Today we started out going to the Wild Goose Pagoda. This is a Buddhist Temple that is dedicated to the man that brought Buddhism to China. He single handily walked to India in order to bring back Buddhism and translate it from Sanskrit to Chinese. The Wild Goose Pagoda is named after a fictional Child's folk tale on his voyage to India. It is told that he was lost in the desert and starving when a Wild Goose led him to water and food, thus saving him and allowing him to finish his journey. When he returned the Emperor was so impressed with Buddhism he adopted the religion to China. After we went to the Banpu Museum that is built over an archeological dig of a Neolithic society called the Banpus.

We then went to the famous Terra Cotta Soldiers Museum. During the 1970's a peasant farmer was digging a well and found evidence of the terra cotta warriors that had been buried during the first empire in China. The Emperor had built a tomb for himself and buried thousands of life sized soldiers to protect his tomb from attracts by tomb robbers and evil spirits. When his dynasty was being taken over some of the soldiers remembered the weapons buried and raided the tombs and pilfered them. The tombs were forgotten about until the 1974 when the farmer found them. We were able to meet that farmer, he was at the museum signing autographs. Jeff even was given a real farmer rolled cigarette from him. For dinner that night we experienced Xian's famous dumplings filled with many different fillings. After dinner we went to the Tang Dynasty musical performance. The dancers were beautiful and very entertaining.