Terracotta Soliders Part 1

I believe I mentioned before that there were three things that I wanted to do while here in China. Visit the Great Wall, get as close as possible to pandas, and go to the location of the Terracotta Army. I have always been fascinated with the Terracotta Army since I can remember. The statues always seem so life like and the fact that they were thousands of years old and buried underground for so long intrigued me. I'm sure watching Indiana Jones movies as a child had some influence on my way of thinking! :P I have broken up this trip into three parts because there is just so much here to see.

This is Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China. He started his rule in 221BC but had been ruling since 246BC under the State of Qin. He took the throne at the age of 13 after his father's death. During his reign he undertook some massive projects; the start of the Great Wall, the Terracotta Warriors, set a standard currency and started building a national road system in China. On the bad side, he ended the Hundred Schools of Thought which was a period when scholars could discuss freely ideas on government, war, and diplomacy and where Confucianism was taught. Also, to avoid scholars with comparing his rule to past rules, he had many books burnt. Over 460 scholars were buried alive because of owning "forbidden books."

On the way in, there are several statues and recreations of artifacts.

There are four different buildings that you can enter. The first is a museum. Above are some of the weapons and tools that were found in the pits. Some of the weapons are still quite sharp as they were coated with chromium oxide which helped to make them rust free and preserve them. We didn't discover chromium oxide until the 18th century.

A tablet with ancient Chinese writing on it.

Some of the statues were pulled out of the pits and put on display. Besides soldiers, the pits also contained musicians, acrobats, officials, and strongmen.

This is one of the many different types of soldiers. I also ended up with a refection from a picture showing the backs of there heads. All the soldiers were crafted to look differently from hair and outfits to faces and facial expressions.

A bronze carving of Emperor Qin Shi Huang. On a side note: his tomb to this day has not been opened. A scholar in 86BC wrote about the tomb saying that it had "rare utensils and wonderful objects", a 100 rivers made with mercury, representations of "the heavenly bodies", and crossbows rigged to shoot anyone who tried to break in. Modern archaeologists have put probes inside of the tomb and found abnormally high levels of mercury which could make this statement true. The Emperor had most of the men who worked on the tomb killed so no one knows for sure.

Another thing they found when they started to unearth everything was a graveyard for construction workers. Two hundred and nineteen human skeletons were found, most of them piled one on top of the other.

The first pit we went to was Pit 2. Pit 2 is medium size which has been mostly excavated. It is composed of cavalry and infantry units and war chariots(most of which have been removed to keep them safe). The use of flash is not permitted at all in any of the pits so I apologize now for some of the conditions of my photos. I cleaned them up the best I could.

Several sections of Pit 2(and some of Pit 1) show fire damage and have the remains of burnt rafters. It's possible that an army general by the name of Xiang Yu looted and tried to burn down the entire area. This could be why the figures above are in the state they are.