Monday 20th July 2009 Xian

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Monday 20th July 2009 Xian
We got up early but decided the terracotta warriors weren’t going anywhere for the rest of the day and often these places are busier with tour groups and Chinese tourist invasions in the morning so finally booked our flights into Australia, not too far away now which is mad. The hostel was offering a tour to the warriors for 16 Euro a head but we decided to do it on our own time and got the easy public bus out to it for about 80 cent. Managed to pull off two half price student tickets also so saved about 25 quid from their tour. The complex around the warrior pits is massive. There are whole highstreets of souvenir shops and galleries and probably more replicas of the warriors here than the 8,000 they have uncovered inside. It was a scorcher of a day but the pits are nicely air-conditions to keep all the lads cool so it was ok. We heard you are best saving the biggest pit, number one to last and working backward from 3,2,1 but we had our own approach and visited 2 first. This is a missive warehouse where you are looking down from about 3 meters into a big dig site and there is not actually much more too see. They still have a huge amount of digging to do here, you can see big excavated furrows scattered with broken bits of arms and bodies and horses, I suppose they are almost 2,400 years old so they can’t all be still intact. I actually think they are all unearthed in bits and pieces and then it’s a matter of getting the world jigsaw champions in with a load of super glue. They have displays of 5 individual soldiers in cases where you can examine them up close. They are pretty intricately made, and every one of the 8,000 in different, all different heights and faces, pretty amazing actually. We visited pit3 next, a lot smaller than 2 but there were more solders in formation in the pits, this was the generals command post it is thought.

We rightly saved the biggest one till last, pit one is the most famous and really is spectacular, lines and lines of very life like soldiers standing in aisles, and there once again is a huge amount still left to be dug. They really are taking their time, its almost 25 years since they were discovered. They do live up to the expectations though and are a definite must see on any trip through China. At least we are seeing all the Chinese sights though because we have gotten into a bad habit of eating very safe and western food recently and were particularly lazy tonight and ate pasta in the hostel.

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