Xi'an 1: Terra cotta warriors

This is a lesson in how small aches can block out major experiences.

We went to the site where thousands of years ago a Chinese emperor buried 8000 terra cotta replicas of his best warriors to guard him in the afterlife. This was an amazing feat, not least because the custom until then was for the emperor to bury the actual warriors with their horses and weapons, sometimes alive.

Knowledge of this cultural and artistic treasure was lost in the intervening millennia until 1974, when a farmer, digging a well, found a lot of pottery shards. As it turned out, he had dug into one corner of an acres-big archaeological site. If he had dug 10 feet north, he would have found nothing. Instead, the state now pays him a generous salary to sit in the Terra Cotta Warriors museum and sign guide books for tourists.

The site is superbly set up to allow tourists to look on at the three active pits as more shards are carefully extracted and reassembled into lifesized replicas of individual warriors who lived before the time of Christ. There's a museum and a wrap-around movie offering background information and a relatively civilized number of souvenir stands staffed by relatively restrained vendors. And because our guide Lynn did translations for the museum, we got to drive our bus right up next to the museum instead of having to hike half a mile from the public parking area.

But my feet hurt from the hikes in Beijing. My knees were stiff. I limped around the first pit, and then I got disconnected from our group. I sat in the public square and people-watched for a while, bought a few terra cotta warriors refrigerator magnets, tried with limited success to use the non-Western toilet facilities, then crept back to the bus and just waited for it to be over.

Most of the people on the tour rate the warriors as a high point. I envy their experience.