Day 192: The Terracotta Army

After spending the night on the train we got into Xi'an and met our new, fill in guide David while our main guide left to take care of his family matters. We checked into our new hotel and then got onto a rented bus to take us out of town to the Terracotta Army of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China.

The Terracotta Army is famous for a few reasons. The thousands of sculpted figures are all unique, and were originally painted and armed and with real weapons and armor. What's even more impressive is that nobody knew they existed. There was no record of this huge project's undertaking, and the army was only discovered in 1974 when a farmer found some fragments while digging a well (the farmer now sits in the gift shop signing books about the army). The majority of the army is still underground as China waits to develop the technology to better preserve the figures once exposed to the air.

Since the national holiday week was still going on, and this is one of the more famous tourist spots in China, the crowds were huge. With a little patience we managed to work our way through everything and still get some nice views of the army, but as we waited in queues we also became quite a popular attraction ourselves, and lots of Chinese would run up and want to take pictures with us.

Getting out of the parking area and back to Xi'an with all the crowds and traffic was very slow, and by the time we got back to the city it was getting quite late. We went out for dinner to a dumpling banquet which consisted of many platters of different types of dumpling all decorated to indicate their contents (this, for example, is the fish dumpling).

After a day of standing in lines and waiting in traffic and an evening stuffing myself with dumplings I was happy to get back to the hotel for some sleep.