Love is a Place: China, Day 14. Xi'an: Terra-cotta Warriors and Biking the City Wall

Back to sunshine today! We started the day by biking the Xi'an City Wall. The wall was built in 1378 (expanding on a wall built during the much earlier Tang dynasty) and is 40 feet high and 45 feet wide. Eight thousand soldiers spent nine years building it by hand. Its interior bricks are built from a mix of lime, clay and sticky rice! It served as a defense wall during then Ming Dynasty when boiling oil and blistering stones were hurled from it. It is a now considered a monument and a great place for city views. Instrumental Chinese music is piped in through speakers along the wall. We rode on tandem bikes around the wall - about 6.5 miles. On our ride, we heard people below the wall doing their morning exercises and singing Chinese opera very loudly. The brickwork was very bumpy in places, but we had a terrific time!

(For scale - the wall is tall! Our guide said he climbed it by hand to the top when he was a naughty boy in middle school!)

We then saw the Terracotta Warriors! We have been looking forward to this part of our trip for a long time. We saw a few of the warriors on exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and were excited to see them in grand scale! The warriors are over 2,000 years old. Even with seeing them, it is still hard to fathom the magnitude of it all.

Qin Shi Huang was the first person to unify the kingdoms in China and became the first Chinese emperor in 221 BC. He ruled over all of China except for Mongolia and Tibet. He was ruthless in his pursuit of conquering the other Chinese kingdoms and worried about revenge in his afterlife so he ordered thousands of clay models of real soldiers be made to protect him in his tomb. Each warrior is different from the other. Over 720,000 slaves were involved in the construction of his tomb and it covers 35 square miles. All Chinese men from the ages of 12-50 in the area had to work on it. Our guide also told us that Qin Shi Huang was a tyrant who burned books and buried scholars alive to prevent rebellion.

In 1975, farmers found remnants of the warriors and it took a while, but a few of the pits are on display to the public. They are not sure how many warriors there are. The government has excavated seven pits of over 9,000 warriors, but has stopped excavation because it destroys the bright colors on the warriors (most are gray now, but all were initially very bright). Our guide was the guide for UNESCO archeologists when they came recently so he had access to non-public places and learned a lot more about the warriors than the average guide.

There are different types of soldiers (cavalry, archers in different stances, generals, etc.) and horses and chariots.

We first stopped at a place where they make replicas of the warriors using the same clay as the warriors and took some fun shots.

We then went to see the Warriors! We first visited Pit 1 which is the largest pit with more than 6,000 warriors in it.

(These are the chariot drivers. The chariots are made out of wood and did not survive well, but you can see the horses in front of the drivers.)

(A rare smile.)

(Very recently pieced together.)

(The warrior hospital.)

Many more remain unexcavated.

(Horse heads.)

(Original colors of a general.)

After the first pit, we had Lanzhou Lamian (noodles) for lunch.

(character for the noodles)

We then walked through pits 2 and 3.

(Some of the color remains here.)

(The generals' swords are chrome-plated and no one can figure out how they did it so long ago.)

(The archer.)

We are so grateful we were able to see such an extraordinary sight.

We walked through a market from the Warriors to the bus where we saw a variety of dog skins for sale. Mostly German Shepard. Our guide seemed embarrassed by it.

Our guide also told us about China's ghost towns. We've driven by many of them. One small one we drove by on the way back from the Warriors had 300 brand new empty apartment buildings. The buildings usually have the structure only - no windows or utilities. Our guide told us that in China, the government owns the land. The government sold the rights to occupy the land all over China to tons of real estate developers. There is a law that requires the developer to build a structure on the land within three years or the government can take it back. As a result, there are hundreds of thousands of unoccupied apartment buildings. Our guide told us that residents will move there if there is a subway line, but without it, people are not inclined to live so far away from their current home/where they work. The ghost towns are creepy because they are completely dark at night and vacant during the day.