The Terracotta Army: How Farmers Digging a Well Found China's Buried Soldiers

In the spring of 1974, the fields around the villages east of Xi'an were dry. A group of farmers decided to dig a well. A few metres down, their tools began turning up broken pottery, which was not unusual in a region with a very long history. Then they found something that was: a head made of fired clay, with a calm, life-size human face.

They did not know it yet, but they had dug into the edge of one of the largest archaeological finds of the twentieth century.

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A well in a dry year

The farmers, from the villages of Xiyang near Lintong, kept digging. Along with fragments of bodies, arms and heads, they pulled out bronze arrowheads and pieces of what looked like crossbows. Some of the broken figures were reportedly carted away, and for a short time no one in authority knew what was coming out of the ground.

Word reached Zhao Kangmin, a curator at the small local museum in Lintong. He collected the fragments, paid the farmers for what they had found and began fitting pieces together. He realised that the figures were of a style and size that had never been found before. A journalist, Lin Aimin, heard about the find and reported it to officials in Beijing. By the summer of 1974, a professional excavation team was at work in the fields.

The well had been dug a little more than a kilometre east of a large, tree-covered hill that local people had always known about. That hill was the burial mound of China's first emperor.

The emperor who wanted an army forever

Ying Zheng became king of the state of Qin in 246 BC, when he was about 13 years old. Work on his tomb began soon afterwards, as was customary for rulers. Over the next 25 years Qin conquered its rival states one by one, and in 221 BC Ying Zheng declared himself Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor of a unified China.

His reign was short and severe. He standardised writing, coins, weights and measures, joined existing walls in the north and ordered vast building projects. When he died in 210 BC, he was buried in a mausoleum that had grown into a whole underground landscape.

The army was only one part of it. Archaeologists have since found pits around the mound containing clay acrobats, officials, musicians, bronze water birds and the remains of real animals. The soldiers were placed to the east, facing outwards, as if to guard the emperor in the afterlife.

What the archaeologists found

The excavators soon realised that the well had broken into the corner of a huge rectangular pit. This became Pit 1, which is about 230 metres long and 62 metres wide. It held long corridors of infantry standing in battle formation, separated by earthen walls, once roofed over with timber beams and mats and buried under soil.

In 1976, two more pits were found nearby. Pit 2 holds a mixed force of archers, cavalry and chariots. Pit 3, much smaller, holds 68 figures and a chariot and is thought to represent a command post. A fourth pit was found empty, probably left unfinished when the dynasty fell.

From the parts excavated so far, archaeologists estimate that the three pits hold more than 8,000 soldiers, about 130 chariots, 520 chariot horses and 150 cavalry horses. Only around 2,000 warriors have been excavated. The rest are still underground, partly by choice: the experience of digging Pit 1 showed how much can be lost once figures are exposed.

How do you make 8,000 soldiers?

The figures were made by an organised workshop system. Legs, torsos, arms and heads were formed separately, often using moulds, and then assembled. Craftsmen then added details by hand: hair tied in different knots and braids, moustaches and beards, armour plates, belt hooks and the treads on the soles of kneeling archers' shoes. The figures were fired in kilns and many carry the stamped or incised names of the workshop foremen responsible for them.

The result is an army that looks both uniform and individual. Most soldiers stand between about 1.75 and 2 metres tall, with officers generally taller. There are standing and kneeling archers, armoured infantry, charioteers, cavalrymen standing beside their horses, and generals with elaborate headdresses.

The soldiers also carried real weapons. Archaeologists have recovered tens of thousands of bronze items, most of them arrowheads, along with swords, spears, halberds and crossbow triggers. Some of the swords and spears are inscribed with dates and the names of the officials who oversaw their production, a striking glimpse of Qin bureaucracy at work.

They were never meant to be grey

Today the warriors look the colour of earth, but that is not how they left the workshop. Each figure was coated with a layer of East Asian lacquer and then painted: faces in pink tones, armour and clothing in reds, greens, blues, purples, black and white. Among the pigments is a synthetic barium copper silicate now called Han purple or Chinese purple.

The lacquer is the problem. After two thousand years in damp soil, it begins to curl and flake within minutes of being exposed to dry air, taking the paint with it. Early excavators watched colours disappear in front of them. Conservation methods have improved, and some figures from later excavations keep traces of their colour, but the difficulty of protecting the paint is one reason excavation has been slow.

Burned, broken and pieced back together

The army was not found standing as visitors see it today. The pits show clear signs of fire and looting. Around 206 BC, as the Qin dynasty collapsed, someone broke into the pits, took weapons and set the timber roofs alight. The traditional account blames the rebel general Xiang Yu, although there is no inscription naming the culprits. When the roofs gave way, tonnes of earth crushed the figures below.

Nearly every warrior on display has therefore been reassembled from fragments, a painstaking process that continues in the restoration areas at the museum, where visitors can see figures lying in pieces awaiting repair.

The tomb no one has opened

The most famous description of the mausoleum comes from the historian Sima Qian, who wrote about a century after the burial. He described a tomb built by hundreds of thousands of workers, with a ceiling showing the heavens, a floor showing the earth, and the empire's great rivers and the sea reproduced in flowing mercury. He added that crossbows were set to shoot anyone who broke in.

Parts of this may be exaggeration, but scientific surveys of the mound have found soil mercury levels well above the surrounding area, which many researchers take as support for his account. The burial chamber itself has never been excavated. Chinese authorities have chosen to leave it closed until it can be explored without destroying what is inside.

From a farmer's field to a world wonder

A museum hall was built over Pit 1, and it opened to the public in 1979. In 1987 the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Millions of people now visit every year, and touring exhibitions of a few warriors have drawn crowds around the world.

Several of the farmers who found the first fragments later became part of the story they had started. Yang Zhifa, one of the men at the well, spent years at the museum meeting visitors and signing books about the discovery.

It is a striking end to a story that began with a practical problem. The emperor built an army to protect him forever. More than two thousand years later, it was found by people who were simply looking for water.