My friend Karen and I managed to get to the Terracotta Warrior exhibit before it closes May 27th at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. These warriors, buried underground, were discovered in 1974 by farmers. They were put there, along with 7000 other statues by The First Emperor, Qin Shihuang sometime between 259-210 BCE.
His goal was to achieve immortality, after he had already conquered most of China and then united the country all before the age of 49. He clearly achieved the immortality goal because here we are talking about him, not sure if that was exactly what he was after. When he died and was placed in this tomb, several love people were placed there with him, including his master engineers from this project, so they would be there for him in the afterlife. That doesn't seem like such a sweet deal for doing such a great job and managing to lead a team to create art on such a massive scale, and deploying assembly line type techniques and then customizing the warriors. Each artist signed each warrior as a quality control tactic. Pretty impressive.
If you're near San Francisco, it's worth the trip, although the exhibit was smaller than we had expected.
After the warriors, we headed upstairs to the adornment exhibit where we saw lots of ancient bling. The photo below is of a Sumatran headdress. Pretty but probably very heavy to wear.
I would like to go to China and see the warriors that are still there. I heard the area is quite far away from Beijing.
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