47 Fun Facts About Terracotta Army

The Terracotta Army was buried to protect which ruler in the afterlife?

Qin Shi Huang, born Ying Zheng, became king at 13, conquered six rival kingdoms and in 221 BCE gave himself a new title, First Emperor.

What were farmers doing when they found the Terracotta Army?

Digging a well for their orchard, the villagers brought up pieces of a clay figure; within five years a museum had opened over the spot.

Outside which Chinese city was the Terracotta Army found?

Xi'an grew up beside the site of Xianyang, where the First Emperor held court, which is why his tomb and its army lie only about 35 km from the modern city.

Roughly how many clay soldiers is the Terracotta Army estimated to hold?

8,000 is the usual estimate for the three pits, yet only about 2,000 have been dug out and pieced together; the rest are still buried.

What determines how tall each Terracotta Army figure stands?

Their military rank was shown through size, a way of making status visible at a glance: generals are the tallest figures, officers the next, and ordinary soldiers the shortest.

Which school of thought, the great rival of Confucianism, shaped the First Emperor's harsh rule?

Legalism held that strict laws and heavy punishments, not family-style virtue, keep a state in order; Confucian historians repaid him by casting him as a villain for centuries.

Which historian described the First Emperor's tomb about a century after it was finished?

Sima Qian filled the tomb with palaces and treasures in his Records of the Grand Historian, yet he never once mentions the clay army buried beside it.

The First Emperor expected his line to rule for countless generations; roughly how long did his dynasty outlast him?

About four years: a scheming counsellor put a weak son on the throne, revolts spread, and by 206 BCE the whole imperial clan had been wiped out.

What did an ancient account say flowed through the First Emperor's tomb in imitation rivers?

Mercury was said to be pumped through channels shaped like the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, and soil tests on the burial mound have since found unusually high levels of it.

Which troops stand three rows deep at the very front of Pit 1, the Terracotta Army's largest pit?

Archers formed a fast, lightly dressed vanguard with long-range weapons, ahead of the armoured infantry and chariots: the order of battle that military writers of the age advised.

The First Emperor's walled burial complex was laid out to mirror what?

His capital city, Xianyang, with its palace inside two rings of walls, was the model: the emperor meant to take his whole court and government with him.

Why has the First Emperor's own burial chamber never been opened?

Its contents might perish: silk, paper or painted surfaces sealed for 2,000 years may not survive exposure, and archaeologists have no technique yet to protect them.

How quickly can the painted surface of a freshly unearthed terracotta warrior start to curl in dry air?

Fifteen seconds is all it takes for the coating under the paint to start curling, and the colours can flake off within four minutes, so conservators now spray finds the moment they surface.

Which direction does the Terracotta Army face, toward the rival states its emperor had conquered?

East is where the six conquered kingdoms lay; one reading is that the emperor still feared his old enemies more than the nomads beyond the northern frontier.

According to an ancient account, what was rigged inside the First Emperor's tomb to shoot intruders?

Crossbows armed many of his real soldiers, and the account has them primed to fire at anyone who broke in; with the chamber still sealed, nobody knows whether they are there.

Why have the battle chariots in the Terracotta Army's pits vanished while their clay horses survive?

They were made of wood, which rotted away over two thousand years, so teams of four clay horses now stand harnessed to empty space.

What does Pit 3 represent?

Pit 2 holds cavalry, infantry and war chariots as a military guard.

What is unusual about the Terracotta Army's Pit 4?

It is empty, perhaps left unfinished: the emperor died in 210 BCE and rebellion soon swept his dynasty away, so the builders may simply have stopped.

What is thought to have crushed so many Terracotta Army figures?

The collapse of the burnt wooden roof followed a raid: intruders stripped the pits of real weapons, fire weakened the timbers, and every warrior on show today has been pieced back together.

How do the Terracotta Army's soldiers compare in size with real men?

About the same height as living soldiers, the figures broke with tradition: earlier Chinese tomb statues were figurines only about 20 cm tall.

What gave each terracotta warrior's face its basic shape?

A mould gave the basic face; workers then added clay and reworked the features and hair by hand so that no two soldiers match.

What was pieced together from hundreds of small stone plates for a pit near the First Emperor's tomb?

Suits of armour, with helmets to match, were wired together plate by plate and stored in an armoury pit beside the tomb: copies in stone of the armour that real soldiers wore.

Why was each terracotta warrior stamped with its foreman's name?

So flaws could be traced: every workshop had to mark what it made, a quality-control rule that now lets historians tell which workshops supplied which figures.

What colour were the Terracotta Army's faces originally painted?

Pink skin was only the start: the whole army was once painted in bold reds and greens, so the bare clay colour that visitors see today is an accident of time.

What does the Italian word 'terracotta' literally mean?

Baked earth describes the warriors exactly, though nobody was meant to see them as clay: each was fired in a kiln and then painted from head to foot in lifelike colours.

What makes the purple pigment found on some terracotta warriors remarkable for its time?

It was made artificially: a barium copper silicate now called Han purple, which Taoist alchemists may have hit on through their glassmaking.

How were the Terracotta Army's figures constructed?

Body parts made separately and luted together let workshops turn out soldiers by the thousand from a few standard pieces; heads, hands and ears were then finished one by one.

Alongside weights, measures and cart axles, what else did the First Emperor standardise across China?

The written script was made uniform so that administrators who spoke mutually unintelligible dialects could all read the same orders.

Which bronze animals were found in a pit by the First Emperor's tomb, arranged as if in a park?

Water birds in bronze, among them cranes and swans, lined the bank of an artificial waterway: a pleasure park rebuilt underground so the emperor could enjoy it after death.

Some scholars have suggested the Terracotta Army's realism was inspired by sculpture from which ancient civilisation?

Ancient Greece's statues had reached Central Asia in the century after Alexander the Great, and in 2016 researchers suggested a Greek sculptor may even have trained local workers, an idea that remains unproven.

According to an ancient account, who was sealed inside the First Emperor's tomb to protect its secrets?

The craftsmen who built it knew where the treasures and traps lay, so the story has the inner passage blocked and the outer gate dropped behind them; none escaped.

Most of the bronze weapons found in the Terracotta Army's pits are which item?

Arrowheads, some 40,000 of them, came in bundles of 100 because each bundle was one soldier's quiverful: live ammunition buried with men of clay.

Chemical analysis of the Terracotta Army's bronze weapons pointed to workshops organised like which modern company's?

Toyota-style cells, each small workshop finishing whole batches by itself, fit the chemistry better than one long assembly line: metal within a batch matched, and differed from the next batch.

What did 2019 research conclude about chromium on the army's weapons?

It was contamination from nearby lacquer, not an ancient rust-proofing: the weapons more likely owe their shine to the fine, slightly alkaline soil they lay in.

Which infamous act is the First Emperor said to have ordered in 213 BCE?

The burning of books spared works on farming, medicine and divination, his own state's records and the imperial library; the aim was to stop scholars using the past to criticise the present.

The earthen mound over the First Emperor's tomb was built in what shape?

A pyramid of earth with a flattened top, it was planted with trees so that it would pass for a natural hill, and a wooded hill is what visitors see today.

Which 2002 Zhang Yimou film starring Jet Li imagines assassins plotting to kill the future First Emperor?

Hero casts Jet Li as a nameless swordsman allowed within ten paces of the king; he finally chooses not to strike, persuaded that only this ruler can unite the land.

The British Museum's 2007 First Emperor show became one of its most popular ever, behind a 1972 exhibition about which pharaoh?

Tutankhamun drew 1.7 million visitors in 1972; the warriors sold 400,000 advance tickets, and the museum stretched its opening hours towards midnight to cope.

Which actor's adventurer fights a terracotta army raised from the dead in a 2008 film sequel?

Brendan Fraser's Rick O'Connell faces a tyrant and his soldiers, cursed by a sorceress and encased in clay, in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

What was the First Emperor hoping to obtain when he sent expeditions to search for islands across the sea?

An elixir of immortality was the prize: he is said to have sent thousands of young people to find the magic islands in 219 BCE, and they never came back.

What half-size models were unearthed in 1980 beside the First Emperor's tomb mound?

Bronze chariots and horses, two teams of four found in pieces and rebuilt over years, stay in China, so exhibitions abroad have shown replicas.

How did the clay armies in later Han-dynasty tombs differ from the First Emperor's?

Far smaller figures, statuettes in a gentler and less warlike style, became the rule, and no later ruler attempted anything like his army again.

Besides soldiers, which figures have been found in other pits around the First Emperor's tomb?

Officials, acrobats, strongmen and musicians show that the emperor meant to take a whole court with him, clerks and entertainers included, not just an army.

Which smelly cargo did courtiers haul beside the dead First Emperor's carriage to hide the stench of his corpse?

Fish by the cartload masked the smell while his ministers kept the death secret on the road home, then put a pliable younger son on the throne instead of the chosen heir.

According to an ancient account, what was depicted on the ceiling of the First Emperor's burial chamber?

The stars and constellations were set overhead and the lands of the empire laid out below, so the dead ruler would lie at the centre of a model universe.

Besides his tomb, the First Emperor is remembered for starting which vast Chinese building project?

The Great Wall began with his order to link older frontier forts and earthworks against northern raiders; most of what tourists walk on today was rebuilt many centuries later under the Ming.

After unifying China, what did the First Emperor reportedly melt down to cast twelve giant bronze statues?

Confiscated weapons from the kingdoms he had beaten were recast as twelve colossal figures for his palace, which disarmed his old enemies at a stroke; none of the statues survives.