The Terracotta Army

Ying Zheng became king of Qin in 246 BC, at the age of thirteen, during the last decades of the Warring States period. Work on his tomb began soon after, as was usual for a ruler. By 221 BC Qin had conquered the last of its rivals, and he took a new title, Qin Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor of Qin. He standardised writing, coinage, weights and measures across his empire. Our page on the Qin dynasty tells the wider story.

He died in 210 BC, and the dynasty fell four years later. The historian Sima Qian, writing about a century afterwards, described a tomb built by hundreds of thousands of labourers, with palaces inside, the heavens shown above and the earth below, and rivers of mercury made to flow by machinery. The burial mound, at the foot of Mount Li, has never been opened. Soil samples from it contain unusually high levels of mercury, which agrees with his account.

Sima Qian does not mention the army. Its existence was unknown until it was found by chance two thousand years later.

In March 1974, farmers digging a well east of Xi'an, in Shaanxi province, struck fragments of fired clay. The find lay about 1.5 kilometres east of the emperor's burial mound, and archaeologists soon realised its scale. Three pits of figures have since been excavated, together with a fourth that was found empty and appears to have been left unfinished.

A museum was built over the largest pit and opened to the public in 1979. In 1987 the site, as part of the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Excavation continues today, slowly, because conserving what is uncovered matters more than speed.

Current estimates put the army at around 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses, and 150 cavalry horses, many of them still unexcavated. The figures stand in battle formation facing east, towards the rival states the Qin had conquered.

• Pit 1, the largest, is about 230 metres long. It holds the main body of the army: rows of infantry in long corridors, with chariots, protected by a vanguard and by ranks facing outwards along the sides.
• Pit 2 holds a mixed force of cavalry, chariots, infantry and archers, both standing and kneeling.
• Pit 3, the smallest, contains a single chariot and a few dozen figures, and is usually interpreted as the command post.
• Pit 4 was dug but never filled.

The pits were roofed with timber and covered with earth. Not long after the emperor's death, at least part of the army was damaged by fire and the roofs collapsed, crushing the figures. Almost every soldier on display today has been pieced together from fragments.

No two soldiers are exactly alike. Their height, armour, dress and hairstyle vary with their rank and role. Generals and officers are taller and more elaborately dressed; infantrymen are shown with or without armour; cavalrymen wear shorter coats suited to riding. Chariots, drawn by teams of four terracotta horses, form an important part of the force.

The figures once carried real weapons: bronze swords, spears, halberds and crossbows. Many were taken in antiquity, but tens of thousands of bronze arrowheads and other pieces remain. Some weapons bear inscriptions dating their manufacture to between 245 and 228 BC, which suggests they were working arms before they were buried.

The figures were produced in workshops by government labourers and local craftsmen, using clay dug nearby. They were made in sections: the legs, torso, arms and head were formed separately and then assembled, much like a production line. The legs are largely solid to carry the weight, the upper bodies hollow. Scholars believe that a small number of basic moulds, perhaps about eight, was used for the faces, with clay then added and modelled by hand to give each soldier individual features, hair and expression.

Control was strict. Each workshop and foreman was required to stamp or inscribe a name on the pieces they made, so that poor work could be traced. The finished figures were fired, coated with lacquer and painted in strong colours, including red, pink, green, blue, purple, black, brown and white. Most of the paint has since been lost; on newly excavated figures, the lacquer can curl and flake within minutes of meeting the air, which is why conservation now governs the pace of the dig.

The army is only one part of a vast funerary complex around the emperor's mound. Later excavations have uncovered two half-size bronze chariots with horses and drivers, found in 1980, and pits containing figures of civil officials, acrobats, strongmen and musicians, as well as bronze waterbirds and the burials of real horses. Together they suggest that the emperor intended to take a complete court, and not only an army, into the afterlife.

Terracotta means fired clay. The soldiers are earthenware: a porous, unglazed body fired at roughly 1,000°C, then painted. Porcelain is a different material. It needs a fine white clay containing kaolin and a much higher firing temperature, around 1,300°C, at which the body fuses into a hard, glassy, often translucent mass. Glazed, high-fired stoneware was already being made in China under the Shang and Zhou, but the white porcelain that collectors know developed over the following centuries, as our overview of Chinese porcelain through the dynasties describes.

The army does belong to a long tradition of figures made for the tomb. Most later examples are far smaller: the pottery attendants, animals and models of the Han dynasty, and the lead-glazed earthenware horses, camels and figures of the Tang dynasty. No later tomb approaches the scale of the First Emperor's. Earthenware tomb figures are also among the most widely copied of all Chinese antiques, and replicas of the warriors are made in large numbers today.

We deal only in antique Chinese porcelain, from the Song to the Qing, and do not offer tomb figures or other earthenware. For the porcelain itself, start with our guide to antique Chinese porcelain.