was easily the most crowded. Actually it was kind of primeval in there, pressing up against the glass case with about 49 million people waiting for the chance to get to the front row.
The soldiers, the halls, and the chariots you can see in the pictures posted below. What I would really like to tell you about is the film. It only ran about 10 minutes (long enough to eat the ice cream we bought outside), but it ran in a circular theatre with 9 large screens arrayed around so that they all joined up. The film depicted the battle which Tsin Shi Huang was fighting at the time, the news coming back to the Imperial court that he had been killed, the preparations for his burial, the building of the terracotta army, the Ming soldiers breaking in and starting the fire, the building collapsing, and then the Chinese farmers stumbling on the entrance while digging a well, 2,500 years later.
While doing all of these things the film alternated between showing a panoramic view on all nine of the projector screens, so that you could turn around in circles and see the entirety of the battle scene, or showing three separate but related sections of footage on three of the nine screens. Like many things which the Chinese have done, it was ingenious and innovative. And it was a nice film too; very well shot and edited. The film sets the scene at the start by showing shots of the roaring Yellow river, then follows the river down to the plains where the museum is today. It’s way nice.
Anyway – enough about the film, go see it for yourself.
By the time we got back on the bus with Kerry O’Keefe and got back to Xi’an it was after 5pm so we just chilled out in the hotel for a bit, went and bought some fried tofu off the street for a snack, and then had Yum Cha at a very nearby 24-hour restaurant, which had a lot of tasty food to choose from and was of course very cheap as well.
Greg
