Day 20: Terra Cotta Warriors

Today was the biggest day I had been looking forward to. This was one of the reasons I even wanted to go to China in the first place. Today we visited the Terra Cotta statues!

Terra Cotta Warriors

Background story: In 200BC the Qin emperor unified all of China. He commissioned the Great Wall, the Li River dam and the infamous Terra Cotta army. He had over 6,000 clay statues made of his soldiers. Every single one is life sized and unique. It was a grand achievement but the Qin emperor was a tyrant and soon after he was overthrown from power, farmers broke into his vault and smashed all of the statues. They were buried and forgotten.

Two thousand years later in 1971 there was a drought going on in that area. A couple farmers were digging around for a new well when they found a clay head. It freaked them out, they thought it was a god and buried it again, but news got out about the discovery. Some archeologists who knew of the legend of the terra cotta army went to investigate farmer’s field. They started digging and found thousands of fragmented statues.

The sign in the corner is the site of the original well

Before we went to the official museum we stopped at the factory where they made authentic replicas of the statues. You could buy small sets or individual statues ranging from about 6 inches to full sized. I found one identical to the one I had purchased in Guilin off a kiosk for 40 yuan, the authentic version cost 400. Not even kidding. There was also really pretty furniture to look at, but I was just anxious about seeing the real things.

There are three pits now at the official site. The first is largest and most impressive. There are just rows and rows of life sized statues. All pieced back together, many still fragmented in the pit. It’s just amazing when you look at them, every single one is different and modeled after someone who actually lived two thousand years ago.  It was crowded and made us glad we came during the off season. As you walk around the pits there are farmers trying to sell knock off replicas. The little set of 5 guys that cost over 100yuan at the official factory we were getting for 20 or 30yuan from the farmers at the pits.

Terra Cotta fragments before they are put together

They even had a small cinema that showed a 360degree movie of the history of the terra cotta warriors. It was made all the better that the film was obviously made in the 70s and hadn’t been updated since. The other really awesome thing was there was a book you could buy that explained everything about the terra cotta warriors and you could have it signed by one of the farmers who originally discovered the head! It was 150yuan and it was actually the most expensive souvenir item I bought, but it was totally awesome and worth it.

We spent the whole morning and part of the afternoon there. It was definitely one of the highlights of the whole trip for me. After dinner we went out on a night tour of Xi’an. We saw the big Wild Goose Pagoda all lit up and we watched this really awesome light water show. It was these massive fountains all lined up in a row and water would shoot up in time to music playing. There were signs all around saying don’t walk on the fountains but a couple songs in people started running through the water and once they started you couldn’t stop them. It was quite funny. We got to walk along the park and see statues of old Tang dynasty figure heads.

Xi’an was definitely the most beautiful city we visited. I would have liked to have stayed there longer and seen more things for sure. 

Statue of Emperor and officials from Tang Dynasty