Ozymandias

“Look on my works, ye mighty and despair.”  Or, if Shelley isn’t your thing, insert a relevant Siouxie Sioux lyric instead.  Because I’m certainly not here to tell you how to run your life.

I took an hour long public bus ride out of Xi’an into the mountains east.  The girl selling tickets on the bus kept asking me “Harry Potter?  Harry Potter?”  (She was saying “terracotta”.)

China continues to impress.

 Sure, you can see these guys out front of any P.F. Chang’s, but these are echt.  When they were all made, across four decades two millennia ago, they were each painted with vibrant colors, flesh tones, etc.  A realistic army.

And then they were all buried.  No mention of it in any of the court records.  It’s a strange case of inconspicuous consumption.

To quote Lisa Simpson, “They’re just like the terracotta warriors of Xi’an!”

I’m sure soldiers of every era and every culture give each other nicknames.  I like to think this guy’s buddies called him “Tex”:

As a total bonus, there is a 360 degree movie presentation (just like the old Circle-Vision at Disneyland!) with ratty prints of a fabulously 70s, bombastic documentary film entitled “THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD” [emphasis theirs].

But, per usual, the things that strike me as most fascinating are the things most people couldn’t care less about.  (You might think it was the miniature statues of bronze chariots with Li’l Sebastian-sized horses.  But you’d be wrong.)  After two thousand years, the site was discovered in 1973 when villagers were digging a well.  This is the location of where they were digging that well:

Dumb luck.  And they uncover this!  And just at the front, leftmost point of the entire pit.  Amazing.

Yet it’s hard not to imagine Indiana Jones uncovering this site himself.

 It belongs in a museum.