Qin Shi Huang's Tomb and Astounding Facts About the Terracotta Army

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The Qin Shi Huang tomb is located near the city of Xi'an in Shaanxi Province, the former capital of China during the first imperial dynasties.

In 1974, Chinese peasants digging a well unexpectedly stumbled upon fragments of some kind of pottery, and then - on the shoulders of a statue made of baked clay. The peasants reacted to the find as befits a well-educated people, which they really were not, and reported it to archaeologists. So, after two millennia, about 8 thousand statues of warriors returned to our world, accompanying the emperor Qin Shi Huang to the afterlife, who unified the then China with fire and sword and who became its first ruler.

The Qin Shi Huang tomb is located near the city of Xi'an in Shaanxi Province, the former capital of China during the first imperial dynasties. This is not the only tomb there. Chinese emperors did not skimp on spending when arranging their afterlife, so there are many extensive burial complexes in those places. Some of them contained figures of people and horses, which were supposed to serve their master in the realm of the dead, but another full-fledged army of clay soldiers in human growth has not yet been found anywhere. However, most of the tombs have not yet been examined by archaeologists - the Chinese authorities are generally extremely reluctant to allow such treatment of the country's deceased leaders.

1. The terracotta army numbers approximately eight thousand figures, concentrated in three underground corridors. This is a very rough estimate, since the statues are mostly broken and require restoration or, more simply, assembly from shards. To date, a little more than a thousand clay warriors have been restored.

2. Details of the statues were molded from clay, fired, painted and assembled in this form. Legs and bodies were made using special shapes, heads with faces, hairstyles, ears and everything else were most likely molded from nature or, at any rate, individually. They are different and depict different people, most likely the real fighters of Qin Shi Huang. In addition to the infantry, the army had archers and war chariots drawn by statues of horses, also in full size, as well as statues of civilian officials, musicians and other servants of the emperor.

3. The weight of a terracotta warrior is about 130-200 kilograms. This is a hollow clay statue depicting the emperor's soldier in some convenient position for using his weapon. Initially, the statues were painted, but two millennia underground affected their preservation, and now the paint has survived very fragmentarily. Nevertheless, the figure sculpted in full of the then ammunition gives a lot of information about how the fighters of the III century BC looked and dressed. It should be noted that in addition to ordinary soldiers in the army, there are officers of different ranks - also with full gear.

4. In case the emperor required a ceremonial departure, two ornate chariots were buried nearby. Finally, 48 of his concubines were buried with him alive. In this case, Qin Shi Huang Ti clearly preferred real women to those of clay. The number of workers buried alive is known very approximately - no one bothered to count them accurately. We can talk about thousands or even tens of thousands of people. It seems that the emperor wanted his afterlife to be as well-ordered and abundant as his earthly one.

5. Work on the construction of the burial complex began shortly after Qin Shi Huang (then still called Ying Zheng) became a wang (i.e., monarch) of the Qing state. Then he was 13 years old. By the time this complex was used, its area probably exceeded fifty square kilometers. It is difficult to define it more precisely - work on its contouring continues, periodically bringing new surprises. The burial of the emperor itself has not yet been opened, although its location has been established precisely.

6. Qin Shi Huang died on September 10, 210 BC. The cause of death, according to the written sources of subsequent centuries, was the intake of pills, which were supposed to make the monarch immortal. They contained mercury. The emperor did not really want to become an inhabitant of his own tomb, and, in the last years of his life, spent a lot of time and money in search of a magic elixir that bestows immortality.

7. The dynasty founded by the emperor was to rule China for a very long time - 10 thousand generations. However, after his death, the struggle for power, traditional for those times, began, during which the heirs of Qin Shi Huang were completely exterminated, his empire collapsed, and subsequent emperors had to reassemble it. Apparently, the terracotta army was simply forgotten. In any case, Sima Qian, who wrote about Qin Shi Huang after about a century, no longer mentions her. The clay soldiers followed their master into the darkness of oblivion.