Dark Night

Back to reality

Because I'm going to be busy tomorrow, here's an early treat.  😊

I was yawning but looking forward to the next adventure as we pulled up to the airport again to board a flight to Xi'an. It took me a couple of minutes to remember, then I snapped a photo of the destination board at the gate and posed it on Instagram with a caption that I was off to see the Terracotta Army. It took just over two hours to get to the UNESCO World Heritage Center, and both Grandpa and I napped on the flight. All the travel was getting tiring.

Our tour guide met us at the airport and by nine we were at the tomb of the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang (from whom China gets its name, an alternate spelling being Chin) and the magnificent terracotta army, which was conceived as a vanity project to show his accomplishments, as a substitute for a sacrificial army of human corpses, and an army for the afterlife. Our guide told us that it took an estimated forty years for around 700 000 laborers and artisans to construct the complex and the army. Everything was made by hand, without advanced tools, in components. The torsos were hollow, with solid legs, arms, and heads to create figures that were almost two meters high. The heads were personalized so that the faces and hairstyles were individual as well as the clothing and everything had been painted. Each figure was unique. Some of the paint had come off over the twenty two hundred years that they had been buried but most had peeled off when the figures were exposed to air again; on some of the figures blotchy patches could still be seen. It must have been extraordinary to see when the vivid colors had been freshly applied.

The excavation had occurred in three pits, which were subsequently covered and made into a museum. The first pit contained around 2000 warriors and horses and was the size of an airplane hanger. The army is positioned in strict  accordance with the ancient directives in the Art of War: facing east towards the ancient enemies of empire, with pit one on the right flank, pit two on the left flank, and pit three a  command post at the rear. It is a real military formation from the time, not just an ideal. Each warrior had been armed with weapons like long spears,  daggers, bows, or halberds. About 40 000 bronze weapons have been found so far. The surface of some weapons were plated with a chrome-saline oxide coatingwith a thickness of 10 to 15 microns, which has protected the sharpness of the weapons and made them look almost new when they were unearthed. Different proportions of the elements of the alloys were used for making different weapons. This demonstrates that metallurgy of Qin era reached a high level and the manufacture of weapons started to be standardized. Modern commercial chrome plating was developed at Columbia University in 1924 but it had emerged as a technology in China 2200 years before.

Excavation and restoration was happening in pits two and three. The first unit in pit two contains rows of kneeling and standing  archers; the second one is a chariot war array; the third unit consists of  mixed forces with infantry and a chariot and trooper standing in a rectangular position;  and the last one has troopers holding weapons. Pit three is the smallest, with only 68 figures, many of which have no heads. All of the figures are civilian officials rather than military. There was a joke to be made about the officials losing their heads, but I refrained while I was there.

The two bronze chariots that had been discovered in 1980 were displayed separately. They have well over three thousand parts each and were   driven by four horses. They are exactly half size replicas of what the actual chariot, driver, and horses were; the first one is called the "High Chariot" and the second the "Security Chariot." There were almost two thousand  pieces of golden and silver  ornaments, weighing seven kilograms in total, for each chariot, and are guarded by coachmen with swords on each side. They are the  best-preserved and earliest known bronze  relics in  China. These chariots are the biggest pieces of ancient bronze found in the entire world thus far. The first chariot was the lead chariot, and the Security Chariot was the seat of the emperor, the full sized-one, I mean. The craftsmanship is superb and even with today's technology, some of would not be easy to replicate, we were told. The canopy of the chariots is over two meters and is two millimeters thick at its thinnest. They had been buried in wooden coffers, which accounts for their remarkable preservation, but even then, they needed careful and extensive restoration. The wood had rotted and the earth pressed the bronze.