The city of Xian, about 1,200 kilometres south-west of Beijing, was China’s first capital. Around 200 BC, feudal warlord Qin became the first man to unify China and he immediately declared himself Emperor. Qin obviously had a fairly big opinion of himself, and 700,000 slaves were put to work for decades to construct a tomb fit for an Emperor, guarded by thousands of terra cotta warriors and horses. These were to protect Qin in the after-life. Each warrior's face is unique, and to our surprise one of them looked uncannily like Dick. Qin was quite partial to big projects - he was also the man who started construction of the Great Wall of China. When Qin died he was buried in the tomb and many of the workers who hadn’t yet died were entombed with him. But barely a year or two later, enemies broke in, set it afire and went on a smashing spree. Amazingly, the site then remained forgotten and undisturbed for around two thousand years until the mid 1970s when farmers digging a well unearthed terra cotta pieces from the tomb below. One of the 20th century’s greatest archeological discoveries soon followed. Since then, many of the pieces have been carefully excavated and painstakingly restored, and are now displayed in the pits where they were discovered, at the fabulous Terra Cotta Warrior Museum about an hour by bus from Xian. The site was listed on the World Heritage Register in 1987, and is currently visited by about 20,000 people every day.
We visited the museum on Tuesday, the day after arriving in Xian on overnight Express Train Z19 from the Beijing West Railway Station. There’s quite a bit to see in Xian city itself too. It has an impressive Bell Tower and Drum Tower, both built around 1380 AD during the Ming Dynasty. We climbed both and listened to the bell and drum performances respectively given here throughout the day. The chime bells in the Bell Tower are replicas of those unearthed from Emperor Qin’s tomb.
Xian has a sizeable muslim community and we spent an afternoon and evening walking through a muslim neighbourhood where we inspected the excellent Xian Great Mosque, originally built in the 8th century AD during the Tang Dynasty. We had lamb kebabs and flatbread for dinner at a roadside café and Dick did a deal on some nice silk scarves in the nearby muslim merchandise market.
Xian has many significant archeological sites other than Qin’s tomb, but we had squeezed all we could into our available day and a half, and soon found ourselves heading out of Xian towards the airport to fly south.
