The Terra Cotta Warriors and the Deadly Treasures of Emperor Qin

A few years ago, I visited the Tomb of China's First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, which is located outside of the city of Xi'an. Qin united a large portion of China around 220 BC, and instituted vast projects and reforms throughout the new empire. His achievements included building some of the original walls that later became part of the Great Wall, instituting a single currency, creating standard weights and measures and establishing a bureaucracy.

Qin’s Legacy

Like many rulers of the ancient world, however, he decided his imperial legacy should be preserved after his death in the form of a vast underground City and monuments. Lost to history for thousands of years, a farmer digging a well in 1974 discovered several terra cotta statues of soldiers. Archaeologists soon uncovered three huge pits containing an army of more than 8,000 individually carved, life sized soldiers with armaments, chariots, and horses. This army was put in place to guard the Emperor's tomb for eternity.

One of the pits is open to tourists. As large as several football fields, it contains thousands of warriors that have been reassembled one by one. Anyone visiting China should seek an opportunity to travel to Xi'an to see this World Heritage Site and the sites of the city itself.

Soldiers and Chariots

Several bronze chariots, horses and numerous individual warriors can be viewed up close at the museum site. There are cavalrymen, archers, officers, crossbowmen and generals on display. Each statue was forged in furnaces by thousands of craftsmen working over several decades. Although archaeologists believe that eight principal molds were used, each statue was given distinctive physical features, painted, and then outfitted with leather or metal armaments. Most of the coloring on the statues faded quickly after they were unearthed, so some statues have been left in the dirt while scientists work on finding better methods to preserve the paint. Despite his many achievements and conquests, Emperor Qin became a despot in his later years.

After Qin died, he reportedly had over 1000 of the workers sacrificed with him. He buried the army in the pits, but that was not all. There is a huge pyramid shaped tomb several miles away which everyone thought was a mountain until the Warriors were discovered in 1974. Today, the Emperor's grave is believed to lie in an underground chamber located within the mountain which has never been opened.

Mortuary Complex

Archaeologists gradually came to understand that the Warriors were merely one part of an elaborate mortuary complex, built by Qin to include replicas of the cities, armies and treasures amassed during his long reign in the third century BC for his use in the afterlife. Legends and historical records claim that the tomb features rivers of mercury, an artificial sky with jewels for stars, and numerous booby traps to prevent graverobbers. Testing has confirmed the presence of numerous underground structures within the mountain as well as high concentrations of mercury, so plans to explore the site further and discover its mysteries remain on hold. For the time being, therefore, King Tut's tomb remains as the greatest treasure of the past century.