Day 9 – Xian – The Terracotta Warriors

Today we are off to see the Terracotta warriors, Xian’s main tourist highlight.  We left the hotel at 9am to miss the worst of the morning traffic, which we may or may not have, but it still seemed pretty bad to me.  The Warriors are about 50ks to the West of the city, and we had a couple of stops on the way, so it was another full day of sightseeing.

The first stop was the Banpo Pre-historic village, which is the site of a village that was inhabited about 6,000 years ago.  The site was fascinating for the historical remnants they found, if not overly for what a layman like me got out of the actual site.  As I said to Helen, “you’d have to know what you were looking for”, because to me it just looked like a bunch of holes in the ground.  As the site was an excavation site, it was kind of like layered holes in the ground, and when your digging a hole in the ground, I’m not sure how you recognise a hole that someone else dug in the ground 6,000 years ago.  As you can tell, I’m not an archaeologist, but when you see the photos you will see what I mean. 

What was interesting, however, was the tools and technology they had developed – the kiln for firing pots was particularly impressive – the structure of the society – it was matriarchal, so the women were in charge, and the burial rituals they had.  Babies were buried in clay pots outside the house, and they found 83 of these clay pots.  Some people were buried face down, if they died of natural causes, other face up, others in a kneeling position.

The site was discovered in the 1960’s when they were building a power plant, so the plans for the power plant had to be amended while they figured out what to do about the site of the village.  We heard about the power station on the way in, but didn’t ask what type of power station it was.  We learnt on the way out that it was a coal fired power station, as we drove past truck, after truck, after truck waiting outside the gate to unload their coal.  I don’t know if the power station is the cause of it, but Xian is a very smoggy city, smoggier than Beijing, even though it only has a quarter of the number of inhabitants.

Our next stop was the Warrior / porcelain / lacquer factory.  The Terracotta warriors are the most famous thing in the district, and are one of China’s main tourist draw cards.  The factory was not responsible for making them originally, as they date back to around 210 BC.  They do however make replicas of them today and you are able to purchase pieces that range in height from a few inches to up to 2 metres – the height of the actual warriors.  As well as the warriors, the factory also makes lacquer furniture and fine Chinese porcelain.  The tour gave us a demonstration of how they created the warriors, and the kilns they used to fire them after they’d dried for a couple of weeks.  There are 5 different warriors figures – kneeling archers, infantrymen, officers, generals and the emperors.  As well as those figures, there are also horses and carts, as part of the overall Terracotta Army.  The full sized warriors are built in two parts – the body from a mould in one part, and the head separate.  This heads are separate because each head in different, so the warriors, like us, are all individuals.

Not having room in our suitcase for any 2 metre high warriors, although they would have shipped them home to us, we moved through the Lacquer furniture section (not really our thing) and into the fine Porcelain china section to check out all the beautiful pieces that could tempt us. 

After lunch, which was in a restaurant today and accompanied by other people, we headed out to the Terracotta Army.  For those of you that don’t know, this army of some 8,000 individual pieces was built and buried to protect Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, in the afterlife.  The following is my recollection of what the guide told us, so if I’ve got it wrong, apologies, but hopefully you’ll get the general gist of what we saw. 

 

 

The Emperor is buried in a tomb under a mountain, which has been known about for a long time. This is what we visited first, and it is a large park and gardens, and we were able to walk around the area.  The tomb hasn’t been opened because the technology doesn’t yet exist that would enable them to preserve the things that are buried there.  Although the tomb has been known about for a long time, there was no knowledge of the buried army.   There had been discoveries of some pieces of terracotta in the past, but it was only in 1974 that a group of farmers digging a well that made what was the discovery that would be the start of the excavation of the terracotta army.  After the tomb park area, we headed into the exhibition centre for the warriors, and to our surprise, one of the farmers who had discovered the warriors in 1974 was there (he’s there every other day apparently) signing the book about the warriors, so we got a signed copy from him. 

We then headed into the third of the three pits to start looking at the exhibition of the warriors.  Helen our guide was taking us through the pits in the reverse order, which was a good idea, because the warriors in the last pit have not been restored yet, so you just get to see bits.  It’s still interesting to see how they were laid out though.

The warriors were buried in corridors several metres under the ground.  To do this, they dug large deep trenches with brick lined sides.  The warriors were then put in the trenches in lines, and then a roof was put over them, and then the whole lot was buried.  Some of the trenches were broken into almost as soon as they were covered over, and the warriors smashed up.  Archaeologists are working to restore each warrior. 

In pit two, we saw what is the command centre for the army, as all the warriors are all looking inwards, as if they are receiving instructions, and there are more generals and officers in this particular pit than in the number 1 pit, which is where the main army is.

Finally, we visited the main pit, and saw the lines of warriors.  Again, there is a lot of restoration work required on the soldiers that have been excavated.  There are thousands more warriors that could be excavated, but they know that they are all painted in vibrant colours, and that those colours fade very quickly when exposed to the environment, so until they figure out how to preserve what they unearth, they are not going to unearth any more.  They know about the colours because when the first started excavating, the warriors were all very colourful, but after just a few years, the colour disappeared and now all you have is just the black coloured warriors.

 

As I said, the army was built for the first Emperor of China – the man who originally unified china in the 3^rd century BC, but the venture was a typically egotistical folly, as it cost so much that it broke the monarchy, so after a bit of a power struggle, the Qin dynasty was pushed aside after just 15 years, and the Han Dynasty installed to rule for over 400 years.