Yang Zhifa at his new job

The second stop on the tour was about an hour and half outside of Xi'an proper to the what is undoubtedly the most well-known attraction of the area and reputed as the Eighth Wonder of the World: The Terra-Cotta Warriors of the Tomb of Qin.

After several "fascinating" government mandated stops at what essentially amounted to three different gift shops, the first point of interest before the actual pits with the warriors in them was an elderly man by the name of Yang Zhifa who in 1974 , two-thousand years after the sealing of the pits, was part of a well digging project and after being lowered in to the ground to send up more buckets of dirt, found an intact terra-cotta warrior and loaded into his bucket so it could be hoisted up and seen in the light. As the popular story - or at least the one told by our guide - goes the other members of the project were so taken aback by the discovery that they fled the scene with the head of the figure back to the town to show the chairman, who instructed them to first return to pit and fetch Yang who had been left in the tomb he had accidentally discovered. At any rate, he now has a new job that doesn't involve digging wells in the scorching Xi'an sun, but signing copies of the book he helped compile on the warriors and apparently being compensated quite well. He drives an Audi 6.

Looking over the contents of Pit 1

The sheer quantity of the warriors, spanning over 4 large pits, is breathtaking, but not nearly as impressive as the level of detail and uniqueness of each life-sized figure. Every face is different. These faces are thought to actually be the faces of the artisans to who crafted them, motivated to immortalize their visages by the knowledge that they would most likely not survive the process. At the time of Emperor Qin's actual death, 3,000 concubines were buried with him along with the craftsman that completed the inner part of his tomb. In the end, man of these latter craftsmen whose charge it was to complete the tomb did die, but not in exactly the way they foresaw.

Read More | Many More Pictures of Terra-Cotta Warriors

After the death of Qin, his successor was unable to maintain the peace, and his numerous enemies banded together in a Rebellion Army which marched on Xi'an to overthrow the emperor's successors. In an attempt to combat this undoing, the Qin government enlisted the help of the workers - who were slaves captured from conquered neighboring territories in the wars that had for the first time united China - to combat the Rebellion Army in exchange for not killing them when their work was completed. Having no love for the dynasty that had enslaved them and executed their artisan comrades before them, most instead joined the Rebellion Army and contributed to the imminent demise of the Qin Dynasty in a bloody coup during which many of the terra-cotta warriors, particularly in the first and third pit, were razed by the invading armies torches and almost all of their weapons looted for actual combat.