A well in a field near Xi’an
The discovery came by chance. In March 1974 farmers sinking a well in their fields, about 35 km north-east of Xi’an, hit a subterranean chamber and pieces of baked clay. Archaeologists soon understood what they were looking at: a buried army of life-size figures of soldiers and horses, laid out in ranks a little over a kilometre from the outer wall of the tomb of China’s first emperor.
Excavation has gone on ever since, under huge roofs built over the pits, which turned the dig itself into a museum. Thousands of figures are still in the ground. That is why every number about the army is an estimate, and why the count keeps growing.
Who it was made for
Qin Shi Huang was born around 259 BCE and became king of Qin, a state in north-west China, at the age of 13, in 246 BCE. Work on his tomb began the same year. By 221 BCE he had conquered the last of the six rival states, and for the first time China was united under one ruler. He took the title Qin Shi Huang, “First Sovereign Emperor”, and imposed a single system of writing, money, weights and measures across the empire.
He died in 210 BCE during a tour of inspection, and his dynasty collapsed less than four years later. His funerary complex is the largest tomb in Chinese history. The historian Sima Qian, writing about a century later, says that workers from every province toiled without pause until the emperor’s death to build an underground city inside a gigantic mound.
The complex at the foot of Mount Li was laid out like the emperor’s capital, Xianyang, with walls inside walls. Nearly 200 pits surround the mound, together with tombs and the remains of buildings, over 600 sites in all. The army in the pits faces east, towards the direction from which the emperor’s chief enemies had come.
What the pits hold
The largest pit, Pit 1, holds the main army, drawn up in a formation that follows the military rules of the time: a vanguard of bowmen and crossbowmen, archers along the outer files, groups of infantry and chariots, and an armoured rear guard. Its chariots were of wood and have disintegrated, but the bronze fittings and the weapons survive.
Three more pits were found in the 1970s. One holds more than 1,300 figures, a smaller force of foot soldiers, chariots and cavalry; another holds 68 figures, probably an elite command unit; the fourth is empty. Above many of the broken figures lie the remains of timber roofs, which may have collapsed after a fire shortly after the emperor’s death.
No two faces alike
Terracotta means “baked earth” in Italian: clay shaped and then fired. The soldiers were not made in one piece. Their bodies were assembled from separately fired sections, a technique close to modern mass production, yet each was given an individually detailed face. Officers, archers, infantrymen and horses differ in uniform and pose, down to details such as the horses’ halters.
The army was once brightly painted
Today the soldiers are the colour of clay, but they were once painted in strong mineral colours over a layer of lacquer. The problem is what happens when they leave the ground. After more than two thousand years in damp earth, the lacquer shrinks as soon as it dries, and in a dry atmosphere it cracks, curls and flakes off within a few minutes, taking the paint with it.
Conservators in Xi’an, with German partners among others, have worked for years on ways to hold the colour in place, such as keeping newly excavated fragments damp and wrapped.
Real weapons, and a myth about them
The soldiers carried real arms: bows and arrows, crossbows, spears, lances, halberds and swords. Many of the bronze blades came out of the ground still shiny and sharp, and for years a story went round that Qin metalworkers had protected them with a chromium coating, an advanced anti-rust treatment far ahead of its time.
Is it true? No. In 2019 a team led by the archaeologist Marcos Martinón-Torres published a study showing that the chromium came from the lacquer on the weapons’ wooden handles and scabbards, not from any coating. The good condition of the bronze is better explained by the soil around them, mildly alkaline and fine-grained, and by the high tin content of the metal.
The tomb nobody has opened
The emperor’s burial mound still rises 51.3 metres above the plain, about as high as a seventeen-storey building. Sima Qian describes a burial chamber with the rivers of China, the Yellow River and the Yangtze, imitated in flowing mercury, and crossbows set to shoot at intruders. No one knows how much of this is true, because the chamber has never been excavated.
Science has added a clue. Soil surveys have measured mercury around the mound, and in 2020 a team using laser measurements reported mercury in the air above it, possibly escaping through cracks in the tomb. That supports the old account without proving it. Xi’an itself, ancient Chang’an, later became the eastern end of the Silk Roads, the routes along which Buddhist art would reach China.
Where to see it
The pits and the burial mound are at Lintong, about 35 km north-east of Xi’an, and are managed by the Qinshihuang Mausoleum Museum, which covers the pits under its halls.
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor” (441).
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “terra-cotta army” and “Qin Shi Huang”.
- M. Martinón-Torres et al., “Surface chromium on Terracotta Army bronze weapons is neither an ancient anti-rust treatment nor the reason for their good preservation”, Scientific Reports 9 (2019), 5289; UCL news release, 4 April 2019.
- Shaanxi Provincial Government, “Meet the underground army of the Qin Dynasty” (2023); Technical University of Munich, press release on the German-Chinese conservation project (2015).
- Zhao et al., “Mercury as a Geophysical Tracer Gas”, Scientific Reports (2020).
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