Michelle Obama visits China's Terra Cotta Army, jumps rope with young women
(Petar Kujundzic/ Reuters ) - First lady Michelle Obama visits the Museum of Qin Terra Cotta Warriors and Horses, in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, March 24, 2014.
XI'AN, China — Michelle Obama stopped down for five-hours for a purely touristic visit, giving Obama and her family a view of China's ancient history. The city is the terminus of the legendary Silk Road, a series of trade routes that linked the East and West throughout history, and is also home of the Terra Cotta Army.
The massive clay sculptures were discovered in the spring of 1974 in the eastern suburbs of the city by farmers digging a well near the grave of China's first emperor, Qinshihuang.
Gallery
Obama was led through the archeological site by Cao Wei, director of the site's museum.
She went down into several pits, the largest of which contains 6,000 life sized warriors arranged along brick-paved corridors in battle formation.
Cao led Obama, her daughters and mother onto a restoration platform in pit number one, where archeologists put together fragments of the sculptures like jigsaw puzzles. The first lady and her family lingered in the pit, asking questions and listening as Cao explained through an interpreter that the soldiers have different poses. Their facial expressions are also varied.
The dusty orange figures — ranging from 6 foot to 6 foot 5 inches — were about Obama's height. Few of the site's 5 million annual visitors get to look into their steely faces as the first lady did.
Obama and her family also visited the 600-year-old Xi'an city wall, an imposing rectangular structure that spans 9 miles and reaches 40 feet high, is the oldest and most well preserved defensive city wall in the country.
A ceremony there included men dressed in the sculptural military uniforms of Tang Dynasty warriors and folk dancers in colorful costumes. A group of children from a local high school greeted the first lady. She smiled and the family clapped as they performed tricks, including shuttlecock kicking. Obama took a turn, winning applause.
But the real question was — would she be able to resist joining a group of the teens who were doing double dutch?
The sun was shining, a light breeze filled the air. A young woman invited Michelle Obama to jump rope and, of course, she said yes. Changing from her kitten heels into flats, she skipped a green jump rope for several beats.
When the young women, who were from Northwest Polytechnic University affiliated high school, asked Obama to join in the double dutch, she demurred.
"I've already done my jumping and I'm not going to break a leg," she said.
Xi'an is located in the home province of Xi Jinping, China's president. Xi's father was instrumental in the restoration and preservation of the city wall.
On Sunday, Obama walked along a section of the Great Wall outside of Beijing. In a video posted on the White House website, she called it "one of the great wonders on the planet."
Obama will spend her last two days in China in Chengdu, where she will meet with high school students and, along with her mother and daughters, will visit a research base home to giant pandas.
Her final stop before returning to Washington is lunch at a Tibetan restaurant in Chengdu to engage with that community, which complains of authoritarian crackdowns on their political leaders and widespread discriminatory practices by the Chinese government. The subject of Tibet is politically sensitive, and a senior White House official traveling with the first lady said Michelle Obama wanted to meet with them because they are an important minority group
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