A lotta terracotta
Trip Start
Sep 17, 2007
1
105
272
Trip End
Oct 08, 2008
Xi'an,
China
Friday, February 1, 2008
So the crazy emperor was a real guy, and he really did cast his army in terracotta, and pit one alone has some 6,000 individual soldiers in it. Those who know and decide such things believe that he did this because he believed that his reign would continue in death as it had in life. Not so crazy for the guy whose compulsiveness created the first unified China.
The signage in the park is not spectacular
Pit 3
. LP said there was a cinema that would give us the skinny on the whole thing if we didn't want to get a guide. It took a while, but we found the cinema and the film was in progress. It was also in Chinese. No help there. But we never really go into a place cold turkey, so it was alright. The guidebook also suggests that you view the pits backwards, so that you see the biggest and most impressive pit one last. Unfortunately pit one is the only building that really stands out once you finally get to the entrance. (The walk from the parking lot-ticket office is about a ten minute walk through a random park before you get to another ticket check and actually enter that which you came to see.) Also unfortunately pit two is under renovation, so one third of the terracotta army is off limits. Yay ten-dollar ticket! We made our way back to pit three, an odd construction with some crushed soldiers, some headless and armless soldiers, and some put-back-together soldiers. And four horses. In this pit you stand pretty well above the soldiers, but it's small, so it's easy to see their faces and uniforms and the specific individuals. This pit also has an exposed ramp. The emperor built ramps for his army to get out of their pits, as it were, but then closed them off when he covered the whole thing. It was a very nice ramp. Ready to gallop onto it were four horses. These life-sized horses were quite impressive
horsies
. Next we went to pit one. It is astonishing. They're not done excavating it, but the front is full of soldiers standing in battle formation. I think it's really hard to wrap your head around the idea that each face is different. When you look at the whole it all looks the same, but when you look harder there's a little difference here and there. You spot the officers, and different groups look like they're meant to do different things. I think this is easier to see in pit two, but we had to make do. There were also little squads of four horses here and there.
As you walk back the pit gets less perfect: it's harder to see the brick floor, the soldiers aren't necessarily in one pretty piece, and eventually you're looking at dirt. This is where the excavations are continuing. In the back of the pit there's a giant sort of puzzle where teams look at pieces of soldiers and glue them back together. I was rather awed by a guy with legs and a head but not much of a chest and no arms at all. He was too far to take a picture of, but it was like a person who had had parts of him erased or something. Very strange to see.
Finally we went into the museum. After looking at some ancient pottery and seriously weird Buddhist paintings we went into the exhibition where you could see highlights from pit two. Here we got up close and personal with some archers and officers. It was pretty sweet. There were also a bunch of recovered weapons. Brass holds up pretty well over the course of 2000 years. My favorite was the general, Trav's was the standing archer. See photos.
The basement of the museum is dedicated to the two chariots unearthed from a pit next to the emperor's tomb
ruined soldiers
. We were a good two kilometers from it, so there was really no way to get over there, and I don't think it would have been all that exciting. Besides, now the chariots were here, so the only thing there was the emperor and possibly some bronze swans. The chariots were half-sized, each with a team of four horses. The front one had a big umbrella and the back one had a coffin. They were elaborate and covered in expensive things, as all things close to the emperor must needs be. Those chariots were pretty wild, in a way that the terracotta army was not. But really the whole thing was larger than life, and it's those larger than life things that draw you in and which you find utterly remarkable.Erin
