Terracotta Warriors

Second day in Xi'an

The day I wanted to go up a mountain, but went to the terracotta army.

The weather was terrible this morning. Terrible. I set my alarm at 6 o'clock in the morning to get to the bus station in time. The bus to the mountain only leaves once. Too bad I was already soaked before I even got to the bus. With pain in my heart I decided to go back to the hostel and not go up the mountain.

Luckily I was able to change the plans for that day and it was possible for us to rebook our tour to the Terracotta Army (which was planned for tomorrow).


Our tour would include transportation, lunch, English tour guide and entry to the museum of the terracotta army. Our day turned out little bit different than this.


The tour started around 9 o'clock, were we met our 'not-so-good-English-speaking' tour guide. She had a very weird way of pronouncing English words. Every time she said 'emperor' I heard her say 'airport'... And we met the other 2 people who would go on this tour. They both booked a different tour, which was almost twice as expensive. We ended up doing the same tour as they did.

We went to the only mausoleum that has two royalties in it and had a look at the burials there while walking over a glass floor. After that we were going to a place where they made the terracotta statues old style. It was very interesting to see, but in truth this was just a glorified shop. We had lunch with the four of us, while our guide was somewhere else and went to the real terracotta place after this.
Our guide turned out to be even worse at guiding us through this thing. She guided us from one building to another, told a little bit (the bare minimum) about the place and then told us where to meet her when we were done looking around. It was crappy. Luckily I had a good time with the people in our group. One woman came from France and the other one from California (and of course the Canadian girl was still around ;).

The terracotta army was very impressive. We walked around all three pits there. The first one was only half excavated and you could clearly see the set-up of the corridors and rooms. In the second pit we could see the commanding centre of the whole army. I thought it was very funny that our guide actually talked about this thing as if it was a real army with living people. She explained that there were four horses here because the communication between this pit and the others should be fast, so that the army knows when to attack. Let me remind you that I am still talking about statues here.
The last pit that we visited is the biggest one and most impressive one. They were still excavating and working in this one. There were millions of statues/soldiers standing there.

I already saw a few terracotta soldiers in the Netherlands. They came to visit one of our museums. I loved the statues and decided then that I would love to see the 'real thing' once.
Standing there today made it just that much more special and impressive to me.


Did you know that they only excavated 1 % of the total Terracotta Army?
3 pits from 300 at least.