Early morning - leaving the city before the traffic
Xi'an's hotel breakfast rooms open early for this one. Your guide and driver collect you at 07:00 and take the expressway east out of the city; the museum at Lintong is about 40 kilometres away and the drive is normally an hour or a little less. The point of the early start is arithmetic rather than romance: the site opens at 08:30, the coach groups from the city arrive in a block between about 10:00 and 11:00, and the difference between walking along the rail of Pit 1 at 08:45 and at 10:30 is the difference between an archaeological site and a queue. Lintong was a county in its own right until it became a district of Xi'an, and it still reads like a town rather than a suburb: the road in passes market gardens and low courtyard houses, and in late autumn the verges are lined with the pomegranate orchards the district is known for.
Morning - Pit 1 and the first emperor's army
The museum covers the pits dug east of the burial mound of Qin Shi Huang, who became king of Qin in 246 BC, took the six rival states between 230 and 221 BC, and died in 210 BC. The mound with the pits was begun around 246 BC and the burial works ran for close to forty years. The site came to light in March 1974, when a group of villagers sinking a well at Xiyang village brought up fragments and bronze arrowheads. Pit 1, the largest, is about 230 metres long and 62 metres wide, divided into eleven corridors by earth walls and floored with brick; the timber roof collapsed long ago, and most of the roughly 6,000 figures estimated to stand here were found broken and had to be reassembled. Work on them continues at the back of the hangar, where you can watch conservators at the benches.
Late morning - Pit 3, Pit 2 and the bronze chariots
Pit 3, found in December 1976, is the smallest of the pits at 520 square metres, and holds 68 figures arranged as the staff headquarters of the army: a chariot and four horses facing east, officers on either side, and a group behind that looks like a bodyguard. It was less disturbed than Pit 1 and several figures were recovered almost intact. Pit 2, next door, has kneeling and standing archers and a cavalry unit and is largely left in the ground, so what you see there is excavation in progress rather than a display. The two bronze chariots have their own hall: found in 1980 in a pit about 20 metres west of the mound, each is roughly half life size with a team of four horses, built from some 3,000 separate cast pieces and finished with gold and silver harness fittings.
Cultural Insight - the faces and the workshop marks
The photographs give the impression of a mass, but the detail is the argument. No two faces are the same; the figures range from about 1.75 to 1.9 metres, with officers built taller than the men, and the hands, ears and hair are modelled rather than moulded. Statues were assembled from separately fired parts - head, torso, legs, arms - then finished by hand, and inside the robes and under the arms archaeologists have found incised names and workshop marks. Those marks identify at least eighty-seven named craftsmen and point to a system in which each workshop was accountable for its own output, which is the Qin state in miniature: standardisation with a signature on it.
Lunch and return
Lunch is at a restaurant in Lintong, built around the district's own cooking - a local chicken dish, vegetables from the market, hand-pulled noodles, and pomegranate juice in the autumn. You are back in Xi'an by the middle of the afternoon, and the guide will drop you at your hotel, at the city wall, or in the Muslim Quarter if you would rather stay out. Guests who want to see the Huaqing hot springs at the foot of Mount Li, ten minutes from the museum, can add them to the return leg; say so at booking so that the morning is timed accordingly.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day tour - no hotel night included.
