The Emperor's Buried Army
Digging a well in 1974, farmers struck something no shovel had touched in over two thousand years — the silent face of an ancient soldier.
In March 1974, Yang Zhifa, his five brothers, and their neighbor Wang Puzhi were digging a well east of a mound near Mount Li, outside Xi'an in Shaanxi, China. Instead of water, their shovels struck fragments of clay figures buried some seven meters below the surface. What they had stumbled upon was not a curiosity but the edge of one of the largest funerary discoveries in human history: the Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China.
Qin Shi Huang began building his mausoleum in 246 BCE, when he was just thirteen years old and had recently inherited the throne of the state of Qin. According to the historian Sima Qian, writing a century later in the Records of the Grand Historian, the project eventually conscripted 700,000 laborers. The tomb complex was built at the foot of Mount Li, a site favored, according to geographer Li Daoyuan, for its auspicious geology — rich in gold to the north and fine jade to the south.
Sima Qian described a tomb filled with palaces, towers, officials, and wondrous objects, with 100 flowing rivers simulated using mercury beneath a ceiling painted with heavenly bodies. Modern soil testing near the tomb mound has found unusually high mercury levels, lending some credibility to this ancient account — though Sima Qian's writing never actually mentions the terracotta soldiers themselves.
The army was buried roughly 1.5 kilometers east of the tomb mound, positioned as if to guard the emperor from the direction of the states he had conquered. Archaeologists eventually uncovered four main pits, each about seven meters deep. Pit 1 alone stretches 230 meters long and 62 meters wide, holding more than 3,000 of the army's estimated 8,000-plus soldiers. Alongside the warriors stood 130 chariots, 520 chariot horses, and 150 cavalry horses — a force whose scale still stuns anyone who walks its rows today.
The figures were not identical. Their height varied by rank, ranging from about 183 to 195 centimeters, with generals standing tallest among the ranks. Later excavations revealed non-military figures too — officials, acrobats, strongmen, and musicians — suggesting the underground world built for the emperor mirrored the full complexity of his court, not just his military might.
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