Day #99: Terracotta Warriors

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Today's big event was the Terracotta Warriors. After seeing them so often in the media it was almost surreal to see them in real life, like seeing the pyramids or Red Square. They are quite incredible and made an arresting sight all lined up as they would be for battle.

I went to see the Terracotta Warriors exhibition a few years ago in London and I was glad I had because the information at the museum was sparse. This has been the case at most of the museums and historical sites in China so far: they are very good at providing the technical information - age, materials, how things were built - but limited on the social history side, and the things that really bring history to life, so if you don't have the background knowledge and use your imagination, even the most spectacular sites fall flat. I don't know if this is a cultural difference, but I anyway knew from the London exhibition that the warriors recreate an actual army (they are of different sizes and all have different faces, which has led to speculation that they were modelled on the actually soldiers of the time) and were arranged as if prepared to go into battle, complete with horses and weaponry, with the generals in a separate barracks. You can also walk around the areas where they are excavating and assembling the fragments of more Warriors (and they do require a lot of reassembling, they are apparently in quite small pieces), although they also said they had stopped a lot of the excavation while they develop techniques that will preserve the paint - when the Warriors are uncovered they are still painted, but it then quickly oxidises when they are exposed.

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