Terracotta Army, Muslim Quarter
The next day we went to visit the Terracotta Army. These are located in the mausoleum of the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, who first unified the country in 221 BC. The Terracotta Army was built to protect the emperor in the afterlife and the site is part of a much larger funerary complex. In fact, the Army is still only partially excavated and the work is ongoing. The tomb itself is still not excavated.
To get to the Terracotta Army we took public transit, instead of taking a tour through our hostel, which would have been much more expensive. We took a bus from the bus station and the trip took about an hour. Once arrived, we started to walk, but we couldn’t find the entrance. We were going around in the shopping area, and looking for any signs but couldn’t find any. Finally we approached a young White man whom we presumed could speak English (turned out he was Russian), who lead us there. It appeared somehow we missed a turn, so couldn’t see the huge entrance way to the site and were heading to the exit instead (there were apparently signs in Chinese, but that didn’t really help us).
The site has four exhibition pits, but after some advice, we started from no 4, which is the smallest, and went backwards leaving pit 1, the largest one, for the end. There are also two different war chariots exhibited, two others cavaliers and officers.
In pit no 2 and 3, we can actually see how the soldiers are discovered; they are broken and lying on the floor.
Just like in a real army, the soldiers are divided into different groups. In pit 2 we saw the cavalry, with whole horses next to the soldiers.
In areas that are not yet excavated, we can clearly see the roofing that covered the whole army. In the newer pits, excavations are done much more carefully than the earlier pit 1, where they quickly dug through the roofing.
Pit 1 was in a large hangar type roof covering the infantry of the army. This is the place where we usually see pictures from.
The area is so large, that there are only few places we can see the soldiers from the front from relatively close.
Pit 1 is the most impressive, hosts many warriors and covers a very large area. All the archaeological work is still ongoing, we were able to see some of the stages of work.
It takes a while just to go around the pit itself and there are quite a lot of visitors, even though we were not in peak season. A was very happy to make it to the site and was very impressed by the warriors. It did feel pretty amazing to be there in person.
On our way back on the bus we met Harry, a Chinese student who also just came back from visiting the Terracotta Army. When he heard we were heading to Beijing for the Golden Week, he strongly advised not to do it if we can, as all the touristic sites would be totally crowded with Chinese tourists. He showed us some scary pictures of the Crowded Great Wall and the entrance to the Forbidden City and we were convinced. Harry joined us for the evening and we went to the Muslim quarter of Xi’an (one of the interesting and very popular areas of the Old City) to find somewhere to have dinner. Eventually we went to a restaurant (some famous local place) which served some special dumplings filled with soup and meat. They were ok, but none of us really was impressed by them.
At the end, to our surprise, Harry picked up the bill. As the dumpling were not that filling, we got some lamb skewers from the street and continued to walk around the market. The market was quite crowded and was full of shops, stalls selling sweets, skewers and who knows what.
At some point we split, said thanks and goodbye to Harry and headed back to our hostel.
