Xian Shaanxi Provincial Museum (Monday, August 21st, 2018 )

When we finished our morning walk we went as a group to the Xian Shaanxi Provencial Museum, where they have a very nice display of relics from the Qin, Han and Tang Dynasties. 

As we made our way to the museum by bus, Louise had gone ahead of us to get our tickets. It took her over an hour of standing in line to get our tickets to the museum. She then met us at the bus and walked us over to the entrance. Once we were there, we could see the line that she had been waiting in. It went all the way around the museum. She said that they limit the number of people that can go through the museum each day, so many of the people in line wouldn’t even be able to get tickets after their wait. This is just one of the ways that Gate-1 make it so easy for us. We jumped into the 10 minute long line to enter the museum, and then we were inside.

Since the museum is so crowded, Louise explained some of the exhibits to us in the lobby, then gave us an hour on our own to visit the areas of the museum that we were most interested in. 

We visited the displays slighty out of order, going through the Han, then Tang and then Qin. By the time we got to the Qin Dynasty Exhibit, it was so crowded that we just moved through it as one huge mass of humanity. We couldn’t get near enough to most of the displays to even see them, so I snapped a few pictures in the less crowded areas and we moved on.

There is a large stone lion in the foyer of the museum. It is the largest stone lion in china. 

I will share a sampling of what we saw in the exhibits.

There were some really interesting and beautiful pieces that they have discovered in this area.  

They opened an exhibit today of a new terracotta warrior that they just recently unearthed. It still has much of the original color on it, unlike all of the other soldiers that are just gray.  So we viewed this exhibit before going through the final Qin Dynasty hall.

Look at the detail on his armor.

These artifacts are from the first Chinese Dynasty about 2,200 years ago.  They are incredible considering they are SO old.

When we finished at the museum we headed to lunch at the same lunch restaurant we enjoyed on our first day in Xian. They have really good food, so we were excited to eat there again. Jason and Louise knew that this restaurant would get us in and out quickly so that we wouldn’t have any trouble catching our train on time.