Thursday 1 September 2011

A trip to Asian Civilisation Muesum...20th August 2011

Once again I stepped into the Asian Civilisation Museum. The last time I went was for the Kang Xi exhibition, one of the emperor which ruled China during the Ching dynasty. This time though, the objective is to grasp a view of the terracotta warriors, which were created and buried together with Qing Shi Huang, the first emperor to unify China.

This exhibition is quite small in my opinion, however, one still can spend a few hours there marveling at the wonderful artifacts and the rich cultural history. It's quite amazing as to what the ancient people have created and done with the limited technology and knowledge.

Thanks to my buddies' accompany, I got to physically "move" myself into the museum. At the main hall, there were some display of the ancient hardware, if I remember some were meant for display, while others were used in daily lives.

Moving on, just before we reached our warriors, there were some weird art display. After some exploration and read up, we realised that this was a art creation by a modern artist, not one of the terracotta warriors!

Anyway, after some walk, we finally reach what we came for. at first, some smaller artifacts were lined up. towards the end, the horse carriage was the start of the "larger" exhibits. After which most of the displays are on the terracotta warriors. You need to read the comments there to really know how their army were organised and how they fought a war. Armours and weapons were also displayed, with descriptions on them.

The one thing that I think the museum did well was to add in "game" whereby visitors could download the application from their Iphones and start playing. The game flow was such that one not only had to move through the exhibits, they could also learn from the game. They need to aim the camera lens at specific areas in order to proceed. It was so interactive, with 3D warriors shown fighting a war for one instance. At one stage one could also learn how to write the Qin's language stroke by stroke!

Towards the end, post Qin's dynasty artifacts were displayed (Han dynasty). It marked a nice and smooth ending to our terracotta warriors trip. (We still went to the permanent exhibitions to enrich ourselves :p)

Having to stand for hours, it was time to find a seat and fill up our stomach! Maxwell market was our destination and we ordered the famous porridge with Yu Sheng. It was marvelous, and it was not expansive at all! Maybe it was our lucky day, we were the final customers that day (porridge), though we could only get 2 bowls when there were 3 of us.