The warriors

Monday morning we woke up early and grabbed a taxi to go to the station. From there we found the bus that would take us to the terracotta army site about 40km out of the city. It was us, a bit uneasy, and a whole bus of Chinese people. No clue where we were going we just trusted the travel guide was right.
It was raining cats and dogs and luckily most of the site is indoor (otherwise the terracotta would dissolve under the rain). A bit more than 1hour after we left the station we entered the site and walked all the way to the different pits to see the warriors.

WOW! Imagine we saw hundreds (or maybe a thousand) of terracotta statues standing there, looking like they are ready to go fighting. The statues we saw used to be colored. It's already very impressive like this, imagine what it must have been when the soldiers were colored.
This trip was my once in a lifetime chance to see the terracotta army and I don't regret we went
Want to take a look at the warriors? Go here.

Want to know the story behind the terracotta army, see below some extracts.

In 1974, the Chinese made an amazing discovery: an army of more than eight thousand soldiers made of terra cotta, a baked reddish clay, is buried fifteen to twenty feet beneath the earth not far from the tomb pyramid where Emperor Qin is believed to be buried along with riches of his dynasty.
Farmers digging a well in a field struck the head of a terra-cotta soldier.

So far, archeologists have dug up and pieced together about one thousand of the soldiers. The soldiers were damaged by raiding rebel armies shortly after their creation and also by the collapse of heavy roof timbers over time. Also uncovered were about one hundred wooden war chariots, about six hundred life-size terra-cotta horses, and thousands of weapons. The soldiers stand about six feet tall, and each appears to have his own individual personality.

They’re all different, every single one of them. Each soldier has his own characteristics. Some are almost smiling; some look very stern. Some look like they are middle aged, and some are very young. Each has his own little mustache and little changes to his hairstyle.
Workers who made the soldiers may have modeled them after the real soldiers of Emperor Qin’s army. The terra-cotta horses buried alongside the soldiers also have their own facial expressions. The weapons the soldiers carry are real.

Emperor Qin’s terra-cotta army had at least two purposes: 1) The army was designed to protect Qin after he died; 2) The army was also created to demonstrate Emperor Qin’s power while he was still alive. Qin, who was born in 259 B.C., began construction of the army and tomb when he became ruler at the age of thirteen. Archeologists estimate that it took as many as seven hundred thousand people more than thirty years to complete the project.

Emperor Qin was powerful, indeed. In 221 B.C. Qin declared himself emperor. He ended hundreds of years of fighting among the different states in China, and he unified the country. Under Qin’s rule, people in China used the same form of money, the same system of measurement, and the same written language. Qin even had all of the axle widths in China made the same size so that all wheels would fit in the same ruts in the roads.