The hostel in Xi’an did not only have a restaurant with crazy decor, but also a big black dog and two cute kittens who were always trying to steal our food.
Our reason for going to Xi’an was of course to see the Terracotta Army. We weren’t the only ones going there though, and had to wait for almost an hour to get on a bus from the city to the actual museum.
Following the advice in the guide book we visited the three sites in reverse order, to start with the smallest and end with the largest.
These are the guys to the right in the previous photo.
And this is the back of one of the charioteers. All the sculptures were incredibly detailed as you can see. This site, pit 3, is called the military command centre because of the many high ranking officers found.
Pit 2 was significantly larger, but only partially excavated. Most of the rooms still had their collapsed roofs on.
The wooden objects, like chariots and weapon handles, had disappeared entirely except from an occasional imprint in the ground.
At times it even felt a little macabre, like walking across a battlefield littered with clay corpses.
At the side of the pit you could get a little bit closer to a couple of statues and have a better look at the details.
Finally we got to the largest excavation site, where about 6000 terracotta soldiers and horses have been found, all housed in an enormous building.
As you might already know, all the statues have different faces, haircuts and clothes.
It sounds quite obvious when you hear it, but before visiting I had never thought about that all statues were broken when excavated. So all the whole ones you see have been restored.
Finally we paid a quick visit to the exhibition hall, but we were beginning to feel exhausted and didn’t stay too long.
Another thing I didn’t know about the terracotta army was that not all sculptures were of soldiers standing guard with weapons in their hands. This, for example, is a person performing a stretching exercise.
These well-built and shirtless men are believed to be acrobats, probably serving as the emperor’s entertainers.
There’s a lot more to see in Xi’an but it has been raining heavily so we’ve been slacking at the hostel the rest of the time.
Monoton+Minimal 