Terracotta Army

You step into a vast hangar, and the air is cool and quiet. Below you, in long earthen trenches, stand rows of clay soldiers. They face east, shoulder to shoulder. There are hundreds of them, and behind those, hundreds more. Each one looks straight ahead, as if waiting for an order that never comes. Your footsteps echo on the walkway above the pit.

This is the Terracotta Army, the buried guard of China's first emperor. His name was Qin Shi Huang. He unified the warring states of China and took the throne as emperor in 221 BCE. He wanted his power to continue after death. So he ordered an army of clay to protect him in the next world.

The figures lay lost for more than two thousand years. Then, in 1974, local farmers were digging a well in a field east of Xi'an, hoping to reach water in a dry season. Their tools struck pieces of hard clay. They pulled up the broken head of a statue, its eyes staring back at them. They had found the first soldier. Archaeologists came, and the scale of the find slowly became clear. What looked like a simple well had opened into a buried army.

Today the site holds three main pits. The largest, Pit One, is the size of several football fields. It contains an estimated six thousand figures. Most are foot soldiers, set out in battle order. When you stand at the rail, the rows stretch away from you into the distance, and the number is hard to hold in your mind.

Look closely at the faces. No two are quite the same. One soldier has a thin mustache. Another has full cheeks and a calm gaze. A third looks young, almost unfinished. Their hair is tied in different knots, and their hands rest in different poses. Scholars believe the makers built each figure from standard parts, then shaped the face and details by hand. The result is a crowd of individuals, not copies.

The soldiers were not always this earthen gray. When they were made, they wore bright color. Red tunics, green trousers, black armor, pink faces. But the paint was fragile. After two thousand years underground, much of it curled and fell within minutes of meeting the air. A few traces survive, and conservators now work to save them.

The army carried real weapons. Bronze swords, spears, crossbows, and thousands of arrowheads have been found among the figures. Some of the blades were still sharp when uncovered. The bronze had been treated in a way that slowed rust. Many wooden parts, like spear shafts and chariots, rotted away, leaving only the metal behind.

Each pit held a different kind of force. Pit Two contains cavalry, chariots, and kneeling archers. Pit Three is small and seems to be the command post, with high officers. Together they form a whole army, with its front lines, its flanks, and its leaders, all turned to face the east, where the emperor's old rivals once lived.

The soldiers are only one part of a much larger tomb. About a mile and a half away lies the burial mound of the emperor himself. It is a great hill of earth, still unopened. Old records describe a hidden world inside, with rivers of liquid mercury and a ceiling set with pearls. Tests of the soil have found high levels of mercury, which fits the account.

Think of the labor behind all this. Records suggest that hundreds of thousands of workers spent decades on the tomb. They dug the pits, fired the clay, and set each figure in place. Many of them were conscripts and prisoners. The cost in human effort was huge, and it was all for one man's journey beyond death.

Do not leave without seeing the two bronze chariots. They were found in 1980, buried near the tomb mound. Each is about half life-size, drawn by four bronze horses, with a driver standing ready. They are made of thousands of metal parts, joined with great care and trimmed with gold and silver. They are among the finest bronzes to survive from the old world.

The work of uncovering the army is far from over. Large areas of the pits remain buried, left in place until the paint can be protected. So what you see is a fraction of what still rests in the ground. New figures come to light year by year, each one lifted in pieces, cleaned, and joined back together with patience.

Stand for a moment and look at one face among the thousands. A maker shaped those features by hand, long ago, then set the figure in the dark to wait. The emperor who ordered them is gone, and his empire with him. But the clay soldiers remain, still at their posts, still facing the sunrise.