"Look over here, everyone. This is the famous Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang. This is the burial pit of our First Emperor, located about 1.5 kilometers from the First Emperor's mausoleum. It was excavated in 1974. According to research, the height of these terracotta warriors is between 1.73 meters and 1.96 meters."
Following the tour guide's flag into Pit 1 of the Terracotta Army, everyone was shocked to see the lifelike clay figures, which looked no different from real people.
This was Xia Minmin's second time visiting the Terracotta Army. Every time she saw these terracotta warriors, she was awestruck. It was hard to imagine what era would require so many terracotta warriors to be made, and how much manpower and resources it would take.
Grandma Xia entered the venue, repeatedly chanting, "Namo Amitabha Buddha, Namo Amitabha Buddha." To the old lady, these were other people's burial goods, and seeing these things was very unlucky.
Without hesitation, Li Qing asked, "In ancient times when food and clothing were scarce, was it possible to grow this tall?"
The tour guide smiled and said, "As I just explained, these terracotta army pits are only 1.5 kilometers away from the First Emperor's tomb. Based on the distance, these terracotta warriors can be considered the emperor's personal guard. There must have been standards for selecting the personal guard, just like there are standards for recruiting soldiers now. Back then, the entire population of the Qin Dynasty was about 20 million, so it was relatively easy to select a few thousand people."
Before the tour guide could finish speaking, Grandma Xia couldn't bear to look at the terracotta warriors' bright eyes and varied expressions. "Girl, these terracotta warriors look just like real people. Could they have been cast from living people?"
The tour guide smiled helplessly; it wasn't the first time he'd heard people ask him that. However, these terracotta warriors did indeed look very lifelike.
"Of course not. If you look over there, there's a damaged terracotta warrior that hasn't been repaired yet. You can see it's hollow inside, so there are no real people inside."
Looking in the direction the tour guide was pointing, everyone saw that it was indeed hollow.
Grandma Xia patted her chest and breathed a long sigh of relief. She was finally at ease. Otherwise, she would have been scared to death. Seeing so many clay figurines almost made her faint.
Grandpa Xia looked at Grandma Xia walking ahead and muttered, "Long hair, short brains."
Grandma Xia turned around instinctively and asked, "What are you talking about?"
Grandpa Xia quickly waved his hand in denial, "You misheard, I didn't say anything."
After two cold snorts, Grandma Xia continued walking forward with the tour guide.
Several younger colleagues were amused by the two's playful banter, a situation that was commonplace and happened almost daily.
"It is said that these terracotta warriors were soldiers who went to war back then. The craftsmen sculpted them based on the descriptions of the families of elite soldiers who died on the battlefield. None of them left their names in the long river of history, but they left their own traces in this way."
Li Chunmei looked at the faces of the terracotta warriors with some surprise, "Tour guide, why do they all have single eyelids?"
The tour guide smiled and said that most of the people asking these kinds of questions were women. "There are two explanations. One is that our Terracotta Warriors don't actually have single eyelids. It's just that the preservation technology for cultural relics was not advanced after they were unearthed, which caused the color to fade, making double eyelids appear as single eyelids. The other is that people in the Qin Dynasty looked like this: wide faces, flat noses, and single eyelids. I personally tend to believe the second one."
Xia Minmin squeezed to the front and took a closer look; indeed, they all had single eyelids.
Sun Erni pointed to the shoes of the kneeling archer terracotta warrior and said, "Their shoes are quite interesting."
"Yes, these are cloth shoes with a thousand-layer sole from more than two thousand years ago. You can see that the needle holes on the forefoot and heel are more dense. Why is that?" the tour guide asked, looking at everyone.
Xia Minmin thought about the shoes she wore, and the most worn areas were usually the heels and the balls of her feet. "Because of wear and tear?!"
The tour guide looked at Xia Minmin approvingly, "Congratulations to this little girl, you got it right! There's one more thing I'd like to add: the sparse needle holes on the soles of the feet make it easier for the feet to bend and for the shoes to bounce back."
Grandma Xia squinted at the sole of the shoe and said, "This is similar to the thousand-layered cloth shoes that our family used to make. I never imagined that thousand-layered cloth shoes have a history of more than two thousand years."
Behind Xia Minmin and her group, another tour guide with a dark face led a group of tourists over. "According to the *Records of the Grand Historian*, the biography of Lü Buwei, Qin Shi Huang was the biological son of Lü Buwei and Zhao Ji. When King Zhuangxiang of Qin, Ying Yiren, gave his concubine Zhao Ji to Lü Buwei, she discovered she was pregnant, and the child born was Ying Zheng..."
Their group laughed loudly when they heard these things, all thinking that Lü Buwei was very clever for putting a green hat on the emperor of a country.
Xia Minmin, her anti-stupidity acting up, shouted, "Then why don't you talk about the records in the 'Records of the Grand Historian: Annals of Qin Shi Huang'? Both are in the Records of the Grand Historian, but there are discrepancies between the two accounts. King Zhuangxiang of Qin wasn't stupid; how could he not see such a huge green hat and still establish Ying Zheng as king? Lü Buwei was a merchant, and in ancient times, merchants had a low status; he didn't dare to confuse the royal bloodline. History is always written by the victors. Isn't it normal for them to smear Qin Shi Huang to consolidate their power?"
The stern-faced tour guide was displeased by Xia Minmin's rebuttal. In all his years as a tour guide, this was the first time he'd been contradicted like this; usually, it was the tourists who fawned over him. He sized Xia Minmin up, estimating she was under ten years old and probably hadn't even read the *Records of the Grand Historian*. He wondered where she'd heard all this hearsay, yet dared to show off in public.
He looked at Xia Minmin with a mocking expression, "Little brat, have you even read the Records of the Grand Historian? How dare you spout such nonsense here? Can you even recognize all the characters?"
After saying that, he pointed at Xia Minmin and shouted, "Whose child is this? Come and discipline her, she's so unruly."
The other tourists in his group also joined in criticizing Xia Minmin.
Xia Minmin stood up straight and stared blankly at the dark-faced tour guide, without any fear. Why should she be afraid of being blamed for something she hadn't said wrong?
The stern-faced tour guide spoke loudly, causing Xia Jianguo and his wife, Li Zhonghua and his wife, who were walking in front, as well as the tour guide himself, to turn around and look.
Xia Minmin's tour guide squeezed through the crowd from the front, "It's you again! I see you talking nonsense with the tourists every day. Is this child wrong? You don't know the professional knowledge yourself, yet you blame a child. This child knows more than you do."
When the stern-faced tour guide saw an old acquaintance, he immediately fell silent. He didn't know which deity he had offended. Every time he told a bit of unofficial history that people liked to hear, he would be caught by this deity. If you don't tell and I don't tell, how will those uneducated tourists know?
Xia Minmin felt that these unofficial histories were nothing but ancient gossip, mostly fabricated rumors. The claim that the great Ming Dynasty Confucian scholar Zhu Xi had a child with his daughter-in-law while advocating "preserving heavenly principles and eliminating human desires" was, in fact, slander and framing by his political enemies after their political defeat.
Xia Minmin's tour guide ignored the stern-faced guide and continued leading the group forward.
Li Chunmei put her arm around her daughter's shoulder and said, "You should be careful about how you talk next time. If you're alone, don't talk to others about these things. Even if you're right, they might hurt you out of anger."
Li Chunmei is right. People like to hear gossip, and serious, formal history is hard to attract tourists.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com