Day 303 - Terracotta Warriors

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We both remember watching an episode of Blue Peter many years ago that featured the Terracotta Army, the buried life-size clay soldiers guarding an ancient Chinese tomb. It’s always seemed to be one of those amazing things the world has to offer to eager tourists and to say we were looking forward to visiting them ourselves would be an understatement. As usual we opted to be clever by making our own way there and avoiding the tour buses, but it turned out to be a bit more complicated than we’d anticipated. Luckily we had Lucas, a Chinese student of British Literature who wanted to spend the day with us, and he found us the right bus. We have never, repeat never, been anywhere as busy and manic as Xi’an train station this morning.

After an hour we arrived and walked to Pit 1. This is the main hall and is gigantic at well over 200m long. It’s also the most famous view and the first glimpse of the terracotta army was quite breathtaking. Like a lot of these places it really is all about that first sighting, and it didn’t let us down. It was all very interesting to see, with other pits in lesser states of restoration, but even with something as spectacular as an ancient life-size clay army there’s only so much time you can spend looking at them. There were other things on display like some of the bronze weapons the soldiers carried, including a great sign that pointed out how chrome plating is widely believed to have been invented by Germans in the 1930s which was about 2200 years after the chrome-plated Terracotta Warriors’ weapons were made!

You can’t exit the way you go in and so have to walk past what seems like mile upon mile of souvenir shops, mostly selling the same crap things. Despite having heard it at least a million times all over the world, it still brings a smile to our faces hearing shopkeepers telling us we can have a ‘free look round’. How kind.

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