Finally - the terracotta Museum - seeing the real thing!

I would say that Herb and I were most excited about seeing this Museum than about anything else other than our orphanage visits. this was our third trip to China, had seen Beijing both times before and was very excited about seeing this site - particularly since National Geographic's exhibit earlier in the year when they had a bit of this exhibit at the museum in Washington - we had taken the kids there with a group of friends that also had adopted kids from China and were very amazed by the story behind the discovery.

If you don't know the story of this discovery - it is worth the goggle - since my bit of explanation is absolutely not satisfactory! The site of this discovery has been a world heritage site since 1987 - but the actual discovery of the terracotta warriors began in March 1974 when a farmer discovered the remains of these terracotta soldier while digging for a water well. The soldiers were created 2,000 (yes, really 2,000) years ago to guard the tomb of China's first emperor QinShiHuang. It is anticipated, once they finish the excavation of the entire area, there will be over 9,000 soldiers discovered. there are so many interesting stories from this discovery. It is told that the emperor when he decided to have these created had brought many, many artists in to create the soldiers. After many many creations the artists told the emperor that that could not create any more faces - they had run out of ideas - because no two faces could look alike. so the Emperor brought in 1,000 soldiers at a time to be modeled and when they finished those soldiers, another 1,000 were brought in. It truly is an amazing sight and we enjoyed spending the time here so far the best of the trip. There are actually 3 different digging areas and we were able to visit them all. We walked these sites for over 3 hours. After seeing everything we ended up in the gift shop (where else) Apparently the farmer who discovered the first warriors has a book and he was in the shop signing copies of the book - there were 7 original farmers who were part of the discovery team, of which only 4 remain. we now have a signed book from this farmer! This was not coincidental - apparently he comes almost every day for about 2 hours to sign books (!)

There is always someone at the sites working on on this project. We actually have one father of one of our girls in our group who is an archeologiest - this must have been absolutely amazing for him - I know it was for us!

We were glad to see that china has become so much more progressive on the smoking. Apparently there are many new smoking laws going into effect in China. We absolutely see much less smoking and spitting! We can thank the Olympics for this!