While we were worrying about North Korean Nukes, Seattle got taken by Chinese soldiers
A slightly belated post here! The Terracotta Army was in town last month, so we went to go and see some life sized pots.
The Terracotta Army is a collection of thousands of life-size ceramic statues that were discovered surrounding the tomb of the first Chinese Emperor, Qin Shi Huang. They were discovered by a farmer digging a well in the 1970's, but the figures have apparently been there over 2,200 years. Cermaics in 200 BC? So ahead of the trends, China.
Underneath the big old mound the farmer discovered them in is an entire city, and scientists have figured that the emperor's football field-sized tomb is right in the middle, stuffed with valuables and treasures, according to legend. But scientists can't get to it yet because if they dig through the tomb wall, everything could collapse! So much drama!!
The whole story is fascinating, and if you want to read more than the brief overview I've just given, here's a good link. Wikipedia is a good wormhole to dive into too.
Many of the Terracotta Army's members have been unearthed from surrounding pits though, and the best preserved / most well-restored members have been loaned out from China to museums around the world. So we went to see them at the Pacific Science Center.
While the soldiers are perhaps the coolest sculptures to be on display, there were also clay horses, acrobats, musicians, and state officials. Everything you need for a bustling necropolis! Except women, but everybody knows they didn't matter until the 1900's, when men said they did. Aren't we men the nicest?
Whenever we go to an art museum, the Ancient Greek and Roman artifacts are always some of my favorite exhibits, so it was really cool to see such similarly ancient artifacts from another entirely disparate part of the world, and crazy to think that they remained unseen for so long. Life can suck sometimes, but being alive at this moment in time has its perks. Centuries old clay Chinese soldiers definitely being one of them.
(These ones are reproductions to show what they might've looked like in full color)
The exhibit itself was relying pretty heavily on the coolness of the artifacts, because there isn't a whole lot of information that the museum could provide to go with them, other than how old they are. They're so recently discovered, and excavations are still ongoing to try and learn more, so there wasn't a whole lot of context the curators could include.
But we went to the butterfly house too, which was fun — in the way that paranoia about trampling delicate beautiful creatures is, anyway. Very pretty though!
Lia made a friend, too!
I just started reading David Sedaris' new book, Theft By Finding, which Louis got me for my birthday (Thanks, Louis!) It's 2,000 pages long, so I'm not sure I'll be finishing it in one month, but who knows. He's one of my favorite authors, and I find his style so utterly indulgent — every sentence is just so perfectly written, even when the passages are from scribblings he made in the 1970's.
The prologue talks about how he's kept a diary for over 40 years, and writing is a craft you have to practice. He's done a lot of practice. He's also done a lot of meth, relative to most people I know. I'd like to be a better writer, so I may well start forcing myself to write diaries. Or do meth.
