Terra-Cotta Warriors-Xian

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Today we went to Xian to see the Terra-cotta Warriors. We first woke up early to fly there from Beijing. It took about 1 ½ hours to get there. We were almost late for the flight. When we got there, we headed straight to the warriors. For lunch, we went to KFC. The KFC in China is very different from the KFC in the US. We got a tour guide who was really good. We learned that the warriors were supposed to guard the tomb and be an army in the afterlife. The people working there are still putting the clay warriors back together. After the emperor Qin Shihuang died, rebels burned the tunnel and roof of the rooms that the warriors were in. The roofs held up lots of dirt and soil. When the roof was burning, the room collapsed and crushed the warriors and broken them into pieces. Since 1974, historians had been repairing them to this day and are about half way done with one pit and started another. The warriors had real weapons but were either stolen or rotted. They had chariots but they rotted too. Horses made of clay were found and fixed. All of the warriors had very good detail and were painted. When they first found the clay remains of the soldiers in 1974, the paint vanished instantly. But some paint remains on some soldiers. The number of soldiers estimated is 6,000. After the warriors, we went to the tomb Emperor Qin Shihuang that hasn’t been opened yet. It is under a pyramid covered in trees. The reasons they can open it are: there is no oxygen in the tomb so all the gold and paint will vanish or disintegrate, inside the tomb is a replica of the palace of the emperor that can fall apart, the rivers and lakes in the palace are made of 100% mercury that is poisonous when you touch and breath it and the last reason is that it has traps everywhere. The tomb itself is the biggest tomb in the world. It took 800,000 workers to finish the tomb and the warriors in 38 years. There are other pits that have clay workers, slaves, painters, and other types of people in the other pits around the tomb. Then at the end of the day, we flew back to Beijing and the flight was delayed for 2 hours.

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