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Xi'an, China |
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Yes indeed, here are some of the famous Terracotta Army warriors, discovered purely by accident back in the 1970s by two farmers ploughing a field, not far from the city of Xi'an. (There are about three or four other chambers, not just this one, although this is the largest - this picture only shows about half of this chamber though.It makes you wonder how much other stuff is just lying around underground, probably to be lost forever). Notice that the figures are quite big, nearly double life size; most of the faces are distinct (so were not made from a single mould; more probably, each head was made by changing a few details on heads made from one of a smaller number of rough moulds). The figures were also dressed in armour (each one made up of several hundred interlocking pieces) and originally with many battle weapons, and painted in full colour. The Emperor Qin who made this is apparently the person who first built the Great Wall (over 3000 miles long, over 2000 years ago), unified the separate kingdoms of China into one [so, in fact, the very first Emperor of China], imposed a single, common system of writing upon the whole empire [which was still in use until the 1950s, when the government introduced various simplified Chinese characters; Hong Kong and Taiwan, I believe, still use the "traditional" characters, although with slight modification], and the one from that wonderful film Hero with Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Zhang Ziyi, etc. |
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Standing on the old city walls of Xi'an, in front of one of the old city entrances (apparently, the Xi'an walls are some of the oldest surviving complete city walls in the world). | |||||||||||
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