The city of Xi'an and the Terra-Cotta Warriors. Here is what we learned and saw.
While in Beijing we really wanted to go see the Terra-Cotta warriors near the city of Xi’an. We did our homework on the attraction and we found a real fantastically priced hostel. The fast train could get us there in 6 hours by going up to 180 mph. We figured that we could take the train up one day, stay the night, go see the Terra-Cotta warriors and then catch the night train home. That all sounded easy enough. Neither of us had ever heard of Xi’an so we assumed that is was a small to mid-size city that just happened to be near the Terra-Cotta warriors. Our train delivered us on time and we took the metro to the hostel. A routine we have done often, however as we looked around we noticed that there seemed to be a lot of people and the city was extremely modern with some high named designer stores. So I did what I often do, I took out my phone and said, “okay google, what is the population of Xi’an?” I was astonished at what the reply was. I asked Bud to take a guess and he replied, “I think it is larger than we thought, I bet it has 900,000 people.” I giggled and then told him, nope – 14 MILLION! The city we had never heard of had 14 million people. That lead me to thinking about other cities in China. I found out that China has 14 cities with populations of over 10 million people. To put that in perspective, New York has 20 million people. That was a big reminder to us to do our homework and not to make assumptions. Beth
Xi’an is a fabulous city and we extended our stay by a day to look around. They have a large city wall from 750 AD that has been well preserved and is just an amazing tourist site. It encircled the city for defense when it was originally built. The city has long since grown beyond the wall boundary. The wall has been rebuilt many times but it still gives you an idea of what it must have been like in the beginning. There is a fabulous walkway on top of the wall that you can rent a bicycle and ride the whole loop. Below is a beautiful park for strolling. We also went to a local market that was selling many things we had never seen before, such as, black eggs, hogs heads (de-boned), lamb meat just cut from the bone and many types of trinkets. We really enjoyed Xi’an and its modern feel.
The Terra-Cotta warriors was just as amazing as I had hoped. They were discovered by a man who was digging a well on his country property in 1974. Since then they have discovered 3 main areas of soldiers. They have built 3 buildings around the dig sights and fully enclosed them with nice walkways and platforms for tourist to view. The buildings are in 3 different phases: #3 building has the least number of intact soldiers and enough work to last at least another 30 years, #2 building housed some unfinished soldiers and carriages, #1 buildings was the first area to be found and has the most amount of work done and hundreds of intact soldiers for viewing. The best part is the story of how the soldiers came into existence. In 221 BC the emperor of the ??? dynasty was concerned about his passage into the afterlife. So, he had 8000 soldiers made from terra-cotta to protect him. He also had horses and carriages made. Every soldier, horse and carriage are 100% unique. No two were made alike, all the small details like ears, eyes, clothing are different. The Emperor was known for his craziness and it is believed that he took an excessive amount of mercury to prolong his life. Mercury is poison for people so he died at the young age of 55. He was buried near his soldiers and had a manmade mountain placed upon his tomb. It is believed that the area around his tomb is covered in mercury so it is un-able to be excavated. It is thought that there may be more discoveries to be made in the area. It was a fascinating site to see and we were extremely lucky to be able to go. It was one of my top things to see along this trip around the world. Thank you for following our adventure. I hope you are planning to adventure too. Bet
