Terracotta Army

The Terracotta Army is a host of life-sized clay soldiers, horses and chariots buried in pits beside the tomb of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, near the city of Xi'an in Shaanxi province. Made in the late third century BCE to guard the emperor in the afterlife, the figures lay forgotten for more than two thousand years until farmers digging a well found them in 1974. They form only one part of a huge burial complex whose central tomb has never been opened.

Construction of the mausoleum started in 246 BCE, shortly after the future emperor, then about thirteen years old, became king of Qin. After he had unified the rival states under the Qin dynasty, the project grew with his power. The historian Sima Qian, writing roughly a century later, said that some 700,000 conscripted labourers eventually worked on it. He described a tomb filled with models of palaces and officials, with rivers of mercury, and a mound planted with trees and plants so that it looked like a hill. He did not mention any army of clay figures. The army was buried with him in 210 or 209 BCE.

Survey work suggests the whole necropolis spreads over roughly 98 square kilometres. The tomb mound itself has been left unexcavated, partly out of concern for preserving whatever lies inside. Tests have found unusually high levels of mercury in the soil of the mound, which has been taken as support for Sima Qian's account.

Later Chinese texts say that Xiang Yu, who fought for the throne after the first emperor's death, plundered the complex and set fire to its buildings, and one adds that a fire lasted ninety days. Burnt timbers and collapsed roofs in two of the pits are often linked to this event, though there are signs that the emperor's tomb itself may not have been robbed.

On 29 March 1974 Yang Zhifa, his five brothers and their neighbour Wang Puzhi struck fragments of figures while digging a well about 1.5 kilometres east of the tomb mound. Archaeologists, among them Zhao Kangmin, soon recognised the scale of the find. Three main pits, about 7 metres deep, held the army, and a fourth was found empty, perhaps left unfinished. Pit 1, the largest, measures 230 by 62 metres and holds more than 3,000 figures arranged in eleven corridors; pit 2 contains cavalry, infantry and chariots, and pit 3 appears to be a command post. Estimates made in 2007 put the total at over 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots drawn by 520 horses, and 150 cavalry mounts. Smaller pits have since revealed figures of officials, acrobats, strongmen and musicians, and bronze cranes and ducks, and a grave of 121 workers was excavated in 2003.

The soldiers stand between about 1.75 and 2 metres tall, with officers the tallest. Heads, torsos, arms and legs were made separately and joined, using a limited set of moulds for the basic face shapes, after which clay was added to give each face its own features. Some sculptors signed their names in the figures' armpits, and the weapons they held were real: more than 40,000 bronze items have been recovered, mostly arrowheads, and some swords bear inscriptions dating them between 245 and 228 BCE. The figures were once brightly painted with pigments including cinnabar, malachite, azurite and Han purple, together with a tree sap, probably lacquer.

Most of that colour has been lost. When the figures are exposed to the dry air of Xi'an, the lacquer can curl within seconds and flake away within minutes, taking the paint with it. A museum now covers the main pits, and UNESCO inscribed the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor as a World Heritage Site in 1987. Selections of the figures have toured widely abroad, from Melbourne in 1982 to an exhibition at the British Museum in 2007 and 2008 that made it one of the most successful years in that museum's history. The army has become one of the best-known images of ancient China.