I was really excited about visiting the “Emperor Qin Huang’s Mausoleum Site Museum” aka The Terracotta Warriors!  I’d seen several documentaries and read about the warriors – even in my local newspaper, as there was a visiting exhibition at the Virginia Fine Arts Museum scheduled for 2018.

Emperor Qin was the first emperor of China and he was buried with hundreds of clay sculptures in approximately 200 BC! There are several buildings you can visit each with archeological digs and a museum too. The place is huge! The photos I’ve seen of it before my visit didn’t convey just how big it is!

This photo can hopefully give you some idea of how big this place is! If you look on the right or left, you can see visitors looking into the pit. The whole building is at least as big as a football field.

This is the view when you pass through the main doors of the largest building. What you can’t see is that from where the photo was taken were hundreds of people all trying to get a great photo.

Just after you enter the building and round the first corner, you can see the statues up close and you can tell that all of the statutes are different! They weren’t all just stamped out of one mold. Everyone was unique!  The horses too.

You can tell a warriors rank from the shoes they are wearing! If the toes curved upward, then they were more important, higher-ranking soldiers.  Looking down the row above, you can see the entrance into the mausoleum midway to the right.

The heads and bodies were cast separately.

The above two photos were taken in a different building from the main dig.

The Terracotty Army was discovered in 1974 by a local farmer, Yang Zhifa. He is still alive and you can meet him (for a small fee!).

I still cant believe that this was created in 200 BC!

They also do a lot of restoration and behind me is a section of warriors being repaired.

For more information on the Terracotta Warriors, you can visit the National Geographic page here.