Terracotta Army
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The paint on the figures is so fragile that, once exposed to Xi'an's dry air, its lacquer base can curl within seconds and flake off in minutes.
- Besides soldiers, the pits include about 130 chariots with 520 horses and some 150 cavalry horses.
- Each workshop had to stamp its name on its figures, an early form of quality control that lets archaeologists trace who made what.
- The army was not only soldiers: digs have also revealed acrobats, strongmen, musicians, officials and bronze cranes and ducks set in an underground park.
- Legs were built much like terracotta drainage pipes, and heads, arms and torsos were made separately before assembly.
- More than 40,000 bronze weapons have been recovered, and some swords carry inscriptions dating them to between 245 and 228 BCE.
- Chromium traces on the bronzes were long hailed as an ancient anti-rust coating, but a 2019 study showed it was contamination from nearby lacquer.
- High mercury levels in the soil of the burial mound lend support to the ancient historian Sima Qian's account of rivers modelled in mercury.
- A fourth pit was found completely empty, probably abandoned unfinished by its builders.
- Pit 1 alone measures about 230 by 62 metres, divided into eleven parallel corridors.
Why it is worth it
The farmer who found the Terracotta Army wasn't looking for it. In March 1974, Yang Zhifa, his five brothers and a neighbor were digging a well during a drought, hoping only for water, when at about three metres down they hit a layer of charcoal and reddened soil, and past four metres one of them pulled up a life-sized pottery head. The villagers' first guess was that they'd disturbed some kind of "Pottery God" idol — it was only after bronze arrowheads and crossbow parts turned up nearby that anyone suspected they'd found something closer to an army.
What makes the find keep giving up new detail is that no two soldiers are alike. Heads were sculpted separately from the mass-produced bodies, which let craftsmen vary hairstyle, facial features, ear shape and expression figure by figure across a workforce of thousands — more than 8,000 figures are believed to exist in total, of which just over 2,000 have been excavated from three pits so far, leaving an estimated 6,000 still underground.
All of it was built for one purpose: to accompany the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, into the afterlife. Construction began around 246 BCE, right after he took the throne as king of Qin, and continued past his death in 210 BCE — and the army is only the excavated fraction of a mausoleum complex that is, by most accounts, still largely unopened, on the theory that archaeologists don't yet have a reliable way to preserve what's inside once it's exposed to air.
Getting there
6 km from Lintong. Xi'an Xianyang International Airport (XIY) is about 47 km away.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Terracotta Army is a collection of terracotta sculptures depicting the armies of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China. It is a form of funerary art buried with the emperor in 210–209 BCE in his mausoleum with the purpose of protecting him in his afterlife.
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