Terracotta Army

The Terracotta Army is a collection of terracotta sculptures depicting the armies of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, buried in his mausoleum to protect him in his afterlife. The figures are life-size and were found in the tomb of the first Qin emperor near Xi'an in Shaanxi province, China. The discovery of the immense army created to serve the emperor in the afterlife is regarded as one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century.

The Qin Dynasty of 221–206 BCE was the first dynasty of Imperial China, one that united the separate states following the Warring States Period. It is also the shortest in the history of Imperial China, lasting only 15 years. In ten years Ying Zheng annexed the six rival states and united the realm, establishing the mighty Qin dynasty. During his reign the First Emperor introduced the standardization of currency, writing and measurements.

Work on the Emperor's mausoleum began in 246 BCE, soon after Emperor Qin succeeded his father as King of Qin at age 13, and the project eventually involved 700,000 conscripted workers. The historian Sima Qian records that workers from every province of the empire toiled unceasingly until the death of the Emperor in 210 in order to construct a subterranean city within a gigantic mound. Begun in 246 BCE, the grave mound survives to a height of 51.3 meters within a rectangular, double-walled enclosure oriented north-south. The mausoleum took 37 years and around 720,000 labors to build, standing as the grandest with the richest burial objects among all the imperial tombs throughout Chinese history.

Shi Huangdi ordered artisans to make crossbows triggered by mechanisms, so that anyone passing before them would be shot immediately. The account offered by Wu Hung holds that each statue was produced by making the head, hands, and torso separately and then assembling them, with the head and hands fashioned with molds and the torso modeled by hand.

Archaeologists subsequently unearthed thousands of figures, among them infantrymen, officers, kneeling archers and clay chariots with horses. The pits are about seven meters deep; pit no. 1 is the largest, measuring about 210 by 60 meters with 11 parallel corridors containing more than 3,000 terracotta figures. Thanks to protective chrome plating — a technique first used in Germany in 1937 and in the United States in 1950 — the weapons remained extremely well preserved after more than 2,000 years.

The tomb containing the terra-cotta army was found in March 1974, when farmers drilling a well discovered a subterranean chamber. While digging that well, the farmer Yang Zhifa's spade struck something unexpected in the soil — a man's head that on closer inspection proved to be clay rather than bone. Zhao Kangmin began the laborious task of putting the fragments back together, some of them as small as a fingernail.

Four pits were unearthed, three of which contained thousands of life-size figures, most in fragments, while the fourth pit was empty, suggesting the burial site was left unfinished. Three nearby chambers, holding more than 1,300 ceramic figures, 68 members of what probably represents an elite command unit, and one that is empty, were also discovered in the 1970s. Researchers discovered the complex had been robbed, probably sometime soon after the emperor's death, and many of the terracotta figures were vandalized.

The mausoleum complex lies 35 kilometers northeast of Xi'an. The complex is regarded as the biggest funerary complex in the world, extending more than 25 square miles and attracting millions of visitors every year.

The mausoleum complex of the First Emperor extends across 56.25 square kilometers and encompasses over 600 sites, among them nearly 200 accompanying pits that hold thousands of life-size terracotta soldiers, horses and bronze chariots, alongside burial tombs and architectural remains. The terracotta figures are life-sized, typically ranging from 1.75 metres to about 2 metres, with officers typically taller.

Four pits form the excavated core of the complex. Pit 1, the largest, measures 230 m (750 ft) long and 62 m (203 ft) wide, and with an estimated 6,000 warriors it is assumed to represent the main part of the army, reflecting the importance of infantry.

The buried army faces east, poised for battle about three-quarters of a mile from the outer wall of the tomb proper, guarding it from Qin Shi Huang's chief former adversaries. The army is estimated at some 8,000 soldiers and horses, arranged in battle formation with no two figures alike. Some counts add 130 chariots with 520 horses and 150 cavalry horses.

Separate groups of artisans, each headed by a master, assembled the warriors one by one rather than producing them all in one workshop.

The painstaking restoration revealed they were created using molds and an early assembly-line-type construction. Only a limited number of molds were used for every part of the body: two types for the feet, three for shoes, eight types of torsos, two types of hands, and eight types for faces. After the figures were modeled, they were fired in a kiln and then painted with lacquer colored with strong pigments, like bright malachite, cinnabar, and azurite, alongside Han purple.

Archaeologists have found some 40,000 bronze weapons in the pits, including battle axes, crossbows, arrowheads and spears. Two bronze chariots were also found, one of them unearthed in 1980.

Excavations begun in 1974 brought to light over 7,000 lifesize terracotta figures from the vast army guarding the tomb of Qin Shihuang. A three-year excavation in Pit 1 yielded more than a hundred soldiers, some still adorned with painted features including black hair, pink faces and black or brown eyes. Once exposed, the lacquer underneath the warriors' paint begins to curl after 15 seconds and flakes off in just four minutes; Chinese researchers worked with experts from the Bavarian State Conservation Office in Germany to develop a preservative known as PEG to help save the warriors' colors. Even 40 years after its discovery less than 1 percent of Emperor Qin's tomb has been excavated.

In 1987 the site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Terracotta Warriors stand among the most recognizable images of Chinese heritage worldwide, alongside the Great Wall of China and the Forbidden City. The Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum opened to the public on October 1 2010 and covers an area of 226 hectares.

The twenty figures sent to the British Museum consisted of a dozen warriors plus musicians, acrobats, court officials and their five horses.

• 246 BCE
  Tomb construction ordered
  Court records show the future emperor took the throne at the age of 13 and ordered construction of his tomb to begin almost immediately.^{6China's Terracotta Warriors: The First Emperor's Legacy · Asian Art Museum, San Francisco ↗}
• 221 BCE
  Unification and start of the Army Pits
  The commonly accepted date for the start of construction of the Army Pits and the production of the terracotta warriors is around this year, when the unification of the Qin Empire was completed.^{14The Terracotta Warriors · Smarthistory ↗}
• 221–210 BCE
  Reign of Shihuangdi
  Shihuangdi was emperor of the Qin dynasty and the creator of the first unified Chinese empire.^{19Qin Shi Huang | Biography, Accomplishments, Family · Encyclopaedia Britannica ↗}