After spending 3 days in the capital Beijing, we took a high-speed train to the city of Xi’an, located in central China. It is famous for the 8,000 terracotta warriors buried with one of the emperors in 200 BC.
The warriors were amazing! It is like seeing a video or photographs from over 2000 years ago. You really got a sense of what they looked like and how they dressed. Each one was an individual, so there were all different kinds of soldiers, some fat, some skinny, tall, short, etc.
The emperor had three regiments of soldiers, horses, chariots, etc. lined in deep ravines of hardened clay. Archaeologists believe they were built to protect the emperor in the afterlife. It is crazy that something this big was forgotten over time, but I guess 2000 years is a long time. The warriors were discovered in 1974 by a farmer digging a well. The site of his well is preserved.
I thought the statues were found intact, and some were, but most were in pieces. Archeologists carefully reassembled the statues and put them in their original places so people could get an idea of how they were arranged. Many of the statues remain buried, being preserved for future studies. Sadly, they were painted when they were made and when exposed to the air after so many years, the mineral paint faded within minutes when exposed to the air. The tourism infrastructure that has grown up around the site is a bit off-putting, but educationally, it is such an incredible piece of history that it doesn’t matter. It is worth the time to go out to the site.
Xi’an is about the size of New York, and as many cities in China, I never heard about it before coming here. City officials went crazy over decorative lights and it is very entertaining to see so many lights.
On our last day in the city, we rented bicycles and rode the almost 14 kilometers of ancient city walls, surrounding the old center of Xian. The wall was perfectly preserved, as most city walls are only preserved in fragments, but in Xi’an, the entire wall is intact, with a moat on the outside. There is a marathon on it next month that I would love to have run. Riding the entire length of the walls gave me a good perspective of the old China inside the walls, which were temples and small, Socialist-style apartments. It contrasted from the new China, huge, glass and steel apartment towers on the outside of the wall.
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