Terra Cotta Soldiers

Along with the Great Wall, the of Xi'an are thought to be one the greatest draws to China. We were fortunate to have Song and Jackie leading us since we were able to catch the local buses that led us to the historic sites in Xi'an. Andrea and I were very excited when we were told that we would stop off at the Imperial hot springs before hitting up the Terra Cotta Soldiers. Well perhaps we had a different notion of what a hot springs would be becauhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifse we both packed our swimsuits and towels, but were very disappointed when we realized this was just a historic sight where the Chinese emperors would bathe and come to relax. So we had to content ourselves by looking at the Tang dynasty architecture and washing our hands in the warm waters.


We finally made it to the site of the Terra Cotta soldiers and were amazed with how extensive the grounds were. Thanks to our Lonely Planet suggestion, we decided to catch the 360 degree movie theater that showed a short film on the man behind the soldiers. After watching the film I was even more impressed with the statues. For those of you who don't know, the terra cotta soldiers are a collection of over 8,000 life-size sculptures that were buried along with Emperor Qin over 2,0000 years ago. The movie showed that the soldiers were destroyed by angry villagers shortly after his death. Emperor Qin is credited with having unified China. According to my Lonely Planet, Emperor Qin had angered the monks who were also the scribes, and they then excluded him from the history books, only for any evidence of him to be unearthed in 1974. As a result of the sacking most of the soldiers are in some sort of broken state. Though it seems the restoration team has done a good job of putting them back together in the grand hallway. The grounds are quite extensive and even after spending several hours looking at all the soldiers we hardly saw them all, since there were still more buried. And they will remain so until new restorations can be developed that will protect the paint that the soldiers were originally painted with since too to their age they deteriorate when exposed to the air.