China Stop 1 - Xi'An

After a quick overnight in Beijing with my cousin Carl and his family, Kim and I head out on our tour. First stop - Xi'an - the first capital of China. We went straight from the airport to the dig site for the Terracotta Warriors, fighting a tremendous amount of traffic, road construction, and other delays along the way. It is amazing to see how much development of going on - I counted over 100 cranes building skyscrapping condo towers on the outskirts of the metro area.

Upon arrival at the dig site the first thing that strike you is how big it is. You have to take a golf cart from the parking lot to the actual exhibition pits as they don't want road traffic disturbing the burial sites that may still remain uncovered. The site consists of 3 pits and they are huge. In the picture below you see me standing at the entrance to one pit.

Behind me you can see the rows and rows of uncovered terracotta warriors. They were originally created by Emperor Qin, the first emperor of China to protect him in the afterlife. Construction of this burial site is estimated to have begun around 240BC and involved 700,000 laborers. It is estimated that there are over 9000 pieces (warriors, chariots, horses) buried at this site. It was interesting to tour all the pits to see the archeological work in various stages from completely restored figures all the way to grids that they were just beginning to unearth.

The next day the tour took us to the Xi'an city wall that still surrounds the old city and is about 14km long and the Shaangxi museum which was one of the nicest museums I've ever visited.