Terracotta Army

The Terracotta Army belongs to the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China. Work on the mausoleum began in 246 BCE, soon after the future emperor, then aged 13, succeeded his father as King of Qin, and according to the historian Sima Qian the project eventually involved 700,000 conscripted workers. The geographer Li Daoyuan, writing six centuries after the emperor’s death in the Shui Jing Zhu, recorded that Mount Li was chosen for its auspicious geology, famed for its jade and gold. The emperor is also well documented as a builder of monumental statues in human form, such as the Twelve Metal Colossi, now lost.

Sima Qian, writing in the Records of the Grand Historian a century after the mausoleum was completed, described the emperor’s burial with palaces, towers, officials and valuable objects, a hundred rivers simulated in mercury and a ceiling decorated with the heavenly bodies; his text makes no mention of the terracotta army. High levels of mercury found in the soil of the tomb mound have since given credence to his account. Before this army only rare and very small terracotta warrior figurines are known, from the end of the Zhou dynasty in the 4th–3rd century BCE, such as the Taerpo horserider, so its humanistic style may have appeared dramatically new to its contemporaries.

The army is part of a much larger necropolis of about 98 square kilometres, built as a microcosm of the emperor’s palace around his pyramidal tomb mound at the foot of Mount Li, with offices, halls, stables and an imperial park. Four main pits about 7 m deep lie some 1,500 m east of the mound, and the soldiers in them were laid out as if to protect the tomb from the east, where the emperor’s conquered states lay. Pit 1, 230 m long and 62 m wide, holds the main army of more than 3,000 figures in eleven parallel corridors under a wooden ceiling; Pit 2 has cavalry, infantry and war chariots and is thought to represent a military guard; Pit 3 is the command post; Pit 4 is empty, perhaps left unfinished.

The figures are life-sized, typically 1.75 to about 2 metres tall, and vary in height, uniform and hairstyle according to rank, the generals being the tallest. They include armoured and unarmoured infantry, cavalrymen, chariot drivers, kneeling crossbowmen and standing archers, and officers, with terracotta horses among them, and their faces appear different for each figure. Other pits hold bronze carriages, figures of acrobats, strongmen and officials, stone armour suits, burials of horses and rare animals, and bronze cranes and ducks set in an underground park.

The figures were made in workshops by government labourers and local craftsmen using local materials. Heads, arms, legs and torsos were created separately and joined by luting, and the faces were formed in moulds, at least ten of which may have been used, before clay was added to give each figure its own features; the legs were probably made much as terracotta drainage pipes were. The process is therefore classed as assembly-line production. Under tight imperial control each workshop had to inscribe its name on what it made, and the sculptors signed their names in the figures’ armpits. The finished figures were placed in the pits in precise military formation according to rank and duty.

They were originally painted with pigments including cinnabar, malachite, azurite, charcoal and Chinese purple over a coloured lacquer finish, with the faces in pink. Most held real weapons, and more than 40,000 bronze items have been recovered, mostly arrowheads in bundles of 100, whose chemistry suggests self-sufficient workshops working in a cellular system of production. Some swords carry inscriptions dating their manufacture to between 245 and 228 BCE. A grave pit excavated in 2003 held 121 skeletons attributed to the site’s workers, mostly aged 15 to 40; DNA analysis of 19 of them showed a diverse range of ethnicities, with a particular concentration from southern China.

Since their discovery the figures have been noted for their realism and individuality, and where that style came from has divided scholars. In 1986 the art historian German Hafner first suggested a Hellenistic link, and Duan Qingbo, the site’s chief archaeologist from 1998 to 2006, saw a close parallel only in the later Khalchayan statuary of Central Asia. Li Xiuzhen of the Mausoleum Site Museum was quoted as saying the army was inspired by Greek sculpture, but later said the BBC had taken her words out of context: the warriors may be inspired by Western culture, she said, but were uniquely made by the Chinese. Zhang Weixing, the museum’s chief archaeologist, found “no substantial evidence at all” for such a link; Johanna Hanink and Felipe Rojas Silva argued that the speculation rests on old Eurocentric ideas; and Darryl Wilkinson, comparing the Moche culture of Peru, argued that “the Greeks did not invent naturalism”.

Scientific study has added other readings. In 2007 researchers at Stanford University reported that the Chinese purple pigment drew on knowledge gained by Taoist alchemists trying to make jade, and microscope marks give evidence of the earliest industrial use of lathes for polishing. Morphological studies in 2021 found a strong resemblance between the figures and the region’s present inhabitants, leading some scholars to suggest they were modelled on actual soldiers.

Later historical accounts say that the mausoleum was looted by Xiang Yu, a contender for the throne after the first emperor’s death, though there are indications that the tomb itself may not have been plundered. Fire damage on figures in Pits 1 and 2, burnt ceiling rafters and the missing weapons have been taken as evidence of that looting and of a fire that brought the roof down and crushed the figures; those on display have been restored from the fragments. Over two millennia up to 5 metres of soil built up over the site. For centuries there were occasional reports of terracotta fragments, and graves of the 18th and 19th centuries show diggers striking pieces and discarding them as worthless.

On 29 March 1974 the farmers Yang Zhifa, his five brothers and their neighbour Wang Puzhi, digging a well about 1.5 km east of the tomb mound, struck the figures, and archaeologists including Zhao Kangmin went on to reveal the largest pottery figurine group ever found. A museum complex now covers the area. Exposure has its costs: in Xi’an’s dry climate much of the colour flaked off within minutes of the mud being removed, and the emperor’s tomb, a sealed space about 100 by 75 metres, remains unopened. Research in 2019 indicated that the burial soil, rather than a chromium coating as once believed, most likely preserved the bronze weapons.

The army left a legacy in the tombs of later rulers. Funeral terracotta armies are known from later dynasties, though in a less stern and militaristic style and with much smaller statuettes, such as the Western Han Yangjiawan terracotta army of 195 BCE and the Yangling terracotta army of 141 BCE. Scholars see the human-sized monumental style of the first emperor as a relatively short-lived phase that did not reappear until monumental Buddhist sculpture began in China in the 4th–6th centuries CE.

In modern times the figures have become one of the most widely exhibited groups of ancient objects. The first exhibition outside China was held at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in 1982. At the British Museum, “The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army” ran from 2007 to 2008, brought the most visitors since the Tutankhamun exhibition of 1972, and sold 400,000 advance tickets so fast that the museum extended its opening hours until midnight. Exhibitions have since gone to Barcelona, Madrid, Bogotá, Santiago de Chile, North America, Sweden, New South Wales, Montreal, New York, Liverpool, Perth and Budapest, and the army has been described as the only set of historic artefacts besides the remains of the Titanic that can draw a crowd by its name alone.