Part of a series of posts detailing my adventures in China exactly one year ago (give or take a day!).

Extract from my journal:
Monday 5th March 2007

I’m almost too tired to write this journal, but I know how quickly events fade from my mind if I leave it, and so I write. I had to spend quite a bit of time online today dealing with my election campaign [for the Students’ Union elections, the campaigning for which started almost immediately after I arrived back in Cardiff!] – it’s a bit of a pain having to deal with them while out here.

More excitingly, we went to see the Terracotta Warriors. The scale of the Qin tomb and all the work that went into it is staggering. The Emperor ordered the start of his massive tomb complex while he was still a teenager, and was obsessed with cheating death, seeking to find the Elixir of Life, only to die from mercury poisoning from one attempt to find the elixir – oh, the irony. Apparently, at the time the tombs were built it was believed that in making a sculpture of someone, you captured their soul, and the point of the warriors was to give the Qin Emperor an army to take with him into the afterlife. It makes you wonder who or what he was expecting to meet there!

Unfortunately, they’ve built Milton bloody Keynes around the pits the warriors were discovered in – nasty modern complexes of shops and touristy venues. But our guide was an interesting young man who told us a bit about his own life and what it’s like to go to university in China – apparently they weren’t allowed girlfriends or boyfriends, in case they prove a distraction from their studies!

We also went to the Wild Goose Pagoda, which has a good view of Xi’an from the top, then back to the hotel and out to dinner (dodging the traffic to get there, as usual!), which included very large prawns. I’m enjoying getting to know the rest of the group better as the trip continues.

I need to get on with packing for Suizhou, our next destination, so I can get to bed!