Xi'an Terracotta Army and the History Museum

In March 1974 a drought had left the fields around Xiyang, a village about 35 kilometers east of Xi’an, badly short of water, and a group of farmers decided to dig a well. What came up out of the hole was not water. It was fragments of fired clay, a bronze arrowhead, and a head.

They had dug into the edge of an army of some eight thousand clay soldiers, buried more than two thousand years earlier to guard the tomb of China’s first emperor. They were looking for water.

Half a century later that army is the reason most people come to Xi’an, and one of the reasons I did.

Terracotta warriors standing in an excavation trench near Xi'an — Sightseeing in China is a contact sport.

Rows of terracotta warriors in Pit 1 of the Terracotta Army museum — Sightseeing in China is a contact sport.

When the Silk Road first came into being under the Han Dynasty in the second century BC it took months, sometimes years, to travel to Xi’an from Europe. I got to Xi’an in less than six hours on the high speed train from Shanghai, traveling at 345 km/h in significantly more comfort than the traders 2,200 years ago. I had come to learn more about Chinese history and the Silk Road, and Xi’an is the place to do so.

During the height of trading along the Silk Road people of all nationalities came to Xi’an, and many made the city their new home. At times up to 10,000 foreigners lived in Xi’an. One large group were Muslims, and their descendants can still be found in the Muslim Quarter in the center of the city, nowadays a bustling neighborhood with many shops and restaurants and a favorite among tourists and visitors.

Museums in China are a contact sport

One day it rained from morning to night, which made it the obvious day for the Shaanxi History Museum. A DiDi took me the six kilometers across town in half an hour for less than ten yuan, a price that makes the bus hard to argue for.

The museum is very big, and it was very crowded. It turns out that visiting a museum in China is a contact sport. You fight your way to the screens to find out what you are looking at, and then you fight your way to the glass to actually look at it. When you get there, everyone around you is photographing every single object in the case with a phone. What they do with all those pictures afterwards I have no idea. I travel to take photographs myself, so I am in no position to complain.

Ancient hominid skull in a display case at the Shaanxi History Museum — Not in the museum, this soldier is made of chocolate

Life-size reconstruction of an early human at the Shaanxi History Museum — Not in the museum, this soldier is made of chocolate

The exhibition is laid out as a walk through time. It starts with Lantian Man, one of the oldest human fossils found in China and well over a million years old, and works its way forward through the dynasties, the Qin, the Han, the Tang and on to the Ming, with the Silk Road running through the middle of it all. By the end I had a far better idea of how the pieces of Chinese history fit together than when I walked in.

It would have been ideal preparation for the Terracotta Army. I went the day after. If you go, do it the other way round.

The Shaanxi History Museum

Shaanxi, with two a’s, is the province Xi’an is the capital of. Shanxi, with one, is the province next door. Spoken, the two names differ only in tone, and the extra letter is how they are told apart in writing.

The museum opened in 1991 and was one of the first large modern museums in China. The building is designed to look like a Tang dynasty palace, a central hall with a pavilion at each corner, which is a sensible choice in a city that was the Tang capital.

The permanent exhibition runs in date order through three halls, from prehistory to the Qin, then the Han, then the Tang and what came after. Lantian Man, where it all starts, is a skull found in 1964 in Lantian county, southeast of Xi’an. In 1989 it was dated to 1.15 million years. In 2015 that was revised to around 1.6 million, which is a considerable correction to anybody’s age.

The best known part of the collection is several hundred Tang dynasty tomb murals, shown in a hall of their own with a separate and considerably less free ticket.

Four thousand years of dynasties

Chinese history is usually told as a sequence of dynasties, which makes it sound a good deal tidier than it was. This is the sequence the museum walks you through, on one screen.

The dynasties did not always follow each other neatly. Some overlap, some only ever ruled part of the country, and the gaps between them were often long stretches of war. The main line runs like this.

Dynasty	Years	Remembered for
Xia	c. 2070 to 1600 BC	The traditional first dynasty. Archaeologists are still arguing about it
Shang	c. 1600 to 1046 BC	Bronze vessels and oracle bones, the oldest Chinese writing
Zhou	1046 to 256 BC	Confucius and Laozi, then the long slide into the Warring States
Qin	221 to 206 BC	The first emperor, one script, one currency, the Terracotta Army
Han	206 BC to AD 220	The Silk Road. The Han Chinese still take their name from it
Three Kingdoms	220 to 280	Wei, Shu and Wu. Shu’s capital was Chengdu
Jin	266 to 420	A brief reunification, then the north was lost
Northern and Southern Dynasties	420 to 589	The country split in two, and Buddhism spread
Sui	581 to 618	Reunified the country and dug the Grand Canal
Tang	618 to 907	The golden age. Chang’an had around a million people
Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms	907 to 960	Half a century of fragments
Song	960 to 1279	Printing, the compass and paper money
Yuan	1271 to 1368	Mongol rule under Kublai Khan, the China of Marco Polo
Ming	1368 to 1644	The Forbidden City, most of the Great Wall you see today, and Xi’an’s city wall
Qing	1644 to 1912	The Manchu dynasty, and the last one
Republic of China	1912 to 1949	The end of the emperors. Its government moved to Taiwan in 1949
People’s Republic of China	1949 to today	Founded in Beijing on 1 October 1949

Xi’an, under its older names, was the capital or right next door to it for the Western Zhou, the Qin, the Western Han, the Sui and the Tang. After the Tang the capital moved east, and it never came back.

Eight thousand soldiers and a few thousand elbows

The Terracotta Army was the whole reason for coming to Xi’an, and it is not actually in Xi’an. The pits are about 50 kilometers away by road, and a DiDi took me out there in the rain for around 70 yuan, which for the distance is a bargain.

The crowds were already massive when I arrived. Even with a ticket bought in advance I had to queue. At the gate they scanned my passport, which was the ticket, and I picked up the English audio guide and went straight to Pit 1.

Pit 1 is the one in all the photographs, rank after rank of soldiers standing in long earth corridors under a roof the size of an aircraft hangar. It is very impressive. It was also jam-packed. Personal space is a smaller unit in China than it is at home, and the rail around the pit was a slow-moving scrum of pushing and shoving, several people deep.

From there the route takes you to Pit 3 and then to Pit 2, and each is less impressive than the one before. Pit 3 is the command post, with fewer than a hundred figures, and much of Pit 2 is still under its covering of earth. Starting with the best and finishing with the least is an unusual way to arrange a visit. I would have reversed it, so that you get more impressed as you go along rather than less.

After the pits there is an exhibition hall, also impressive. Then I returned the audio guide and ate a couple of pieces of chicken, on the theory that this was my last chance of food. Outside the gates was an enormous commercial area full of restaurants. The theory was wrong.

How a well turned into a museum

The farmers found the army. It took a county museum curator, a journalist home on a family visit and a certain amount of nerve before anybody in Beijing heard about it.

The man usually credited is Yang Zhifa, who was digging with a handful of other men from Xiyang when they hit a clay head. The spot was about a kilometer and a half east of the burial mound of Qin Shi Huang, the king who unified China in 221 BC and called himself its first emperor. Work on his tomb had begun in 246 BC, when he came to the throne of Qin at the age of thirteen, and went on for the rest of his life.

The fragments reached Zhao Kangmin, who ran the small museum in Lintong county. He recognized them as Qin, gathered every piece he could find down to the smallest shards, and glued them back together into life-sized armored soldiers. Then he kept quiet about it. This was still the Cultural Revolution, and old things had a habit of being smashed. The secret got out when Lin Anwen, a reporter for the Xinhua news agency, came home to Lintong to visit relatives, heard the story, and wrote it up when he got back to Beijing. The response from the top was favorable, excavation began that summer, and a museum opened on the site in 1979.

The three pits are thought to hold more than 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses, and another 150 cavalry horses. Only part of that has been dug up. The figures were painted when they were made, but the lacquer under the paint can begin to curl within fifteen seconds of meeting Xi’an’s dry air, which is one reason the digging goes slowly. The emperor’s tomb itself has never been opened.

Yang Zhifa was paid 300 yuan, about a year’s income at the time. His house was later cleared along with the rest of the village to make room for the site, and for years afterwards he sat in the museum shop signing books for tourists. An asteroid has since been named after him.

Three evenings in the Muslim Quarter

My hotel was a short walk from the Muslim Quarter, and I ended up there on all three evenings. The first visit was an accident. I came up out of the metro at a random exit, looking for my hotel, and found myself in the middle of it instead.

The main street is lined with restaurants, one after another, with food stalls squeezed in between them. It is noisy, crowded and thoroughly touristy, and it felt more like Southeast Asia than anything I had seen in Shanghai.

On the second evening I picked a small restaurant with a menu only in Chinese and ordered, as best I could, lamb skewers with noodles. Two very good skewers arrived, and then a full bowl of beef noodles, which I had apparently also ordered. It was a good dinner and there was a great deal of it. I managed about half, which in China seems to be the normal outcome.

On the last evening, in the rain, I skipped the restaurants and ate my way along the street instead. A lamb skewer, a bowl of potatoes, a rolled frozen yogurt made in front of me, a sweet of uncertain composition, and then another ice cream, since nobody was keeping count.

The alleys off the main street are quieter, and that is where the shops are. I had left my hat on the train from Shanghai and found a new one there, along with some socks. Not the souvenirs from Xi’an I had planned on, but the ones I needed.

The Muslim Quarter

The quarter is home to the Hui, Chinese-speaking Muslims whose community goes back to the traders who arrived along the Silk Road more than twelve hundred years ago.

Under the Tang dynasty, Chang’an was the eastern end of the Silk Road and one of the largest cities in the world, and Arab and Persian merchants settled here in numbers. Many married locally and stayed. More Muslims arrived from Central Asia under the Mongol Yuan dynasty, and over the centuries the different groups merged into the people now called the Hui. They speak Chinese, look much like their Han neighbors, and are set apart mainly by their faith.

The quarter today has around ten mosques. The oldest and best known is the Great Mosque, founded according to tradition in 742, although most of what stands now was built under the Ming. It looks nothing like a mosque in the Middle East. There is no dome, the minaret is a Chinese pagoda, and the whole thing is laid out as a series of courtyards under tiled roofs. Only the Arabic inscriptions give it away.

Beiyuanmen is the main street, about 500 meters of restaurants and stalls running north from the Drum Tower, which was built in 1380 and still marks the way in. The Great Mosque is tucked away in Huajue Lane, a few minutes’ walk from the Drum Tower. Xiyangshi and Dapiyuan are the lanes to try for food a little away from the crowds, and on Beiyuanmen itself is the Gao family courtyard, a merchant’s house about four hundred years old.

The dishes to look for are yangrou paomo, a lamb soup into which you break your own flatbread, roujiamo, shredded meat in a bun and usually called the Chinese hamburger, biangbiang noodles, whose name is written with one of the most complicated characters in the language, and persimmon cakes, fried and filled with something sweet.

Two days, the same history twice. Once behind glass with a label, once standing in a pit in the rain. Both of them crowded. Both of them worth the elbows.

Xi’an, the practical stuff

How long is the train from Shanghai to Xi’an? — Under six hours on the fastest high-speed trains, at up to 350 km/h. Book on 12306 or Trip.com; the passport is the ticket.
Where is the Terracotta Army? — Not in Xi’an itself. The pits are near Lintong, about 50 km from the city center by road. A DiDi cost about 70 yuan (about US$10) each way.
How much is a Terracotta Army ticket? — 120 yuan (about US$18), covering Pits 1, 2 and 3, Lishan Garden and the shuttle bus. Book ahead with your passport, which is scanned as the ticket at the gate. Open 08:30 to 18:30 from mid-March to mid-November, last entry 17:00.
In what order do you see the Terracotta Army pits? — The standard route runs Pit 1, Pit 3, then Pit 2, from most to least impressive. Pit 1, with the ranks of soldiers, is also the most crowded. An English audio guide is available at the entrance.
When was the Terracotta Army found? — In March 1974, by farmers from Xiyang village digging a well, about 1.5 km east of the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, China’s first emperor. The three pits are thought to hold more than 8,000 soldiers, and the emperor’s tomb has never been opened.
Should you visit the Shaanxi History Museum before the Terracotta Army? — Yes. The museum, opened in 1991, walks through Chinese history in date order from Lantian Man to the Ming, which is the ideal preparation. The main halls are free, the Tang mural hall has its own ticket, and the museum is closed on Mondays.
Where is the Muslim Quarter in Xi’an? — In the center, north of the Drum Tower. Beiyuanmen is the main food street, about 500 meters long, and the Great Mosque is in Huajue Lane. The side alleys are quieter and sell everyday goods.
What should you eat in Xi’an? — Yangrou paomo, a lamb soup with flatbread you break in yourself; roujiamo, the “Chinese hamburger”; biangbiang noodles; lamb skewers; and fried persimmon cakes.
How do you get around Xi’an? — By metro in the center and DiDi for the rest. Six kilometers across town by DiDi cost less than 10 yuan (about US$1.50).

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