Warriors and walls

A 13-year-old boy became emperor of China in 246BC and went on to become a man whose name keeps popping up all over China today.
Pretty much as soon a young Emperor Qin ascended the throne, he started preparing for his death. This involved creating a large and elaborate tomb for himself, complete with an impressive army of lifesize terracotta warriors in full battle array, featuring bowmen, calvary, horse drawn chariots and infantry.
These warriors were re-discovered in 1974 by some local farmers who were digging a well. Since then, they have been named as one of the most important archeological finds of the 20th century, labeled as a hoax created by China (though it’s hard to imagine how anyone who has seen them could think they were anything but authentic) and become very well traveled, as exhibitions have traveled the world.
Today the uncovered and restored warriors are protected by a large building and more excavation and restoration work is done at night.
Qin's tomb is located near Xi'an, an ancient capital of China that went very close to becoming the modern capital of China, missing out by just a few votes in favour of Beijing sometime last century (this memory loss is what you get when you get slack with your blog and write it close to three months after the events and can't be bothered looking up the facts).
My main memories of Xi'an now are:
- It was STILL raining.
- There was some very good food - I got to like a peanut and celery salad and a cold tofu salad.
- There was some very bad food - we ordered these lovely-looking stuffed buns from a joint in the Muslem Quarter and they were the worse thing I've ever tasted. I don't know how to describe them cause I've never tasted anything like them before and hope to hell I never do again.
- Mobile phone shops were everywhere, with people out the front handing out brochures. This was about the only time in China that people selling things ignored us in favour of the locals.
- There was a really posh shopping mall that gave you bags to stop your umbrellas from dripping, this mall had great toilets that we used repeatedly.
- There was another shopping mall where I ended up buying a pair of pink high heels (cause I REALLY needed another pair of shoes to carry across half the world). They do however go very nicely with the green dress, suit and woolen winter coat I was also carrying.
- There was market with some very lovely and some very tacky souvenirs (I'm still sort of regretting not buying a little Mao clock with his arms as the hands).

Now, back to our friend Qin.... The warriors aren’t the only .work he commissioned that lasted to the present day.
He was also responsible for the beginnings of a little thing called the Great Wall of China, which he got rolling by ordering the linking of existing city walls.
In its heyday, the wall ran across 6400km of north eastern China.
The wall was built to keep out the hordes, but today it attracts them. There are several sites where you can see remaining sections, in various states of repair, and we chose to go to a place called Badaling as it is the easiest to get to by public transport and I’d seen pretty pictures taken from there.
Badaling is the most popular site and we had heard reports that it is insanely busy, but it really wasn’t too bad. There are two ways you can walk along the wall from Badaling, north and south, and we were lucky to choose the south route first, which was very quiet, with the people selling souvenirs almost out numbering the tourists. The northern route was a different matter, it was positively swarming with tourists, but this sort of added to the atmosphere in its own hectic way.