Mon, 21 Feb 2005

Guerrers de Xi'an

After being in Barcelona, during the suspicious Fòrum de les Cultures, and after in Madrid, the Terracota Warriors from Xi'an exposition came to València. The entrance is free for everyone, but there are long queues. I was lucky enough to get 3 tickets for a guided tour during the first day of the show, last Friday. These tickets get you a guide who explains the details about all the pieces, and also quite important, gets you past the queue. :)

I invited Kiko and his workmate Marisol to come with me. A few other members of my family also came with their own tickets, including my 93 year old grandfather, who didn't seem to have many problems to walk all over the museum without getting too tired.

Marisol, Kiko and I enjoyed the stuff, despite our guide being completely unprofessional... if someone was lucky to understand what she was saying (you could only do that if you were straight in front of her) and then asked something to her, instead of just answering "I don't know, sorry", she would invent something, which in some cases sounded quite funny.

The figures from the Qin dynasty were quite big and and impressive, while the objects and figures from the Han dynasty were smaller but a lot more varied. One interesting object was a female masturbation toy made in bronze, and quite big in size.

While the exposition was very interesting, for some reason I expected more. I had seen many pictures from the excavation which showed hundreds of big figures in huge trenches, and I thought the exposition would have a big number of them. But there were only a few 10 big Qin figures and another area with more Han stuff. This doesn't mean by any means that it's not worth visiting, on the contrary, if you're somewhere near València at some point from now to April 1st, you should consider finding some time to visit els Guerrers.

For more, please come to China. :) There are thousands of figure in the museum, very impressive. These warriors and horses form a real army accompanied Emperor QinShihuang and conquered another world.

The website of Emperor Qin's Terra-cotta Warriors and Horses Museum - http://www.bmy.com.cn/ .

Posted by Carlos at Tue Feb 22 07:01:25 2005

Thanks a lot, Carlos!

Here, the figures are known as the "Guerrers de Xi'an", so I didn't know how to search for an official website not knowing how they are called internationally.

Thanks a lot for the link! It surely makes me want to visit Xi'an. It's funny that the English version is all in Chinese though. ;)

Posted by Jordi at Tue Feb 22 10:47:57 2005