We got to Xian, collected our luggage and headed to the train station. Ironic I know since we’d had hopped all along to arrive there by train. The train station is where the buses that go to the Terracotta Warriors Museum leave from. An important note about Xian is that many things that are supposedly in Xian are really not in Xian. For example, the airport is more than 40 km from town, so it’s about a 50 minute bus ride to town. We got to the station where we found the left luggage office (which looked like all of China was storing a bag there) and quickly found the bus to the warriors. FYI: the Warriors are not actually in Xian either. Like the airport, they’re some distance from the city, about 35 km.
The Xian train station was a seriously old school Chinese train station – thousands of travelers with their random assortments of odd packages, bins, buckets, boxes and the like sitting all over a pavement roughly the size of a football field. The remaining pockets of space were monopolized by vendors of socks, fried critter on a stick and other oddments. The “Patriotic Stop Spitting Everywhere and Chain Smoking” campaign clearly hasn’t resonated quite as strongly out here in the sticks (only 4.5 million or so).
So, another hour later we were in line buying tickets to see the warriors and trying to get 400 pushy tour guides to leave us alone. Like everything else in China that is worth seeing, the Terracotta Warriors are surrounded by a flea market. One thing was saw there and have seen nowhere else in China is dog pelts for sale. I mean like, that’s a german shepperd, and that one is a collie, and that’s a rotweiller. The whole thing was pretty unpleasant. I don’t mean to sound like some militant vegetarian or anything and know that the Chinese have a different relationship with dogs than we do but I don’t see the appeal of a dog skin rug. We put that behind us and walked a long way to the actual entrance to the site. There was the usual elbowing and general lack of line to get through and once inside it took some time to find where anything was.
The terracotta army was ordered by the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty. He was a brutal tyrant who led the Kingdom of Qin to victory over the neighboring states in about 220 BC. He standardized weights and measures and writing and basically created the idea of “China” and a unified whole which has lasted for 2200 years now. He also burned lots of books, had a large number of scholars buried alive and executed anyone who looked at him funny. Curiously, there were several attempts to assassinate him which made him paranoid and obsessed with becoming immortal. So he commanded thousands of slaves to create a life size replica of his army in clay to protect him in the afterlife. The figures are so detailed as to have different faces. It is thought that there were 8 generic heads that the artists then went about individualizing, probably using the faces of the actual army as their models. It is interesting to look at the faces and imagine that you are looking at the portraits of people who lived more than 2000 years ago. |
| Headless Cocktail Party |
Eventually we stumbled upon “Pit 2”. This is a collection of horse drawn chariots and archers but it is mostly unexcavated so there’s not much to see there except a few specimens behind glass. Next we found “Pit 3” which they suppose was the command center of the army. There was a bit more there, numerous statues, most without heads, right hands out clutching spears long since rotted away. As the picture shows, they look like a headless cocktail party. Finally we came to “Pit 1” where the bulk of the army is buried. This is the place where the scale of the undertaking really hits you. All the pits are covered with buildings but Pit 1 is covered by an aircraft hangar. I’d say it is 300 yards long, or more. And there they stand, hundreds of the warriors in long lines, staring at you from across 2 millennia. There are parts of Pit 1 where you can see people digging the pieces out of the ground and a place where you can see the warriors being reconstructed. When you see the state most of them are in when they come out of the ground it is astonishing how many they have put back together.
We made it back to town on the bus and after some digging with a flashlight the folks in the luggage office surfaced with our bags. We went to our hotel which was not the easiest to find because it was in this walled compound with the Sofitel and some other hotels. The hotel was lovely and the whole compound was scented! We wanted to go out into the city for dinner and asked the concierge for a vegetarian recommendation. This landed us at a gorgeous restaurant that boasted lovely ground floor aquariums with sea turtles and other exotica. Aquariums – that pleasant thought held for almost 20 seconds while I my brain slowly processed that this was the menu – not the décor. Back out into the streets – seafood is very popular in Xian and by refusing to slow down next to anyplace with a tank in/on/near it, we had almost no options. We did find a place at last and the food was excellent – very spicy and had to be sent back because the tofu was floating next to big hunks of beef at first, but in the end, delicious.
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| Fabulous as it is, it does get a bit exhausting |
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