10/8/98: Today we visited another one of China’s mainstay tourist sights: the Terra Cotta Soldiers… This burial site includes more than 8,000 life-sized clay soldiers, each apparently modelled after real men in the army of Qin Shi Huang, China’s first emperor, who died in 210 BC… The Pharaohs of Egypt had their gold buried with them, but for Qin Shi Huang, they buried His Army With Him… More than 2,000 years old, but the site was only discovered a little over 20 years ago in 1974… This place is amazing… The museum included a standing only theater that was a circular room with a screen covering all 360 degrees of space wall space… The dramatized documentary was shot with nine movie cameras aimed in as many directions from a single point while the action went on all around. It was quite an amazing sensation to look at one of the nine screens in the round watching as horses and soldiers loped towards you, then pass you by and, turning fully around, you could watch their backs as they headed off in the distance. Wow!… We also visited the Forest of Stele. This museum has several hundred of these huge, stone slabs with inscriptions that range from formal edicts of an emperor, to law codes, to what appear to be personal letters… I’d had to have been a postman back then…
NOTE: The photo above shows Ruth in the hall of the Terra Cotta Soldiers in Xi’an, China.
