Terracotta Warriors Exhibit (plus links to our China Freebies)

Last week, I shared a little bit about what we’ve been doing in our homeschool, but I also mentioned that we have been on the go a lot.  Pretty much right after that post went live, we headed out of town again! I wanted to share a few pictures from the amazing exhibit we went to see: Terracotta Army: Legacy of the First Emperor of China. It was wonderful!

The Terracotta Army is a collection of terracotta sculptures depicting the armies of Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China. These pieces were buried with the emperor in 210–209 BCE.

One of the first things you see when you walk into the exhibit is this chariot:

In 1974 local farmers digging a well outside the city of Xi’an in Shaanxi province, China, discovered pottery shards and bronze arrows near the mausoleum of Ying Zheng. This led to the astonishing discovery of 8,000 life-size terracotta warriors and horses, which is considered one of the most important archaeological finds in human history.

The exhibition had quite an array of objects.  In addition to the terracotta warriors, it included arms and armor, ritual bronze vessels, works in gold and silver, jade ornaments, precious jewelry and ceramics.

Ancient Chinese Coins: We thought the display of money was interesting.  All of these objects below were used as money! The coin on the left was from the Han dynasty. The knife-shaped coin in the middle was from the Qi. The coin on the right was a banliang coin from the Qin dynasty after the emperor standardized coins across the empire.

There were 9  life-size terracotta figures. What is amazing, is that each figure has a unique face.  Here’s a collage of many of these faces so you can see just what I mean! Can you tell which one is the servant? Can you find the general?

The servant is the second from the right on the bottom row.  The general is in the top left corner.

What you can’t tell from the photo above is that the general is the tallest figure in the exhibit. Generals were the highest ranking figures excavated from the pits. In the picture below, his hand was probably resting on a sword. His finger is pointing, showing that he was in command.Below is an archer:

And this is a cavalry horse and cavalryman:

This is a picture of the excavation site in Xian, China.  As you can see, people can walk around the edges to observe this site.  Hubby and I were able to visit Xian a couple years before LD was born. It was pretty amazing how vast this site is! There are thousands of warriors in this army.

The soldiers within were laid out as if to protect the tomb from the east, where the Qin Emperor’s conquered states lay.

Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

The Terracotta Warrior exhibit is currently in Richmond, VA until March 11th, 2018. Then, it will be going to the Cincinnati Art Museum of Ohio – April 20th through August 12th, 2018.

Since I am talking about Ancient China, I thought I would share links to a few of resources about China:

This is a packet I put together for the kids when we studied Ancient China a number of years ago.  Visit the Ancient China Unit post for more details!

When we did our Ancient China unit, the kids really enjoyed trying some Chinese Brush Painting.  You can read more about our activities here: Chinese Brush Painting Activity

China Geography and Landmarks Packet: This is another resource I made more recently about China’s geography & landmarks. It is currently free to download.

If your kids are a bit younger, you might be interested in our free Chinese New Year materials

If you are studying Japan, you might be interested in this packet: Samurai Packet (Free Notebook Pages)

So, that’s it for today!  It sure is fabulous to have the flexibility to do special trips like this! We love homeschooling!

See you again soon here or over at our Homeschool Den Facebook Page! Don’t forget to Subscribe to our Homeschool Den Newsletter. You might also want to check out some of our resources pages above (such as our Science, Language Arts, or History Units Resource Pages) which have links to dozens of posts.  You might want to join our free Homeschool Den Chat Facebook group.  Don’t forget to check out Our Store as well. ~Liesl

Happy Homeschooling, everyone!!  ~Liesl