Augustana senior Kyle Nelson and his teammates are in China. He will be blogging regularly on D3hoops.com about the team’s journey.
Our fourth flight of the trip brought us to the city of Xi’an in central China. The flight from Wuhan to here lasted only about an hour and a half. It seems like the flights are getting shorter and shorter. When we landed we were greeted by Mr. Chang (pronounced J-ong) our guide in Xi’an. Our first stop was lunch and then it was on to see the Terracotta warriors. The warriors were clay sculptures of an army that Emperor Qing (“Ch-in”) who reigned in about 200 B.C., had commissioned and buried along with his body so that he would have an army in the afterlife.
The site of the soldiers was massive. There were three different pits that we stopped at. The first was the pit where the first terracotta warrior was discovered by peasants who were digging for a well in 1974. What they happened to find was one of the greatest discoveries of this century. The other two pits that we saw were both discovered by archeologists when they began digging around the initial discovery site.
The clay army was made up of infantry men, archers, horses, generals, captains and chariots. Much of the collection is either broken or undiscovered, but much of the army is exposed for this public to see. The warriors were made to be actual size, where as the horses and the chariots were scaled down to half of their true sizes. I thought that something very interesting was that not a single soldier was identical to another. Each warrior had its own face and given the massive scale of the army, that was an impressive undertaking. The terracotta warriors provided some once in a lifetime pictures because truly there is nothing else like them on this planet.
After seeing the warriors we went back to our hotel and then set off into downtown Xi’an on our own. We headed to the local market which was positioned right behind the bell and drum towers that have been at the center of Xi’an since the city was established. This market was one of the most lively and exciting and it sold goods that ranged from Rolex watches to squirrel on a stick.
Early night to rest for a game against Xi’an University tomorrow.
Kyle Nelson
