The next day was supposed to start with a bike ride on the Old Xian City Wall, but when we woke up that morning we learned that due to rain the bike ride had been cancelled. I was disappointed, but we had been going non-stop for the past four days so a morning spent lounging in the hotel room was welcomed.
That afternoon we headed to the reason people go to Xian—the Terracotta Warriors. These have been on my list of things to see forever, and they did not disappoint. The Warriors were built by an emperor a long, long time ago (I don’t remember exactly, but it’s something like 1000-2000 years ago) outside his tomb to serve as an army to protect him in the afterlife. There are thousands of life-sized warriors, in the formation exactly as a real army at the time would have been formatted. Each warrior is modeled after a different warrior, so they are all completely unique. They were built, covered with wooden roves, and buried in a tomb.
In 1974 some farmers were digging for a well and they hit something hard, thus discovering the terracotta warriors. The government paid them each the equivalent of $3 USD, a deal all parties involved thought fair at the time. In 2006 one of the farmers came back to the government, pretty much told them that they screwed him, and now he is gainfully employed in the gift shop signing copies of books about the Warriors. He earns a nice government salary and they provide housing for him. We got lucky and he was there the day we were.
The complex that houses the Warriors is huge—it consists of housing for the farmers whose land was taken away to make the complex, a mini-village filled with restaurants and souvenier shops (the farmers now work in these establishments), numerous squares and a park-like entrance to the buildings that actually house the Warriors. The first building holds Pit #1—the largest and most famous. It holds 6,000 Warriors, but only 1,000 have been uncovered and restored. When I say restored, I mean put back together like a puzzle. Shortly after the emperor who had the Warriors built died, his empire was overthrown and the new army came in and destroyed the Warriors. You can see some of the excavation of the Warriors that have yet to be put back together—it looks like a mess of terracotta pieces of pottery or something. It’s a complete disaster and makes the fact that so many of the Warriors have been properly put back together even more amazing. You really can tell how each of the Warriors are unique; they are different heights, weights, have different facial features, etc. At one point they were all even painted differently, but the color has faded over time (thousands of years will do that, I guess). The parts of the Pit that are not uncovered just look like mounds of barren earth. We made our way through the next three pits and learned about the different formations of warriors, and saw one of the five Warriors that was uncovered completely intact and whose paint was still visible. It was only a little red on the back of his uniform, but the fact that he is so old and you can still see the paint on his was really cool.
After seeing the Warriors, we had some tea at the Terracotta Warriors Teahouse, then were dropped off at the airport for our 9:00pm flight back to Chengdu. As I was sitting at the gate, minding my own business, I heard one of the boys clicking a pen repeatedly behind me. I turned to ask them to stop doing it, and realized it wasn’t one of the boys at all, but a Chinese man CLIPPING HIS NAILS! He continued for a good ten minutes, then brushed the clippings onto the floor. You just never know what you’re going to see next in this country.
Pictures: The discoverer of the Terracotta Warriors signing books; Can you see the different faces of the Warriors?
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