Going underground

Wednesday, 28/11/2012 – 167 A.D.

Hotel rooms with thick dark curtains are confusing. You can never be sure what the daylight is doing outside. I was awoken from my slumbers by the following:

[Knock-knock.]

[Unintelligible word from behind door.]

[Knock-knock.]

[Unintelligible word from behind door.]

[Knock-knock.]

[Unintelligible word from behind door.]

Etc.

I should point out that it was the same unintelligible word that was repeated over and over. I went to answer it dressed only in my sleep shorts and my quiff and opened the door to find one of the maids there. She repeated the same unintelligible word and I grunted back in confusion, still half-asleep and wondering what the heck was so important in the middle of the night. Eventually I reached for the Do Not Disturb sign and hung it on the handle. She understood and walked away, and I walked back to bed.

But I couldn’t drop off again, and I must have lain there for a good while, trying to ignore the weird Chinese music that was drifting in from the street outside. Why were they playing it so early in the morning? It seemed to come and it seemed to go, but I just couldn’t drop off again. It was as if my brain and body were working together to tell me something…check the time, dufus! Okay then…sh*t! It’s ten to eleven! Or, as I put it to my still-slumbering brother, “F*ckin` `ell, Tim, it’s ten ta f*ckin` eleven!”

How did we manage to oversleep so much? Immediately my accusative eyes looked to Tim, given that it’s his responsibility to set the alarm, but upon checking his watch he was convinced it had gone off. So that means we both slept well and truly through it. Or it went off, he turned it off and neither of us batted an eyelid until the maid started frantically knocking to rouse us before breakfast finished at 09:30, bless her. On the negative side of things, we were up late, we’d missed a perfectly good brekkie, and we’d have to make contingency plans that the situation did not occur again. But on the positive side, if this had to happen then we did pretty well to go this far before having to deal with it. Prior to this, the latest we’ve slept in is `til 09:45 – talk about record breakers! If only that maid had known the English for “breakfast”, or even, “Get up and out of bed you slothful English idiots, it’s bacon time!”

So that was a bit of a downer and we had to get ready in double-quick time, but we did okay, and brisk-walked it north to the train station. Today we were off to see the terracotta army, about an hour’s drive from the city. The easiest (and cheapest) way to get there is to jump on the number 306 bus and get off at the last stop. We found the bus just about to go at its stop just outside the train station and hopped on by 12:00 – not bad considering that 70 minutes earlier we’d both been in sleep shorts and under duvets. And for 70 pence you cannot go wrong – take that, Southport “what’s a return ticket?” buses!

[Beware of the boys who sit at the back of the bus.]

Here’s a bit about the terracotta army – it was constructed over a period of about 30 years and completed in 209 B.C. (that’s B.C., man, not A.D.!) Current estimates reckon it contains over 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses, and 150 cavalry horses. There are also non-military figures, such as acrobats and musicians. And every single one of these LIFE-SIZE figures was buried close to the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, to protect him in the afterlife. The belief if that to exist in the afterlife you need to be buried with everything that you had when you were alive. So, by that rationale if I was to pop my clogs tomorrow my grave would contain a terracotta Samsung netbook, Apple Ipod and a cracked bottle of Tsingtao beer. Actually, make it a crate of Tsingtao – the afterlife is eternal, after all.

The terracotta army lay there under the earth for over 2,000 years until it was discovered in 1974 by a group of farmers trying to dig a well. There was evidence of some previous disturbances at the site, such as a local graveyard, but it seemed as though any terracotta that had come up through the ground had been discarded as worthless. Not so! How can it be worthless if it attracts the Grayboys to visit from halfway across the world? Upon alighting the bus we realised that winter really was heading to Xi`an and it was a good job that we’d be clearing off in a couple of days’ time! Brrrrrrr!

After buying our tickets and politely sending away multiple requests for an English tour guide, we made our way up to the entrance. The site as a whole is known as the Terracotta Army Museum and it is built upon the three pits that have so far been excavated (okay, so there’s also a fourth pit, but it didn’t contain any warriors – guess the B.C. builders had clocked off and gone down the pub by that point!) All of the pits are enclosed under buildings, but because they are so large the museum owners weren’t willing to put the heating on, which was a bit of a downer, but not enough to detract from the spectacle. I give you, Pit 1…

..this is by far the largest of the excavated sites. The warriors were built from local clay and assembled piece by piece, i.e. legs, torso, arms, head. They all originally held (mostly) bronze weapons, but virtually all of these were looted or wasted away over the centuries. You’ll notice that most of them face the same direction – east – because the states that the emperor conquered were all east of Qin.

The sites are still being excavated. The 8,000 soldiers mentioned in an earlier paragraph is only an estimate because the work is ongoing. This whole army is guarding the mausoleum of the emperor, which is essentially a massive necropolis that represents all of the buildings that he would have used when alive – remember that when he’s dead, he needs what he had when he lived. The actual tomb of the emperor (close by, pyramid shaped) remains unopened. Legend has it that there are 100 rivers of mercury flowing inside and contains Indiana Jones-style traps like automatically-firing crossbows to keep would-be thieves from entering. But the real reason it has not been excavated is the dry Xi`an air – the fear is that artefacts within the tomb will quickly disintegrate if exposed to it. The terracotta army was originally painted, but most of it wore away while they were buried for two millennia. However, some figures retained traces of paint when dug up, but by some accounts, when exposed to the air, the paint curled off in 15 seconds and after four minutes it had flaked away completely.

Here’s the thing that really left me gobsmacked by the terracotta army – every single one of those fugues is UNIQUE. Yep, they were all individually created, not like some kind of production line similar to the toy figures of today. Every single one of those faces, uniforms and feet is different from the rest. The effort involved must have been huge, though the original account of 700,000 people to create the whole complex has been denounced in recent times as being slightly far-fetched. But by how much? If the first emperor of China tells you to do something, you drop whatever you are doing and do it!

[James meekly adopts the victory sign that all Japanese people make when being photographed.]

Pit 2 is not quite as large as Pit 1, but looks a lot more like a museum from the inside, rather than a big warehouse. There weren’t that many figures down in the clay, but instead there were selected warriors housed behind glass that visitors could observe up close. The rule is that the larger the figure, the higher their rank. Below we have, respectively, a kneeling archer and a general.          

Pit 3 is the smallest and contains what was assumed to be the command post for the entire terracotta army. Made of clay, just like the rest of the battalions, I’m not sure how it was supposed to give orders in the afterlife, but let’s not get all metaphysical in this blog! Here you could go a bit crazy if you fancied it and have your photo taken professionally with the whole army as a backdrop, or get your own face personalised in the form of a terracotta warrior... 

...we didn’t fancy either of those. Instead we headed to the exhibition hall, which was basically a museum-within-a-museum giving some background information to everything. The whole terracotta army, coupled with the extensive mausoleum of the first emperor, is one of those things that I could get quite spaced-out contemplating if I thought about it enough. Fortunately it was too cold for that much contemplation, so we tipped our hats to the terracotta generals and headed back to the bus stop for the number 306.

Back in Xi`an we barely had time to nip across to a Japanese noodle bar over the road for our first proper meal of the day - a meal in which, I might add, not one word of English was spoken. They hadn’t turned the heating on, despite the frost coming down outside, so we were forced to sit out the entire meal in our coats. I ordered some kind of noodles with steamed duck. It was very nice, but again they only provided me with chopsticks and when I asked for something else I was given a pair of elongated spoons. Okay, so I can try to scoop up noodles with these (and fail!) but how am I supposed to chop up the pieces of duck which are about two inches long and an inch wide? Swallow them whole like the noisy slurper enjoying the same meal at the next table to us? Oh well, when in Xi`an, I guess the Xi`an man can