Terracotta army – lots of images, not enough imagination?

In Xian the first thing to do is to get to the Terracotta army before the Chinese holiday begins, we’ve been warned that the big sites get reeeaaallyy crowded during the 1-week holiday after the 1st October (this year is 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic).

So up early and onto a double decker red bus to the central train/bus station where it’s easy to get another bus to the terracotta army site about an hour away. Easy to spot which bus as 2 blond germans where boarding ahead of us, and the hostel gave us the bus number. An hour or so later and we’re before the ticket office and early enough that there’s no queue. At 8.30-9am we head straight for the biggest hall…

The first rows in this enormous hall feature complete warriors and horses but after that you realise that this is still an archeological work in progress. And complete warriors give way to the almost complete (‘armless enough…), piles of labeled fragments, assorted heads and and a handful archeologists ‘with orders to identify, to clarify and classify’.

It’s undoubtedly a spectacular archeological find and must have been, and continue to be, an amazing thing to work on. But as a visitor we found something was missing. I found it a bit lazy.. they know they have a massive audience and don’t need to do much other than sell tickets and build a massive shopping centre that you have to walk through between the exit and carpark / bus station. It also lacks emotion – here they are, look at them – certainly if compared to the Great Wall and the Fobidden City. Except if you consider that the workers at the time were killed on a massive scale, either here or in the nearby tomb (we didnt take a guide so you’ll have to look up the exact details). We didnt find much creativity and imagination in the displays. So Anouchka and the kids did their own inventing: discovering buried giants where the official version claims there will be merely human scale warriors. They think that many thousands more warriors remain buried and for archeological reasons are generally leaving them where they are for the moment as they quickly deteriorate when uncovered, in particular the paintwork. Perhaps there is more than an archeological case.

In the meantime there was more time to people watch. Mostly it wasn’t too crowded (early and just outside Golden Week) but in places we still got to enjoy the spectacle of our mobile phone and image obsessed society. (Less beach beneath the street and more warriors beneath the phones – or something). And yes I was in there with everyone else – one goal for the trip is surely to get a mobile phone image of a mobile phone image of a mobile phone image of thing.

And no outing would be complete without one or two nice building features – always an eye on the Charrat renovations! (even here there is some mobile phone photography going on in the background).