By this time in our tip we are about 4 days in and have about 8 days left. We arrived in Xian and got settled into our hotel rooms before we took a public bus out to the Terracotta Warriors Museum. It was another tourist packed sight but still totally worth the trip!
A little bit about the history of the Terracotta Army: (from Wikapedia cause they explain it better than I can)
The Terracotta Army or the "Terracotta Warriors and Horses" is a collection of terracotta sculptures depicting the armies of Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China. It is a form of funerary art buried with the emperor in 210–209 BC and whose purpose was to protect the emperor in his afterlife. The figures, dating from approximately the late third century BC, were discovered in 1974 by local farmers in Lintong District, Xi'an, Shaanxi province. The figures vary in height according to their roles, with the tallest being the generals. The figures include warriors,chariots and horses. Current (2007) estimates are that in the three pits containing the Terracotta Army there were more than 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses, and 150 cavalry horses, the majority of which are still buried in the pits nearby Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum.
So basically the first emperor of china thought that if he had a army of sculptured men guarding his tomb when he died that he would have their protection in the afterlife.
Here are some of the pictures that we got while we were there. These things are so OLD that it is magnificent to see the process of putting them back together and having all the pieces in place.
The pits are still being excavated and the people that are putting the pieces back together go into work at night when the museum is not open to the public.
Here you can see the statues labeled with numbers and being put together piece by piece.
These pits were dug in so that the statues stand in their battle formation.
Each statue is different. From the hair to the facial features to the body type, no one statue is exactly the same as the other.
Here are some of the horses that have been discovered and rebuilt.
As you can see some of the pieces are still missing, maybe still in the dirt or grind into dust. It was funny to walk around and notice that one was missing a finger or a hand or even a whole head!
See that second one from the bottom in the pic above? It was completely different from any other statue. He had a long, lanky body and no armor. Wonder what/who he was supposed to represent.
They would put sierran wrap around the parts that they had glued together to help hold it in place.
The baby bump at the Terracotta Warriors Museum! I am about 27 weeks here!
NO HEADS!
This is what the sites look like before all the pieces are excavated, cleaned and tagged. They are still working on many more sights that have more soldiers in them.
This is spot where some tomb robbers came and stole some of the goods without realizing exactly what they had found.
They also had some pieces on display because they were the only parts that were still completely in tack when they were dug up. The horse and soldier above as well as the ninja looking guy below were all in one piece.
We didn't spend nearly as much time at this museum as we would have liked because there were just so many things to look at but we did see a lot of really neat history. This was definitely a highlight of the trip.
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