warriors: terracotta and flesh

Xian, the ancient capital of China, is the place where you see the famous terracotta warriors, created for emperor Qin Shihuang in the 3rd century B.C.E. After the well-preserved, picture-postcard-shot city walls of Xian (constructed wide enough to allow an entire army to march on top of it and with gates that can trap an opposing army), the warriors seem to be the thing to see in Xian. They are amazing, astounding. And there are so freaking many of them! There are several buildings' worth, there are officiers, horses, charioteers--and they still haven't finished digging them up! When we were visiting them, on a typical, hot, grey, humid Chinese day, we were constantly held up because, as our guide, Joe Yu, put it, "a big potato" was visiting the site that day. Squads of green-uniformed Chinese soldiers marched in formation, and after seeing the first building, we had to wait to see the second. Immaturely, I wondered why we had to see the second or third building's warriors. Were they any different? (They were not.) Apparently, he created this army to protect him in the afterlife, which probably was a good idea for him because he was very much hated when alive. But why so many warriors? Why 8,000, or whatever number it is? Why not 1,000? Or 100? Couldn't he have deployed them in a way that belied their numbers but would still scare off any vengeful ghosts that came to attack him in the afterlife?
But maybe this was a good reintroduction to me to the rest of China after Tibet because it was a reminder of the numerousness that pervades every aspect of Chinese life. They just have a lot of everything, of every kind of person. Moderate-sized cities, of 6 million or so souls, abound in China, and are so unremarkable that most Americans don't even know their names. And when I think of some of the scenes that left me dumbfounded -- the hordes of bicycles crossing intersections in Chengdu, the swarms of people at the train stations in Xian and Beijing, the endless crowds of people waiting to enter the Forbidden City, the throngs of daytrippers filling up every last shaded seat along the miles of lakefront in the enormous Summer Palace -- they all have in common the theme of overwhelming numbers of human beings. This is why, in parks around China -- around West Lake in Hangzhou or the Temple of Heaven in Beijing -- people claim their own few square feet of space in which to exercise or practice calligraphy or ballroom dance or squat and stare into space. And this also offers some insight into some of the greatest manmade wonders in China like the 1,000 mile Grand Canal, the 2,000 mile Great Wall, and the 750 acre, hand-dug lake of Beijing's Summer Palace -- all of these are astonishing feats that were accomplished with vast numbers of laborers (sometimes slave labor) that Chinese emperors were able to command.
Today, this army of people is producing the huge piles of cheap goods that we Americans are always buying; these are the entrepreneurial warriors that assailed us, continually trying to sell us things as we traveled all over China.