Terra Cotta Warriors

I knew what the Terra Cotta Warriors were. I knew we would be seeing thousands of them that had been buried for centuries and that they would all be lined up in this giant archeological pit. Intellectually, I was 100% prepared for what I would see. It should not have been any shock at all to me.

 

But it was…

 

 

The sheer scope of the excavation and the wave after wave of warriors are a wonder to behold. There are 3 buildings with excavations. The picture above is #1, which is by far the most impressive. Still, we could not help but also spend about a half-hour each in rooms #2 and #3.

 

The history of the warriors is an interesting one. They were built for Emperor Ching as an army he would have to use in the afterlife. Lisa Shepherd and I correctly figured out that the way they were built was by pouring mud into molds and then baking until the warrior was hard. But, the heads were done separately from the bodies by skilled artists who tried to design each head to be slightly different from all the rest.

 

 

Shortly after the army was built, the Emperor died and his son took over. The son was such a lousy emperor, the people revolted and overthrew his rule. When the peasants came across the warriors, they smashed most of them and burned the buildings housing the Terra Cotta Warriors to the ground. This picture of a horse shows how the pieces had to be painstakingly put back together before they could be put on display.

 

 

There was a flood, that buried all the pieces of the broken warriors and then, in the 1970s, a farmer found the head of one of them while digging for a well. The government stepped in and began the massive excavation that is truly one of the wonders of the world today.