The Terra-Cotta Warriors: The World's Largest Jigsaw Puzzle [Fri. 11-2 Morning]

[Here there be more Terra-Cotta Warrior photos (hopefully)]

The Terra-Cotta warriors are about an hour out of Xi’an and adjacent to the tomb of the Emperor of Qin.  He was the first one to unify China, quite the tyrant he put his people to work constructing thousands of terra-cotta warriors and the earliest version of the Great Wall.   The terra-cotta warriors were to be his army in the afterlife, which is better than having people killed in order to accompany you I suppose.  After his death his dynasty fell apart and a rebel general attacked the underground chambers housing them, stole their weapons, and burned the place.

Thus, the warriors were found in pieces.  Hence Doris’s comment that this was the world’s largest jigsaw puzzle.  Apparently for centuries when peasants found them they figured they were parts of evil spirits and hung and smashed them like a pinata.  A few decades ago, a local well digger had a better idea and reported his finding to the authorities and has been making his money selling and signing books ever since (he was there when I visited but he doesn’t like having his photo taken because of the flash).

They’ve reconstructed whole columns of the warriors, although many are still buried in part to preserve the original paint job.  The picture above is of the reconstruction area, which had figures that made me think of terra-cotta zombies-- arms were missing and their mid sections often had sizable chunks gone.  Still, they made for a quite impressive sight.  There wasn’t as much variation of expression as there was in the figures in the Shaanxi History museum, but the warriors are still quite distinctive.  They also have horses, but they’re for chariot pulling and not riding.

Sadly, the second dig site was under renovation so we skipped to the third.  It was much smaller, the first is literally in an aircraft hanger, the third site could fit within the basement of a good-sized house.  That said, the third site did have a slightly better view on the broken pieces of the warriors.  Finally there was a museum with two half-scale bronze carriages that would apparently transport the Emperor around the afterlife.  I’m not sure the way afterlife scaling works, but practically speaking it seems the more precious the material the smaller the model can be,