Visiting 200 B.C. in 2010 D.C.

I’m typically not a procrastinator but I literally waited until the 11th hour to catch the "Terra Cotta warriors" exhibit at the National Geographic museum. On March 31st at 11 PM, I walked the few blocks over to join the line of people for the last showing of these historic statues in the United States. I fought through the crowd past the first rooms to get up close and personal with the fighting figures. I figured I could look at the photographs later online.

The story goes that back around the year 200 B.C., Qin Shi Huang came into power at the age of thirteen as the First Emperor of China. It seems typical of a teenage boy to create an eternal army of terra cotta. Qin wanted his men to help rule his empire in the afterlife. It was a man-made necropolis (I love that word, it means “a large elaborate cemetery of an ancient city.” You’re on your own with the word, necrophilia). In 1974, a group of farmers stumbled across these silent soldiers and excavated a thousand of them, it’s estimated that a total of six thousand exist.

The Italian word for terra cotta is "baked earth," we usually see this material in plant pots or Spanish-style roof shingles. I'm not sure why they used this as the material to build these guardians of the afterlife. They weigh between 200 – 300 pounds and were made on an assembly line with the feet being built first and used as a weight to build the rest of the body. Their faces were made from eight different molds like ancient-day action figures.

Maybe it was because I was tired or because it was closing night, but I got an eerie feeling at this exhibit. I doubt I'll ever get to China to see the real thing but it was fun being apart of this phenomenon and putting my history major to use.