Qin Shi Huang's Terracotta Army

(To the tune of "Brian Clough's Red and White Army", of course... Yes I know, almost as ancient history as the rest of this entry.)

The Terracotta Army is probably China's second most famous tourist attraction after the Great Wall. Given our experience of tourist meccas so far in China (crowds, noise, litter, pushing and shoving), I went to see the warriors (or woooorriz, as our Chinese guide had it) not expecting to be bowled over. Also, people we'd met who'd seen them had mostly just said that they'd ticked that sight off their list, nothing more than that - you couldn't see much.

About 2200 years ago, the first emperor of a united China, Qin Shi Huang, ordered an underground army to be built to guard his tomb near the large central Chinese city of Xi'an. It was to consist of thousands of infantrymen, officers and cavalry, and to be made of life-sized terracotta figures. More incredibly, each soldier was to have a unique head, attached to one of five or six body types for the different ranks - one type for archer, one for horseman, officer, etc. This all lay underground, undiscovered, until in 1974 a peasant digging a well came across one section of it. Since then over a thousand warriors have been uncovered, but apparently there are thousands more still underground. Apologies for that slide into guidebook mode, but I've gone into this detail because it really was amazing. I don't know what those who were disappointed were hoping to see. As is obvious from our photos, we were able to see a huge amount of this vast, 2000-plus-year-old treasure. Did they want to stand amongst the soldiers or climb onto the horses? I can be as cynical as anyone about tourist sights, as this blog no doubt shows, but I can't really understand the cynicism we'd come across about the Terracotta Army.



I want to believe that these figures really are over 2000 years old, because it's incredible, and I've come travelling partly to see incredible things; nothing I've read about the Terracotta Army, from various sources, casts any doubt on this assertion, so why spoil it for yourself by not believing it? But I overheard one gruff old New Yorker telling a worried-looking Asian man that he wasn't "buying it", that it was all a big hoax to get the tourists in. (He's not the first American we've come across in China who seems to think that everything they're told in this country is lies and propaganda, and yet he probably watches Fox News back home.) Some historians have apparently suggested that each face may have been modelled on a real-life soldier from the emperor's army. That does seem a little unlikely perhaps, but that each new face was made different from the last is undeniably true (at least based on what you can see), so why not accept that this happened 2200 years ago rather than thirty? I thought it was a pretty amazing place.

The main excavated hall


Each face really is subtly different




Infantryman (I think)


Middle-ranking officer


High-ranking officer


Of course I'm not saying the Chinese are saints. Nearby the site there is a factory churning out replica models from this size up to full life size, which pretty much all tour groups are dragged to and encouraged to open their wallets.


Our stay in Xi'an was preceded by a particularly comfortable night's sleep in our first train since March, and was almost as lazy and relaxing as Chengdu had been. Other than the organised tour (much easier and no more expensive than doing it off our own backs) to the Terracotta Army, we mostly just sauntered up the road to a Peking Duck restaurant which served up the duck pancakes with plum sauce that I'm sure everyone knows and loves, made for you, for 14p a pop. Oh yes.


One day we rustled up the energy to cycle round the city walls, still completely intact (although I think they've been rebuilt a few times). It's impressive how big the ancient city must have been - it took us an hour and twenty minutes to cycle all the way round, going at a decent whack.