I was really looking forward to our tour of the terracotta warriors and excitedly boarded the bus with a motley crew of fellow travelers and an insanely perky chinese tour guide. The warriors are part of the tomb of the man credited by most historians as China's first true Emperor and the man who built the great wall Qin Shi Huang. It is a matter of debate whether they were to guard his tomb, follow him into the afterlife to help him rule there or a huge decoration but whatever they are they lay hidden for over 2,000 years before a local farmer came across the remains and notified the authorities. The remains lie in three pits and are laid out in batle formation, with a headquarters and sections of infantry, cavalry and charioteers.

We entered the first hall with most of the cavalry and instantly fell silent. There were 6,000 soldiers, every one of them unique, in column after column ahead. The Emperor had insisted on having every region represented and as you look down into the pits the warriors are indeed different heights and ethnicities, with the shorter stockier men of Northern China and the taller Northern Chinese alongside. Sadly none of the men still have their original weapons as the tomb was raided shortly after Qin Shi Huang's death but the effect of the silent still army of men is still unsettling to say the least. We shuffled round in awe and took hundreds of pictures, dumbfounded at the bizarre sight.

Sadly halls two and three are a bit of an anticlimax after the size of hall one so I'd recommend you do them in reverse order if you go but we were under the orders of our guide and she insisted on doing it all by the book. There's a very interesting short film about the making of the army in a small hall too, directed by the same guy who directed the olympic opening ceremony apparently. The frustrating part of the tour is that the rest of his tomb, said to contain palaces and all sorts of riches, is lying close by but has not yet been excavated as it is booby trapped. Archeologists are worried that they'll cause it to self destruct if they break in and so sit day after day trying to unravel the mysteries of how to get in.

We headed off for a late group lunch then back to the hostel for a few beers and a barbeque chatting with our new friends from all over the world. None of us quite got over the strangeness of the army though, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one who went to bed with visions of it running through my head!