A Whole Lotta Terra Cotta

We spent the weekend in Xi’an, a 90 minute flight southwest from Beijing.

A (very) brief history, courtesy of our tour guide Michael and Discovery Channel: 2200 years ago, Emperor Qin was the first to unite the eight provinces of China. Unlike his father and grandfather, he also realized that if he wanted his dynasty to continue, it wouldn’t help to bury his closest lieutentants and advisors with him when he died, as was the tradition. But, like the Egyptians, he still believed he would need all the same support in the afterlife, so he built an entire army – 8100 soldiers and horses – to protect him when he got there.

The terra cotta soldiers were discovered in 1974 by some farmers digging a well. The original well site is marked in the excavation pit – at the very edge. Had they been just a few feet off they would have missed the site entirely. Including the Army pits, which are located some distance from Emperor’s necropolis, the entire tomb covers about 22 square miles. It took 38 years and, if ancient historians are to be believed, 700,000 workers and artists to construct. (More at Wikipedia.)

There are a few artifacts from the tomb that are housed in traditional museum-style glass cases. But because the dig sites are so huge, and archaeological work is still incomplete, the Chinese government has built the exhibits on top of the pits. From the outside, they look like regular museum buildings – high-walled and high-windowed with fancy facades. On the inside, they look like warehouses built on top of exposed earth.

Five years after the Emperor died, there was a rebellion. The rebel leader found out about the army and unearthed it in order to steal the (battle-ready) weapons the terra cotta soldiers held. Then he set fire to the wooden beams that served as the “roof” for the underground army. Later, the pits were re-buried, but the weakened roof collapsed, crushing the soldiers. Every one of the soldiers you see in these pictures have been pieced together from fragments in what our tour guided called the “terra cotta hospital” here at one end of Pit #1.