Xi'an - Terracotta Army

---

Today was a bit of a drive out to the area where the Terracotta Warriors were discovered back in 1974. On the way we stopped off to one of many Terracotta Warrior factories located in the area where you can buy replicas of the actual warriors from 15cm to the actual size of 2m tall. They also showed how the warriors would have been made which was interesting.

We arrived at the Terracotta Warriors Museum around 10:30am, the place is massive with 3 pits opened to the public a museum with various brass and other items. I won’t bore you with too many details about the warriors as there is a lot of information out there about them.

I was surprised how big the pits were (well pit 1 and 2) and how many warriors they have yet to reconstruct. Each warrior must takes weeks and months to put back together after being smashed. It is estimated that over 7,000 warriors were made, of which only 7 warriors were intact (per our guide) when the pits were discovered.

Since the terracotta army is a fair distance outside of the city, we didn’t get to do many other things today. We arrived at the Shaanxi History Museum just before 6pm, the museum isn’t as big as the one at Shanghai but they do have some cool items there.

Our final stop of the night was the Great Mosque and Bazaar in the Muslim Quarter. As an atheist, the Mosque didn’t really interest me, outside of the fact that it is a Mosque that is built in China style architecture. This was an requirement of the emperor at the time that if Muslims wanted to build the Mosque it had to be in China’s style of the time. We actually had to pay to enter the Mosque, unless you can speak Arabic and convince the doorman that you wanted to pray.

Surrounding the Mosque is a typical market (Bazaar) where they are selling most things that can be copied and sold as genuine fakes. All the markets are starting to look the same and I tend to be a bit of a zombie as I walk through them now.

---

Comments

[Catherine]

Good fun
Hey Andrew, LOVING the blog hilarious! Great to hear you are enjoying every moment! Great photos too. Love to both you and Judith x