Terra Cotta Warriors

Last week, I went to ACM to see this Terra Cotta Warriors exhibtion. I have admired these terra cotta warriors since a young age. I just like them so much that I want to have a life size one in my room but my room is really too small to fit.



The exhibition only had like 6 or 7 authentic terra cotta warriors (as they claimed in their booklets). Then there were some replicas and some other artfefacts found in the tombs of some other emperors. Some were quite interesting.

Cute or not? Little porcelain warriors with headphones!

Then I discovered this lady using the laptop....~

See, you can collect little stamps around the exhibit area.

The stamping point!

It was like walking through a maze to get to that exhibition hall but I finally found it!!!


I saw this little tiger decorative item in one of the cases.

It's so cute right! Look at it! It's grinning lor! I never knew that people from the han/qin dynasty got such humour. They made a grinning tiger.

The horse chariots. This is a replica but the real thing is also this size. Qin emperor made all the horses and chariots half the size of the real thing. I am thinking maybe because the whole thing is made of bronze so it will be quite difficult to make a life size one. As you see the chariotis very tighly covered and it actually only had one small window. Qin emperor was a very paranoid emepror. He kept thinking that someone will kill him so he always kept to himself and even his chariot has only a very small window that is seldom opened.

I dunno if you can see, the horse has very fine bronze lines hanging on their chins. These very fine bronze lines of lesser than 1mm or about 1mm in diameter is a sign that the makers of these bronze figures have very good skills as even in modern standard, it is very hard to make such find little lines with bronze.

A little stamp used in the past to confirm an order.

The spears and arrow heads found in the Qin tomb. The components of the crossbows and arrowheads are interchangeable between the crossbows from different states during Qin dynasty. This goes to show that at that time they already had a very standardised way to manufacture these bronze weapons throughout the country! At a time when there are not automated machineries, I find this very impressive. The difference between the arrow heads are at most about 1mm only.

If I can buy one life size terra cotta warrior, I want this one, the general!! First of all because he is the highest ranked among all the warriors found. Secondly, I like his style, I like the way the hair and the hat is done up. Very nice. Did you know that the head and the arms were made separately? And that the warriors are actually hollow inside?

It was found that the warriors are made using the coiling technique, not the mould technique. The coiling way takes so much longer than the mould way so I am wondering really why they want to use the coiling way? I understand that they want individuality but that is only for the face mah. The body still can use mould.

I read before that each terra cotta face is unique. In a documentry I watched not so long ago, a certain agency in the US uses this face recognition program (used by the FBI or something) to scan the faces of the terra cotta warriors to find a perfect match. To their amazement, they didn't find a match among the hundreds of terra cotta warriors scanned.

Each terra cotta warrior was also painted before they were buried but all we can see now is this brownish colour because we do not have the technology to preserve the paint on the warriors. Therefore within minutes after the warriors were unearthed, the paint all fell off. From the examination, they first painted lacquer on the warrior then they pain the colours over the coat of lacquer. Lacquer was a very expensive material in the past and you can imagine the amount of lacquer used in this project was enormous! Qin emperor was the king for only 11 years and he completed all these within 11 years. Fascinating.

We didn't really take a lot of photos of the terra cotta warriors because there were too many tourists and it wasn't really convenient to take pictures.



Don't you think that the terra cotta warriors are very 'sud'? Like very stylo like that. I just love the way they look. They got this aura around them.

Oh man... They really look very nice!!!

And to promote this exhibition, ACM actually find some people to pose at Qin Emperor and his concubine in the museum. LOL..
The qin emperor poser wore a rather nice costume but that concubine was terrible lor with her hair like that!!

As part of the National Day celebration, that day was a free museum day so we actually got to see the exhibition for free. Heng we went early at about 10plus because when we came out at about 12 plus, there was a mega mega long queue! There wasn't only a short queue which took like 10 minutes when I reached there but now the queue has extended from the exhibition hall all the way to the outside of ACM!

Oh that long hair girl here is me lah.. Hahaha.... I just realised KL took a photo of me taking a picture of the queue.

See, ppl queueing outside the museum. I heard that the queue takes about 1.5 hours if you queue outside the building! So I am lucky I got to see it free without queueing..