The Terracotta Warriors

Happy Thanksgiving! I’m grateful to have friends and family who care about me so I don’t have to do life alone.  ❤️

Yesterday, at 5pm we got back to our hotel and decided to take a nap. I just woke up. It’s 5am. Rik is still sleeping. We missed out on any activities scheduled for last evening. Oh well.  It doesn’t feel like we are lacking in sensory input.

A 12-hour nap is a bit much, though. Could it be we are getting old?  

Yesterday morning, our guide asked the coffee shop owners to open early for us. They did and I was finally able to get a morning coffee. Morning coffee isn’t a thing in China. They must get their jolt from tea leaves(?)

Rik tried their tea flavoured with duck excrement. Check it out:

When asked, our guide explained that the Chinese love this oolong tea so much, they say it has duck turds in it to dissuade people from buying it so they never run out.

I skipped breakfast so I could spend some extra time stretching out my sore leg muscles and savouring my coffee.  Our excursion today is to a place they are calling the “8th Wonder of the World: “The Terracotta Warriors”. If you haven’t heard of this, don’t worry, you aren’t alone. (Although, one of the young punks on our tour stayed “Everyone should know about this. It’s as important as the Eiffel Tower.” Know-it-all from the US  I’m surprised he didn’t mention the Statue of Liberty.)

This remote place is an archeological site dating from 200 years before Jesus was born and it was only discovered in 1974. 

Imagine it. It’s 1974 and you’re a kid in rural Canada, listening to the Doobie Brothers rock out on AM radio, and on the other side of the world, some impoverished peasants in China are trying to dig a well with their pick-axes. And they uncovered a humongous tomb - so huge, that it's still being uncovered!  It covers more than 20 square kilometers.   

Here’s the story: Way back when, around 200 B.C., a few years after he became Emperor at age 13, Qin Shi Huangdi decided he needed to conquer the afterlife and commissioned a mighty army of soldiers to be build around his gravesite - so he could come into the next world with a bang. (They believed in a God of some sort back then, and the afterlife was taken very seriously.)

This is a statue of Qin:

It took 700,000+ artisans many years to create this clay army. There were 8000 individual clay infantry soldiers, horses, archers, generals - all hand-crafted in life size and battle-ready.

Qin’s bright idea was to build his army underground so it wouldn’t be found and destroyed.  And to make sure the artisans didn’t tell what was going on, he buried all 700,000 of them, too. Alive. Well, until they suffocated to death. 

There are several more pits like this. It really is impressive.  It’ll take them more than 100 years to fully uncover it.

- Ruth