Terracotta Warriors

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The Terracottta warriors are outside the city of Xian.  They  currently have three excavation pits of the warriors. Qin Shi Huang, became the first Emperor of all China at the age of 13 in 246 BC. Soon after he became emperor, he began the work on his mausoleum. It took 11 years to finish the mausoleum. In 1974 a group of local farmers were digging a well near the Royal Tomb and discovered the Terra Cotta Warriors. It is about 1 mile away from the Royal Tomb. The warriors are all smashed and the color mostly all gone from them. So they had been forgotten for over 2,000 years.

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It is a long painstaking process to find all the pieces and restore them and put them back in their original location. I have posted a picture of what they believe one of the warriors looked like in full color. There are also photos of warriors in the reconstruction phase and you can see all the pieces being put together like a jig saw puzzle. Pit One is the largest and it has the most warriors. There are columns of soldiers at the front, followed by war chariots at the back.

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From Wikipedia “Estimates from 2007 were that the three pits containing the Terracotta Army held more than 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses and 150 cavalry horses, the majority of which remained buried in the pits nearby Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum. Other terracotta non-military figures were found in other pits, including officials, acrobats, strongmen and musicians.”

We visited many ancient places like the Great Wall and the Forbidden City but the warriors was one of the more fascinating things for me. How many thousands of people must have been used to build the warriors, dig the trenches for them, then place them in these pits. The same thing with the Great Wall and we are talking BC where everything was pretty much done by hand.


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               click photo to enlarge