I think the last blog covered the evening of the wedding. The day after that our local hosts took us on a fine outing to some of the sights of their lesser known province. First it was off to the tombs of the Xia emperors - a people group obliterated by the Mongols, so the tombs are all that is left to tell us what their civilisation was like. There appears to be a preoccupation with death and the after life generally amongst the various dynasties. The mausolia we have seen were all massive (we saw Mao's in Beijing too - apparently he's lowered into the freezer every night). Apparently, building his mausoleum was the first thing any emperor did. The scale was extraordinary - none bigger than the famous ones found at Xi'an (our next stop after Ningxia). I hadn't appreciated that the Terracotta Warriors were the thousands of life size soldiers made to accompany the emperor into the afterlife (the logic being that he needed them in life, so he'd no doubt need them in death too). The scale is phenomenal - they estimate up to about 6,000 soldiers, plus horses and chariots. We were wondering whether the guys who had to make them all were as taken with the project as the emperor himself.
After the tombs, we stopped in on what we were told was the Chinese Hollywood - the set of 100+ films. None of which I'd seen.
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