A Visit To The Terracotta Warriors

The biggest reason for most people to travel to Xi’an is to visit the famous Terracotta Warriors.  This massive collection of sculptures depicting the warriors from the Qin Dynasty is mind blowing when you consider the technology and tools that were available back in the Qin era. 

The museum is located approximately an hour’s bus ride from the city.  Facing the Xi’an Railway station, there is a parking lot on the right (East) side where you can find bus number 306 (also known as tourism bus number 5).  The payment of ¥7 is taken after you board the bus. 

After approximately an hour’s ride, you are dropped off at a big parking lot and from there, you just follow the hordes of people towards the entrance.  Once you enter, you can either walk up the little hill or pay to take a short trolley ride.  The walk will take about 15-20 minutes and is not strenuous at all.

Currently there are 3 separate pits that the Terracotta Warriors have been discovered in.  The first (main) pit is the largest and most impressive.  It is quite large but possible to walk from one end to the other.  Unfortunately the experienced was dampened because there were quite a few people selling knock off souvenirs inside and when they notice that you’re a foreigner, they will target you and continue to follow you around, hoping you give in and purchase some of their overpriced souvenirs.

Since the first pit is the most impressive, it also means that this is the most crowded pit.  Once we moved onto the second pit, we realized that it is about half the size of the first one and they’ve made the room much darker for some reason.  It was here where we discovered we could pay ¥10 to take a picture with some replicas of the warriors.  There were 4 of us and the sign clearly said it would cost ¥10 per photo, but they tried to charge us ¥10 per person.  Thankfully, we won the argument and they finally let us pay just ¥10 for the photo. 

When we reached the third and final pit, we realized that it was even smaller than the second one.  We spent the majority of our time in the first pit and I’m really glad we did that, as the second and third pits were not up to the same standard as the first one.  However, this doesn’t mean that they weren’t just as impressive.

For more photos, please see my Photo Gallery of The Terracotta Warriors.