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  Lintong, Shaanxi Sheng, China
Wednesday, March 30, 2011

After our fun and games getting to the Great Wall we decided to take the easy option for our visit to the Terracotta Warriors and take an organised tour. It turned out to be a great decision as the tour guide who called herself Lady Za Za was a real hoot. It was worth the money that we paid for the tour just to listen to her humorous commentary.

The drive to the museum on a dilapidated old bus was the usual hair raising experience with plenty of near misses. I'm sure we left a trail of carnage and destruction in our wake. The best thing to do when going by bus is to fall asleep, which Ant seems to be able to do at will. An hour or so later we were at the museum, thankfully it was an early start tour so the museum was relatively quiet as the hordes of Chinese visitors hadn't arrived yet.

The most surprising thing was the sheer size of the main pit where most of the warriors have been found. So far only a fraction of the warriors have been unearthed, there are believed to be thousands more still buried. As it takes about three to four months to piece together each warrior, there will be steady employment for the workers for hundreds of years to come.

For those that don't know, the warriors were discovered by a local farmer in the early 1970's whilst he was digging a water well. The farmer was at the museum on the day we visited signing copies of the museum guide book that were on sale. We wondered if he really was the original farmer or just some old bloke that sat and signed books all day. We weren't allowed to take photographs of the man so we had no means of checking if he was the real farmer.

The mausoleum of the Emperor that had the warriors made was situated a mile or so away from the main warrior pits. He is buried under a man made hill in a chamber that is believed to be surrounded by a moat of mercury. We paid a visit to the mausoleum which wasn't that interesting as it is still buried and it looks like a hill with trees on.

Interestingly though, there was another souvenir stall at the mausoleum site selling guide books.Guess what? They were being signed by the farmer who had discovered the warriors! You've got to give them credit for being enterprising. 

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1000's more still lie buried	Excavation pit	Massive jigsaw puzzle	Excavation in progress
Not all are as intact as this one	The only one recovered intact	Reassembly line	Even clay soldiers fall over on parade
They originally held real weapons	The weapons were plundered centuries ago	.	All the same hair style
.	Gives an idea of the vast size of the pit	The main pit	The emperors mausoleum 1.5km away...

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