Terra Cotta Warriors

The other highlight to our trip throughout China was our stop in Xian to see the Terra Cotta Warriors. To get there, we took a 12 hour over-night train from Beijing. This is a pretty good option, especially with a family. There are some downsides, however.

1. Non smoking cars aren't truly nonsmoking as people can smoke at the end of the train cars and that seems to circulate quite nicely back into the other cars via the air conditioning system.

2. You're easy pickings by fellow train passengers who want to interact with you and your kids. This time I was the target. Some random lady who saw me on the platform buying drinks and snacks tracked me down and found my room and, uninvited, sat down to tell me all about why she was going to Xian. She probably would have stayed there forever had we not told her to leave our cabin...in a more nice way than I'm putting it.

The Terra Cotta Warriors were stunning. They were first discovered by a local farmer who was drilling for water and came across shards of terra cotta. That turned into the massive dig that we have today. If this had been the United States, then the guy who found this would undoubtedly be a very rich man...kind of like finding oil underneath your house. But in this case, the man who found this has a new job, that of sitting in a visitor center outside of the entrance, shaking hands with people and signing autographs for tourists who buy coffee table books. Look, is it a step up from farming? In my book, yes. But come on...this guy got shafted in grand scheme of things.

I don't know if it's comforting or not to know that wasteful government spending isn't a modern invention. A few hundred years BC, Emperor Qin, who's buried here, recreated an underground palace complete with an army to help him fight in the afterlife. So much planning went into this, that it was started over 30 years before the future Emperor died...even before he was made Emperor.

The whole compound is fascinating. It's one of these places where you can stand in one place and stare it would still be as stimulating after 30 minutes as it was when you first saw it. It's just hard to fathom how much time, money, people and effort that went into making these statues. The attention to detail and the sheer number of soldiers is incredible. Most have been broken apart underground and it must be so tedious to put them back together - like a giant 3D puzzle.

This place is still very much a slow work in progress. There are three pits, two still darkened significantly, denoting ongoing archeological digs.

As always, click on the pictures to take you to a small gallery of shots from the day. The youtube video below offers a brief look at the statues and the pits.