Day 5 Tuesday 30th April

We had a brilliant day! We drove out to the Terra Cotta Warriors, first visiting a government sponsored large, museum/factory that produced Terra Cotta Warriors the traditional way to sell to the rest of the world. They also had demonstrations of lacquered furniture and had a huge display of warriors and furniture that could be purchased. You dare not stop in one place for too long or else a sales-person would be trying to sell you something. This “hard-sell” was annoying to some people but we know that the government are doing all they can to “sell” China to the tourists and we were told that they are actually subsidising some of the tours. Our guide told us that this year alone, over 30,000 Australian “Trip-a-deal” tourists will visit China. The Terra Cotta Warrior display was everything we thought it would be and more. There were 3 large hanger-style buildings housing some of the warriors in various stages of discovery and restoration. It was amazing to think that these were all crafted for the Emperor over 2,000 years ago. The Emperor had decided that when he died he would need to take an army with him to protect him. Originally he decided that warriors would be buried with him but soon after he died the warriors did not think it was a good idea and so the Terra Cotta Warriors were modelled by craftsmen to match real warriors. They all have individual faces of real warriors. It was truly a great experience to visit this place and something I hope I will always remember. We have struggled to check any emails (gmail) and also use Google and our guide explained these things are not available in China. I’m not really sure when and if Rob will be able to up-load this but I’ll keep writing it. We have noticed that no matter where we travel in China there is always tall, modern 30 to 40 storey high buildings and the building of these is happening everywhere. Our guide explained that many of the people who lived out in the rural areas now want to live in the cities and so they are continuing to build these massive buildings to house all these people. The scale of all that is happening in this country is difficult to fathom. In the late afternoon we boarded another bullet train heading for our next destination of Zhengzhou.