Made in China - Terracotta Warriors and Tang Dynasty Show

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We oversleep a little but get down to enjoy another sumptuous spread at the breakfast buffet. Lilly finds us there, and we take a 45 minute drive to the terracotta warrior crafting shop: Xian Da Qin Pottery Company. There we learn of the process to recreate the full size hand-crafted warriors: shape in clay, dry for 3 months and then bake at 900 degrees for a week. You can even have your own bust made. In the attached shop is a huge array of creations, in jade, marble, terracotta, brass, ceramics and the like. A very few items are similar to the Jade shop in Beijing, but most are very different. We select a 32cm high Archer for ¥320 (A$58) and I finally find a pair of lions like at the Forbidden City (and in front of many restaurants and houses), in white marble for ¥200 (A$36). They weigh over 5kg together, so we’ll have to watch the total luggage weight.

From there we drive on to see the Terracotta Warriors. Lilly is very helpful, pointing out the best order to see the different lots of warriors. There are three collections in large halls, the main one having 2,000 unearthed warriors and horses, with a further 4,000 still buried. The remainder won’t be unearthed until a better method of preserving them has been found. The currently displayed pieces are supposed to be painted in bright colours, but as soon as they are exposed to the light and air, the colour fades, leaving the pictured brown-black terracotta.

The first hall holds the large 6,000 piece collection. The hospital there is interesting: there, a team of archeologists reassembles the warriors piece by piece. In many cases they can’t be sure which piece belongs to which, so they reconstruct them as best they can. The damage was caused by either roof collapses, age, or deliberate damage. At one time in the 70s the farmers who used to grow pomegranate orchards above the warriors (before they were found) were forcibly relocated, and they rebelled, broke in and burnt and smashed many of the warriors.

In the third hall, Liam arranges to have his photo taken to superimpose on a kneeling archer. The kneeling archer has special significance because it was the first warrior found. The second hall is kept dark to try to preserve the colours, but even then the exposed ones have already faded. There is a display of the bronze weapons, real weapons created and fitted to the warriors. These are still sharp, as they were made using chrome plating technology, a technique not (re)invented until the 1930s.

After a stroll through the souvenir shops, where we find some much cheaper items, and then head for the old city wall of Xian.

The common tourist advertisement is for a bike ride along the wall, and I had pictured a narrow battlement with a small circuit of maybe ten minutes. Imagine my appreciation when we get to the top and see a 16m wide carriageway, and a wall that surrounds an area of 3.8km in one direction, and 4.8km in the other. We hop on some rented bikes (single ¥40 for 100 minutes), with the boys on singles and Ky and I on a tandem. She gets on the back end, and gets all the bruises, because although the top of the wall is brick paved, some parts have broken out leaving some serious bum-bruisers. We ride around a quarter of the wall from one tower to another and back in 30 minutes. It is quite enjoyable, and if we’d been feeling more adventurous I think we could have gone all the way around. After the ride, we return to the hotel for a rest and a run/swim.

Dinner is a dumpling banquet followed by a show at the Shaanxi Grand Opera House, showing a Tang Dynasty Palace Music and Dances. The dumplings, totalling 18 different kinds, are served in batches over 45 minutes. We can barely get through half of them, but have a lot of fun eating them as many are shaped like their fillings: fish, duck, pork, cabbage. My favourite is the sweet potato, made using a dark purple potato.

The show is excellent. It is a mixture of dances and musical pieces, with beautiful coloured costumes and clever backdrops. Each part of the show is introduced in both Chinese and English, so the packed theatre, with many foreigners, is well catered for.

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