Ancient Civilisations - The Terracotta Army

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

After its initial discovery in 1974, the Terracotta Army became the unofficial eighth wonder of the world. Comprising an estimated 8,000 statue warriors buried as part of the First Emperor of China’s tomb complex, experts are still unearthing its secrets. But what was the purpose of so many clay soldiers? How were they made, and by whom? And what do we know about the Emperor considered so important that his death demanded a project on this scale? A Noiser production, written by Duncan Barrett. With thanks to Eugene Wang, Professor of Asian Art at Harvard University; and Andrew Bevan, Professor of Comparative Archaeology at University College London. For ad-free listening, exclusive content, and early access to new episodes across the Noiser network, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's the 29th of March, 1974. 30 kilometres from the Chinese city of Xi'an, peasant farmer Yang Shifah, is hard at work on his land. Along with his five brothers and a neighbour, Yang is digging a well. It's their third day out in the field, and they've already made it down through the top layer of earth, to the reddish clay beneath. Suddenly, Yang hits something hard. It looks like a piece of pottery. He drops his tool, bends down, and begins scraping away at his find. Pulling it out of the earth, he can see it's a fragment of something larger.

A circular piece of terracotta, about 15 centimetres in diameter. Yang shows what he's found of the others. They may be digging on the sight of an old kiln, he tells them. If they're lucky, they might find a few jars and pots they can take home with them. But as the men continued digging, they realized this was no kiln. Soon the others are finding pieces as well, some of them much larger than Yang's. They clean them up and lay them out on the ground. There's no mistaking what they found.

They're parts of a life-sized human statue, made out of baked red clay. And from the way it's dressed, it looks like an ancient warrior. Eventually one of them finds the head. He brushes off the earth and places it carefully next to its body. The seven men gather round to admire it. The craftsmanship is simple but exquisitely realistic. They don't yet know it, but what they've uncovered is a relic that hasn't been seen for over 2,000 years.

Excited they keep working. There are pieces of bronze too among the pieces of broken clay. Soon Yang and the others have enough to fill three small cards. Between them, the men drag their discovery several kilometers to the local museum. If the fragments turn out to be worthless, Yang muses, he'll simply throw them in the river, rinse off his muddy hands and go home. With the sun beating down, the men finally arrive at the museum. And it quickly becomes clear that wherever these finds are going to end up, it's definitely

not going to be at the bottom of the river. Under the bright lights of the museum's back room, it doesn't take long to identify that these artefacts date from the 3rd century BC. That means they belong to the Qin dynasty, the earliest years of a unified China. The first emperor of China, Ying Zheng, is believed. to be buried only a mile away from where the statues were discovered. Surely that can't be a coincidence. To the professional archaeologists, these fines are priceless. They offer the farmers 30 yuan to take them off their hands. Around three times a typical agricultural worker's annual wage. It

looks like Yang and his friends have just hit the jackpot. But this is China, at the height of chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. When the men get back to their village, they are required to hand over the bounty to their local collective. They issued a reward for their discovery, but it's far from generous, just 13 fen each. That's less than half a percent of the total fee paid by the museum. It's barely enough to cover the time they spent unearthing in transporting their fines. And soon the authorities arrived to take over the site, displacing the peasant farmers from their land.

As the experts begin their excavation, it becomes clear that the fragments dug up by the farmers were just the tip of a major archaeological iceberg. Over the next ten years, more than a thousand life-sized statues are unearthed. Their military dress and orderly formation sees them dubbed the Terracotta Army. Almost half a century on from Yang's initial discovery, experts are still teasing out the secrets of the Terracotta army. It's now estimated that over 8,000 statue warriors were buried with the first emperor of China, as part of a monumental tomb complex. Hundreds of thousands of early Chinese labourers were involved in making them. But this was no hasty production line.

Careful study has revealed that each warrior's features are unique. Everyone is a work of art, as well as an example of impressive craftsmanship. But what is the meaning of this immense undertaking, orchestrated in the early days of the Chinese Empire? Why did the man who unified China wished to be buried alongside thousands of life-sized statues? And how much do we know about Emperor Chin himself? A ruler so important that his death demanded a project on this scale. I'm Paul McGahn, and this is a short history of the Terracotta Army. Before the discovery of the warriors in the 1970s,

almost all that is known about the First Emperor's tomb comes from a single account, written over a hundred years later by the Chinese court historian, Sima Chen. Though his own sources are lost to history, his description of the booby-trap treasure trove Sounds like something out of an Indiana Jones movie. The tomb, he writes, was filled with rare artifacts and wonderful treasures. Craftsmen were ordered to set up crossbows, prying to shoot at anyone who entered. All the country's streams, the Yangtze and the Yellow River, were reproduced in quicksilver,

and by some mechanism made to flow into a miniature ocean. The heavenly constellations were shown above, and the features of the land. below. Over the past half century, the Chinese authorities have dug up thousands of terracotta warriors, but they are reluctant to excavate the Emperor's tomb itself, for fear of damaging it. As a result, Siemichens' more outlandish claims, including the rivers of Mercury, are hard to corroborate. The State Archaeology team begin their non-invasive exploration of the site near Shan.

But their borehole survey and imaging reveal that the ancient account may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Andrew Bevan is Professor of Comparative Archaeology at University College London. We've got a sense of what major tombs look like in the period, but we're still sort of unsure of what this particular one might look like, because everything else about the Muslim complex is so unusual in many ways. A good example would be a famous suggestion that under the main tomb complex were some sort of model of the world with life-like rivers made of flowing mercury. And a borehole survey by the museum has indeed suggested higher than anticipated concentrations of mercury in the soil around the central area of that mausoleum complex. Of course, it would take full-scale excavation to really prove it one way or the other. Whether true or not, Sima Chen's description of the emperor's tomb ensured that its legend went down in history.

But on the subject of the Terracotta army, the great historian is noticeably silent. Does this mean the massive project to build these thousands of life-sized statues was completed in secret, without word ever leaking out? Eugene Wang is Professor of Asian Art at Harvard University. None of this appear in history books. And if you were to tell people that such existed, if some obscure literature mentioning such a thing, that there would be left off as some kind of piece of fantasy and no one would take it seriously.

So that's why when they stumble upon this Terracod army formation, it was a total, total surprise. Shock, in fact. And no one started coming, and no one had any fantasy idea. of the magnitude of the formation. Today, following decades of excavation work, the tomb complex has given up many of its secrets.

But archaeologists continue to make new discoveries that complicate their assumptions about the mausoleum, the Terracotta army, and their functions following the first emperor's death. They have uncovered an awful lot of sighting finds above and beyond the first group of warriors that they've thought. of warriors that they found. So we've got a sense that there are many, many pits that house all sorts of interesting objects and figures made of terracotta. So for example, there's a pit of acrobats. There's a pit that contains a riverside scene with bronze birds and all sorts

of other lifelike aspects of a riverside scene and so on and so on. There are other military formations in other pits. And clearly this was a constellation of different funerary monuments associated with the First Emperor, not just one. And of course, at the heart of that mausoleum complex is an unexcavated area under the main mound, and that is where most archaeologists think is probably the actual tomb of the First Emperor itself. But who is the man at the heart of this mysterious, complicated tomb? And what did he believe about life and death that made him want such an enormous entourage to accompany him to the grave? From his earliest years, the future emperor is surrounded by mystery.

As the eldest child of the king, the boy who starts life in 259 BC, as Ying Zheng, is always expected to rise to power. But what sets the courtly tongues wagging are the stories about his mother. It's rumoured that Lady Zhao, formerly a merchant's concubine, was already pregnant with the boy who would be king before. she entered the royal bedchamber. The claims are now considered salacious gossip.

But even then, the young Ying Zheng was someone who divided opinion. As he enters adulthood, he's already proving himself a determined character, if a little unusual. He speak in a weird voice. He looked kind of weird. So someone who had the impression of him early on, before he became the king and then eventually, emperor actually predicted that this guy is going to conquer the world. Because there's something about him, about his self-control, self-perception, and his kind of ruthlessness indicate that this is a very capable person.

Ying Zheng is still a teenager when he ascends to the throne of Chin, one of seven warring states that make up what were later become known as China. But by his early 30s, King Zhang has already conquered the states of Han and Zhao. It's over a million square miles of territory, but it's not enough. Next in his sights is the northernmost state of Yan, with its capital city, Xi, present-day Beijing. But the ruler of Yan, a man known as the Red Prince, is determined to strike first. He hatches an elaborate plot to assassinate the ambitious king of Chin.

One day in 227 BC, King Jiang receives a pair of unusual visitors at court. They are men from Yan. But they say, they come bearing gifts. One of the men, the elder of the two, carries a large box. Inside is the head of an enemy of the Kings, a man who had sought refuge in Yan. The younger man bows and steps forward to present a large rolled parchment. It's a map of Yan territory near the Chin border. The Red Prince, they claim, is willing to cede it to Chin without a fight.

In China there are no legends about Greeks bearing gifts, and the men's offerings are too tantalizing to resist. The king summons them up onto the raised platform where he sits alone on his throne, so that he can take a better look. The assassins know that their mission is one from which they are unlikely to return, but But as they approach the king, the younger of the two men begins to lose his nerve. By the time they reach the dais, his hands are shaking. The older man does his best to shrug off his accomplice is evident discomfort.

His friend is a simple turn, he explains, to the suspicious courtiers. He is merely overwhelmed in the presence of such an august and mighty ruler. The king dismisses this petty excuse. He has little interest in the two men themselves. What he really wants to see is the territory they're offering him. He takes one end of the rolled-up map and begins to unfurl it. He smiles with satisfaction as he studies the proposed new border between Chin and Yan. But as the last roll of the map opens out, it reveals something else nestled inside,

a small dagger, its tip coated in poison. The king has barely a second to react before the cool-headed elder assassin takes his chance. He grabs at the monarch's long ornate sleeve with one hand and stabs the knife towards his chest with the other. Somehow though, the king escapes. He pulls his arm away, ripping the sleeve and dodges the potentially fatal blow. Staggering back, the king attempts to draw his ceremonial sword, but it sticks in his scabbard. Hundreds of courtiers look on horror-struck as the assassin makes a second attempt on the king's life.

As they call out for the armed guards who are posted outside the room, the royal doctor does the only thing he can think of. He hurls his medical bag in the direction of the assassin. The distraction buys the king just enough times to successfully draw his sword. He steps forward triumphantly and brings it down on the assassin holding the knife. By the time his armed guards arrive, he's hacked away at the would-be king-killer no less than eight times, leaving him in a bloody heap against the pillar. The nervous accomplice is seized.

The red prince's gamble is a failure. From the jaws of death, the king of chin emerges more determined and ruthless than ever. Over the next six years, the king succeeds in conquering all of the remaining warring states, including Yan, and bestows upon himself a new title, Chin Shu Huang, the first emperor of China. You could either say this individual had a massive impact as an individual on the subsequent course of Chinese history, and you'd probably be right in certain ways. Or you could say he's part of a wider context across Europe and Asia, really,

of the appearance of much larger states and empires. We're talking about the same period that sees the campaigns of Alexander the Great, the various kingdoms that succeed his death, the appearance of the Roman Republic, Ashoka and the Morian Empire in India. And I could go on and on. But what's striking about this period is that empires appear all over Europe and Asia. And so clearly, maybe it's too loose to say something was in the air, but there was a wider context for improved overall logistics, military, and in terms of the arrangement of a state that allowed these larger political systems to flourish. In China, the First Emperor presides over a period of massive change.

He begins work on an early version of the famous Great War and unifies currencies and systems of measurement. Perhaps most significantly, the old feudal system is replaced. Now, society is structured by elaborate rules and regulations that apply to the entire population of the country. For every crime, there is a corresponding, and often brutal, consequence laid out in the new statute books. Mutilation, tattooing, and executions by beheading,

all become standardized punishment. Meanwhile, the emperor attempts to rest control of the vast country's wealth of knowledge. He accumulates an enormous library, packed with scrolls from the empire's doctors, historians and philosophers, burning their other copies. Any works failing to meet with official approval are banned. Even discussing them soon carries the death penalty. But there is one great project that eludes all the emperor's efforts,

the search for an elixir of eternal life. He becomes obsessed with the idea that he can achieve immortality. He issues an executive order demanding that regional representatives from across China offer their own remedies. One official writes back suggesting a herb collected from a particular auspicious mountain

might hold the key. On the emperor's orders, hundreds of young men embark on a quest to find the mythical land of Punglai, supposed home of a thousand-year-old magician, but none of them return. Ultimately, the emperor's searches

prove fruitless. Instead, he's forced to rely on dubious medical advice in an attempt to prolong his mortal existence. The royal doctors prescribe plenty of sex with multiple partners, and even more questionably, pills containing small doses of mercury. Over time, the effects of mercury poisoning commonly include aggression and paranoia. For a man who already has megalomaniacal tendencies, it's far. from an ideal combination. It may be around now that the first emperor begins work on the greatest project of his reign,

and his most enduring legacy, the Terracotta army. Scholars are divided about the exact purpose that the thousands of clay warriors are intended to serve. Some see them as offering protection in the afterlife. Maybe the emperor feared that his many deceased enemies would be out for revenge after his own death. If so, he'd need an army, ready to defend him in whatever realm awaited him. It shows signs of being a military formation in a way that we might expect for a functioning military division.

So certain kinds of warriors with certain kinds of armor and weapons at the front of the formation, crossbowmen on the sides to protect the sides of the military formation, chariots in particular locations to allow the leaders of that formation to issue orders and to move the formation around. etc, etc. So in that sense, it is faithful to what we'd expect in terms of military strategy. This is a period in which people were placing grave goods in their tombs with a view to them being part of the afterlife with them. And these were often real grave goods that had real functional roles in life. So we'd have to anticipate that maybe some aspect of the Mosleyam complex had exactly the same idea in mind that you equip the emperor after his death for a continuing

life of some kind. But other people don't suggest necessarily that that army was meant to be used to go and wage war in an afterlife now that it was more just a monument. Since no surviving accounts even mentioned the existence of the Terracotta army, deducing its true meaning and its purpose is a puzzle for archaeologists of ancient China. One unconventional theory suggests that the statues are neither functional warriors nor a monument to an actual mortal army. Instead, maybe they have a mechanism of their own,

an artificial ecosystem designed to preserve the Emperor's life force or chi. It is my conviction and claim is that the whole tomb complex is more of a physiological, biological undertaking. Essentially, everything in early Chinese imagination for life and death comes down to the formation and nature of breath. Chinese called Qi. This sort of an airy kind of thing that permeates the universe and also the body.

In ancient China, people care of the dead, but it's not so much really in preserving the corpse. Somehow the breath that constitute you, that also comes to the universe, that do drift apart. So the only way for, for family members to care for the well-being of the disease is to make sure that this dual breath do not get too scattered. This vitality resides in the kind of system, it resides in the ecosystem.

And the assumption is that if that ecosystem is keep running, then whatever we regard as the postmodern existence of the emperor would be alive. If this theory is correct, then perhaps the Terracotta army represents the first emperor's final attempt to cheat death altogether. Speculation is rife about the meaning of the Terracotta army. What archaeologists can say with more certainty though is that the scale of the project to build them is unprecedented. This is really a huge undertaking. To give one a sense of how massive it is, not. Now, we all know the great pyramid for Farah Hufu in ancient Egypt was built around 550 BC, which was the largest pyramid in Giza, and that deployed about 100,000 workers and took about 10 years.

Now, the first emperor's tomb project, the number of laborers are about eight times of Hufu's pyramid project, which meant that this is probably the largest tomb building project in human history. To ensure quality control over the enormous production line, each statue is stamped with the name of the foreman responsible. Craftsmen work in small units, perhaps four or five men each. That so many separate teams are responsible for the project makes it all the more extraordinary that it remains a secret for two millennia. There's a tradition of thinking that the mausoleum was at least in part constructed with the help of unskilled conscript labor,

and it's quite possible that that's true for certain portions of it. For example, some of the rammed earth walls of the excavation itself, some of the logistics of moving things around the mausoleum complex, perhaps they were supported by large numbers of conscripts. But what's clear is that for things like the production of the Terragotta warriors themselves or the military equipment, the bronze weapons, for example, that they carried, that these were specialist products. We'd like to compare it to modern analogs, wouldn't we? We would like to say, is this like the way Henry Ford produced automobiles? Or is it completely different?

Are people in a line producing individual components? Or are they responsible for the entire product? And a lot of work has gone into trying to tease out those issues. Overall, it does look as if small workshop cells or groups were, typically aware of the entire process of making a warrior. Partly as a result of this process, no two warriors are identical. Each one is an individual, carefully crafted by skilled workmen, rather than being mass-produced. The reason that some people thought that they were mass-produced, well, there are so many

so it had to be mass-produced. Actually, it wasn't. And a specialist in facial recognition in New Zealand actually worked on about a thousand faces gathered from the first empress Terracotta Army and then they found that none of them looked like one another. In other, they're all highly individualized. In other words, it's not like they kind of yanked out of some kind of mold, and the mold would generate these forms. Today, most of the surviving warriors look plain, but originally they would have been detailed with vivid colors.

And here too, the logistical challenge is a mind-boggling. They were all painted, mainly in red, green, purple, blue colors. To give you a sense of the amount of lacquer necessary or needed to get the painting down, one single terracolet warrior would require 25 lacquer trees. So that means if we were to paint all 8,000 soldiers, warriors, you need 200,000 blacker trees. Some historians argue that the sheer scale of the construction project may have been an end in itself.

Exactly why people put the effort in. You could ask the same question about the Great Pyramid in Egypt or Stonehenge or many others. And for some researchers, they place the priority on the fact that it might mobilize huge numbers of people in ways that are very useful for a state that's trying to create itself. This is an example of empire building, if you like.

And bringing all these people together creates a greater sense of unity. It's really part and parcel of the same goals that built parts of the Great Wall of China or the canal that's associated with the Duchen Empire or many other mega projects. And you'd expect these in any early state as a sort of political tool, if you like. Chin Shiu Wang may have dreamed of living forever. But ultimately, he proves as more than. mortal as any other man. In 210 BC, at the age of 49, the first emperor sets off for a tour of China's eastern provinces.

But in the town of Pinguan, 200 miles south of Beijing, he's suddenly taken ill. He writes a letter to his estranged son and heir, Fusu, that reads simply, come to my funeral and bury me. The emperor's carriage sets off for home. But most of the men in his entourage have no idea that he is seriously ill. When the party stops for food on the road to Handang, one of his most trusted servants, a eunuch called Zhao Giao, brings him a meal. But as he enters the carriage, he realizes that the emperor is already dead. Zhao is still holding the emperor's final letter to his eldest son, Fusu, but now he has

a decision to make. Fusu's clashes with his father over government policy have made it clear that he will have little time for Zhao or his cronies once he inherits the throne. If Zhao sends the letter, he may well be making his own position at court untenable. Right now, Zhao is the only one who knows the emperor is dead. He spies an opportunity to turn the tables on Fusu and secure his own position under a new second Emperor of China. Boldly, Zhao approaches the first Emperor's youngest son, Fouhai, who is travelling in another carriage. He discreetly informs the prince, who is around 18 years old,

of his father's death. Zhao reveals the Emperor's final letter to Fusu, which appears to end their estrangement. It might be better for both of them, Jiao explains, if Fusu were never to receive it. Perhaps if his elder brother were out of his elder brother were out of of the picture, Huai could take the throne instead. The young prince protests. He tells Zhao that he lacks the strength of personality to govern the Chin court. And in any case, the teachings of the great Chinese philosopher Confucius are clear. A younger son cannot inherit while his elder brother lives.

But Zhao is undeterred. He points out to Huai that neither of them will be safe under a new Fusu regime. And as for the issue of his elder brother, he has a solution for that. He outlines his plan. Between them, they will forge a new letter to Fusu. It will appear to come straight from the emperor, who will accuse his son of disloyalty, and order him to take his own life. Eventually, the emperor's younger son agrees.

It's a bold, not to mention, dastardly move, but it pays off for the conspirators. The letter is dispatched without delay. When the messenger arrives with the forged letter, the heir to the throne reads it through with eyes filled with tears. Fusu is horrified at the demand. But, despite his disagreements with his father, he is determined to be an obedient son to the last.

Without further verification, he takes out his sword, closes his eyes, and executes what he believes is his father's command. Meanwhile, the first emperor's entourage continues its slow passage back to the Chinese capital. Zhao Gao knows that if anyone else learns of the emperor's death before they arrive, a new power struggle could break out, and all his scheming will come to nothing. So he continues to keep up the pretense that the emperor is still alive. He brings food into his master's carriage several times a day and appears to spend his time there discussing important government business.

There's just one flaw in Zhao's plan. It's the height of summer. On the long journey home, the first emperor's corpse begins to rot. If anyone notices the unpleasant smell, Zhao realizes, his plot may be discovered. So he hits on an unlikely solution. He orders a cart of fish to travel close to the emperor's carriage.

The smell is enough to mask the stench of decomposition, and the entourage reaches home without anyone discovering that the emperor has passed away. By now, news of Fusu's suicide has already reached the royal court, and nothing stands in Zhao's way, who hires Crown's second emperor of China, and his father is buried in the grand mausoleum complex outside Xi'an, along with his tens of thousands of terracotta warriors. Or is he?

In recent years, some scholars have speculated that the vast tomb may not in fact contain the first emperor's body at all. One interesting aspect of the mausoleum complex is there actually a royal body, an imperial body in the middle of it because this was an emperor who effectively died not abroad but a long way from the capital

and people have wondered whether it was possible to bring the body back intact and whether we are dealing with a real tomb with a body in the middle or a cenotaph of some kind. And really that kind of question can't be answered without further excavation. The underground monument stands today as a testament to the power of the first emperor, a man obsessed with immortality. It would be ironic indeed then, if despite overseeing the creation of a tomb worthy of his magnificence, he never actually made it inside.

If his body was discreetly disposed of on the way home by sneaky Zhao Gao, it will most likely never be recovered. For now, the Chinese authorities remain reluctant to disturb the First Emperor's tomb, forcing archaeologists around the world to speculate on what might be inside. So they've taken a sort of slowly, slowly approach to the exploration of the tomb, which may frustrate many in the world because, of course, maybe they haven't opened as many areas to excavation as people would like. But it means that the techniques for preserving the site and for understanding

and have got better and better over time, and we don't destroy things as we go along, or they don't destroy things as they go along. So it's a model in that respect for a safe, careful approach to archaeology anywhere in the world. Even 2,000 years after his death, the great leader's final resting place, complete with its vast army of terracotta warriors. remains shrouded in mystery. Next time, we'll bring you a short history of the lighthouse of Alexandria. The lighthouse goes well beyond practical purposes,

because it's a symbol of power, because it's imposing, it's grand, it's strong, so it suggests all of those things about the leaders of the city, about the Ptolemies, that they have this kind of supremacy. I would say it also has a kind of symbolic importance. that it's spreading light, and we see that as a city that becomes a knowledge capital of the world, spreading knowledge light of knowledge far and white. And Alexandria, to a large extent, becomes defined by this famous building.

That's next time.