Terracotta Warriors

Xi’an is the ancient capital of China and it’s sort of what you expect from the tourist brochures, with lots of beautiful old buildings with the ornamental Chinese roof decorations etc.  It also has plenty of multistorey apartment buildings, office blocks and mega shopping malls to service the teeney weeney population of 8 million!

Unfortunately we had to cut short our intended stay due to the lack of train tickets to Beijing if we didn’t go earlier.  We saw most of the highlights though, which are mostly clustered around the centre of town – the Bell Tower, Drum Tower, the ancient city wall and of course the premier event – the Museum of the Terra-cotta Warriors & Horses.

If you want to find out more information about them, try Google – I haven’t been able to get the official website to work but a lot of internet doesn’t work very well here.

The whole museum is a massive complex with the archaeology digs split into three covered “pits”.  We started in pit 2, which is mostly still unexcavated. 

The archaeologists are keeping a lot of the warriors buried because of their paint.  Once the painted terracotta is exposed to the air, the paint disappears very quickly.  I would imagine the other reason is that they have plenty of already dug up warriors to glue back together! 

The army was placed in trenches supported by rammed earth walls and covered with timber planked to make a roof and covered again by 5 metres of soil.  The ceilings have collapsed and the pressure of the soil from above has fragmented the army underneath.  The archaeologists have to painstakingly photograph the pieces where they find them, label them and then they try to put the pieces back together again – it’s like a massive jigsaw.

They found two bronze chariots with horses and charioteers – also in fragments – which took 8 years to restore.  It is fascinating stuff.

Michael was most interested in the Emperor, whose tomb the army is supposed to be protecting.  From the outside, the tomb just looks like a hill, but from ancient documents, the experts believe the tomb was built as an underground palace, lined with gold, jade and precious stones.  Safety mechanisms were built in to prevent looters, including a river of mercury and arrow and spear booby traps – very Indiana Jones!

We did a quick turn around the rest of Xi’an – walked along the old city wall which surrounds the city (one of the few cities in China where the city wall remains intact); went up both the Bell and Drum Towers including the “musical” programs of both.  I put that in inverted commas, as I have recorded a short piece of the Drum Tower program and you can decide for yourself if it can be considered music!