The Terracotta Army
Eight thousand life-size soldiers guard a tomb nobody has opened.
- When
- Known to
- ± 10 years
- Era
- Classical, Holocene
Discovered by well-diggers in 1974, the First Emperor's funerary complex contains around 8,000 clay soldiers, 130 chariots and 670 horses, arranged in battle formation, each figure assembled from mass-produced parts but individually finished so that no two faces match. They were originally painted. The tomb mound itself remains unexcavated — historical accounts describe rivers of mercury inside, and soil surveys have found anomalously high mercury concentrations.