Terracotta Army: The Clay Soldiers of China's First Emperor

The Terracotta Army is a buried force of thousands of life-size pottery soldiers, horses and chariots created to accompany Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, into the afterlife. Made in the decades before his death in 210 BC and placed in pits about 1.5 kilometres east of his burial mound near modern Xi’an, it lay forgotten until farmers digging a well found broken figures in 1974. It is now one of the most famous archaeological discoveries in the world.

The First Emperor and his tomb

Ying Zheng became king of the state of Qin in 246 BC, at the age of 13. As was customary for rulers, work on his tomb began soon after he came to the throne, at Mount Li east of the Qin capital, Xianyang. After he conquered the last of his rivals and completed the unification of China in 221 BC, he took the title Qin Shi Huang, “First Emperor of Qin”, and the scale of the project grew dramatically.

The historian Sima Qian, writing about a century later, says that more than 700,000 conscripted labourers worked on the emperor’s tomb. He describes a burial chamber filled with treasures, with the rivers and seas of the empire modelled in flowing mercury and with crossbows set to fire at intruders. He also reports that, after the emperor’s burial, workers who knew its secrets were sealed inside.

Remarkably, Sima Qian says nothing about an army of clay soldiers. The pits that hold the Terracotta Army lie outside the tomb’s walled enclosure, and their existence was not recorded in any surviving written source.

Discovery in 1974

In March 1974, during a drought, farmers from the village of Xiyang in Lintong District were digging a well when they struck fragments of fired clay, including heads and bodies, as well as bronze arrowheads. Zhao Kangmin, an archaeologist at the local museum, recognised that the figures dated from the Qin period and began piecing them together.

News reached national authorities, and in July 1974 a team of archaeologists, later led by Yuan Zhongyi, started systematic excavations. They soon realised they had found a vast pit filled with rank upon rank of warriors. Further pits were located in 1976. A museum built over the first pit opened to the public in 1979.

The four pits

Archaeologists have identified three pits containing figures and a fourth that was left empty, probably because work stopped when the emperor died and the empire fell into rebellion.

Pit 1, the largest, is about 230 metres long and 62 metres wide. It holds the main army, estimated at more than 6,000 figures, arranged in eleven parallel corridors. Archers and crossbowmen stand at the front, followed by columns of armoured infantry and chariots, with flank guards on each side.

Pit 2, smaller and L-shaped, contains a mixed force of kneeling and standing archers, chariots, and cavalrymen standing beside saddled horses. Estimates put its contents at around 1,300 figures and horses.

Pit 3 is the smallest, holding 68 figures and one chariot. Because the soldiers face each other in formation and there are deer antlers and animal bones that may come from rituals, it is usually interpreted as a command post.

The estimated contents of the three pits are summarised below; figures are approximate because excavation is far from complete.

The pits were built as roofed underground corridors with earthen walls, wooden beams and brick floors, covered with matting and soil. Over time the roofs collapsed, crushing most figures. Many were also broken and burned in antiquity, and some weapons were removed. Tradition attributes this damage to the rebel army of Xiang Yu, which plundered the Qin capital in 206 BC, but there is no direct proof.

How the figures were made, armed and painted

The warriors are about 1.8 to 2 metres tall, slightly larger than an average man of the time. They were made from local clay in a system that combined mass production with individual finishing, as the art historian Lothar Ledderose has shown.

Legs were solid, while torsos were built up from coils or slabs of clay and left hollow. Heads, hands and arms were made separately, often using moulds, and then attached. Craftsmen added hair, moustaches, armour plates, belts and shoe laces by hand, giving each figure its own details. The figures were fired in kilns at high temperature, then coated with lacquer and painted.

Many figures carry stamped or incised names of workshop foremen, a form of quality control familiar from Qin law, which held workers responsible for faulty products. Dozens of different names have been identified. Some came from government workshops, others from local potters drafted for the project.

The soldiers once held real weapons. Archaeologists have recovered around 40,000 bronze items, mostly arrowheads, together with swords, spears, halberd blades and crossbow triggers. Some halberds carry inscriptions dating their manufacture to the reign of King Zheng before unification.

Many bronze weapons were found in remarkably good condition. A popular claim held that Qin smiths used a chromium coating to protect them from rust. A study published in 2019 found that the traces of chromium came from lacquer on the weapons’ wooden handles and that the bronze survived mainly because of the composition of the surrounding soil.

The figures were originally brightly painted in red, green, blue, white, black and Han purple, an artificial pigment unique to ancient China. Most of the paint was laid on a layer of lacquer that curls and flakes within minutes of exposure to dry air, which is why nearly all the warriors now look grey or brown. Conservation methods developed since the 1990s have helped preserve some colours.

Beyond the army: the wider mausoleum

The Terracotta Army is only one part of a huge funerary complex. The emperor’s burial mound, still unexcavated, stands within two sets of walls that once enclosed temples, halls and gardens. Around it, archaeologists have found more than 180 pits and burials.

Among the most striking finds are two half-size bronze chariots, each pulled by four bronze horses, discovered in 1980 just west of the mound. Other pits contain stone armour, figures of officials and acrobats, and dozens of bronze waterbirds, such as cranes, swans and geese, set beside an artificial stream with musicians. Together they suggest that the complex was meant to recreate the emperor’s court, army and pleasures for eternity.

Surveys of the soil on top of the mound have found unusually high levels of mercury, which some scholars see as support for Sima Qian’s description of mercury rivers. The authorities have so far chosen not to open the burial chamber, citing the risks to fragile materials.

Purpose and meaning

No text explains why the army was made. Most scholars agree that it was meant to protect and serve the emperor in the afterlife, in keeping with the Chinese belief that the dead needed the comforts and powers they had enjoyed in life. Earlier rulers had sometimes been buried with sacrificed servants; by the Qin period, figures often replaced living victims, although human burials still occurred in the complex.

The army also displayed Qin power. Its orderly ranks reflect the disciplined, mass infantry forces with which Qin had conquered its rivals. The figures’ uniforms, weapons and formations offer historians invaluable evidence of how a Warring States army looked and fought.

Myths and facts

Myth: every warrior is a portrait of a real soldier. The figures were built from moulded parts and finished by hand, producing great variety. Whether any were modelled on real individuals is unknown.

Myth: the Terracotta Army is inside the emperor’s tomb. The pits lie about 1.5 kilometres east of the burial mound, outside its walls. The tomb chamber itself has never been entered by archaeologists.

Myth: real soldiers were buried inside the figures. The bodies are hollow clay, and no human remains have been found within them.

Legacy

The Qin dynasty did not long survive its founder. After Qin Shi Huang’s death in 210 BC, rebellions spread, and in 206 BC rebel armies sacked the capital, opening the way for the founding of the Han dynasty. Yet the emperor’s buried army survived underground for more than 2,000 years.

UNESCO inscribed the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor on the World Heritage List in 1987. Excavation continues, and selected figures have travelled to museums across Europe and North America, drawing very large crowds. The Terracotta Army has become one of the best-known symbols of ancient China.

Timeline

• 246 BC: Ying Zheng becomes King of Qin; work on his tomb begins.
• 221 BC: Qin unifies China and the king takes the title First Emperor; the tomb project expands.
• 210 BC: Qin Shi Huang dies on a tour of the east and is buried at Mount Li.
• 206 BC: Rebel forces sack the Qin capital; the pits may have been damaged at this time.
• 1974, March: Farmers digging a well near Xiyang village find fragments of figures.
• 1976: Pits 2 and 3 are located.
• 1979: The museum over Pit 1 opens to the public.
• 1980: Two bronze chariots are discovered west of the burial mound.
• 1987: The Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor becomes a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Why it matters

The Terracotta Army reveals the ambition, organisation and beliefs of China’s first imperial state on an extraordinary scale. It preserves a frozen image of a Qin army and of the workshops that equipped it, and it continues to shape how the world imagines the First Emperor and early China.