Our main goal today was the Terracotta Warriors, which are a way out of Xi'an. I started out trying the hotel breakfast, which was pretty poor (apparently "bacon" means "fried sliced spam"), but that is to be expected in hotels in China, even the good ones. We headed out for a decent breakfast (or early lunch, I guess) at a well-known place for yang rou pao mo (Chinese bread in lamb soup). You may have noticed all the places we have been to eat in Xi'an are famous - Jing did her research on this.
Yang rou pao mo is a dish you partially prepare yourself. You start out with two mo, which are round, flat pieces of bread (the same mo as in rou jia mo). You have to break these up into your bowl, the smaller the better, then send the bowls back to be filled with soup. The ideal result is a soup full of bready bits which have soaked up soup all through them, but my bready bits were too big so they were still bready in the middle. Still very nice and highly recommended as a Xi'an specialty.
We took another taxi to the train station, to catch a bus, which makes more sense once you actually do it. The bus to the Terracotta Warriors is a public tourist route, one of those rare occasions in China where something cheap and reliable is provided for the benefit of tourists. However, fakes are not rare in China, and there are plenty of "fake" buses out there. They look nothing like the actual bus, and charge slightly more, but your average tourist isn't going to know that. If you want to find the real one, it is marked as the 306 (Tourist route 5) and perhaps most importantly, the driver and conductor wear official-looking uniforms. Stick to them hard, as the drivers for the other buses will literally follow you until you get in, trying to get you to take their bus instead. Once on board, everything is nice, it is a modern air-conditioned coach which makes a few stops on the way to the Terracotta warriors.
The real bus!
We got off at one of those few halfway stops, the Huaqing springs. There are natural hot springs here, which like most in China, have been plumbed and diverted for centuries. They once fed into the baths of Tang emperors (from 7th century AD), but now feed fountains you can wash your hands in for good luck. The park around the springs is large and covers a couple of historical sites, so we took one of the touristy stretch golf cart vehicles around. The driver knew the history of the place and explained it well, but I didn't test his English. The Tang baths were the first stop, and are now just stone pits in the ground with pavilions built around them in Tang style. Some are very large, some are small, and some have been filled with water so you can see what they might have looked like (but most haven't, as they are still significant archaeological finds). Signs explain the construction and role of each bath (which emperor or consort they were built for).
We headed on to a more recent site, the Huanyuan gardens, a hideaway for the later Qing emperors (in particular Cixi) from the mid-19th century. The scenery here is very nice and it's not hard to see why so many emperors chose this area to relax. More interesting to me though, was that the gardens were taken over by Chiang Kai-Shek during the 1930s and used as his command centre for a time. Most of the rooms are kept as they probably would have looked at the time, with fancy desks and Nationalist flags adorning the walls. During this time, the Xi'an Incident happened, in which some officers rebelled against Chiang. They failed, but are depicted as heroes here (they fought for an alliance with the Communists against Japan). So much so that bullet holes and broken windows from the Incident were protected in glass cases.
After wandering around a bit more, we got back on the bus, onwards to the Terracotta Warriors. Of course, being China, this was only the start of the journey. We had to walk a way from the bus stop to buy tickets, and once we got through the first gate, there was a much longer walk through some markets, selling all sorts of trinkets, from postcards up to full-size hand-carved replicas of the warriors. After this, another gate, then a walk, then the final gate, with the obligatory airport-style security. Either the metal detector was broken, or couldn't cope with the number of people, so they were frisking people as they stood in the arch of the detector.
Finally, we got into the park proper. It's hard to say whether it should be called a park or a museum - large grassy squares separate enormous concrete cubes housing the dig sites. We headed for the first building, which was like a large, old aircraft hangar. Once we pushed through the crowds, we got an impressive sight.
The buildings house active archaeological sites, so in the pits you can see archaeologists hard at work, apparently cataloguing their finds. There are also a few police in the pits, presumably in case someone decides to jump the railing. Some of the pits apparently have yet to be excavated, but it might be a while before the archaeologists get started on them.
There are 3 of these halls here. The smaller two are smaller and newer, presumably more recent finds. Less excavation seems to have been done here, and some tunnels seem to have collapsed. The warriors were placed in trenches, which had wooden frames built over them, then were buried, so that the trenches became tunnels. What is impressive here is what a large area the finds cover - it's clear the intent was to reproduce a massive ancient military formation. One pit has been identified as a "command centre" with higher-ranking officers. Makes one wonder what else is still hidden here.
Apart from this, there was a separate museum, but we were tired, so skipped it and headed home, the way we came, through the three gates and the markets, and on the bus back to the train station. Once we got back, we couldn't get a taxi - it was peak hour, and the few taxis which stopped for us decided we weren't going far enough to be worth it. So, we walked back, through the streets of Xi'an. It did feel more peaceful than some other Chinese cities, despite the guy selling swords on the street. We got back to the drum tower around sunset, and fortunately still had the energy to go to Muslim Street for dinner. We had Xinjiang-style food, but I was assured, not as good as what I'd get the next day.
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