What Was the Terracotta Army? Mass Production With Individual Faces

The figures were buried in pits about a mile and a half east of the tomb mound of Qin Shi Huang, the ruler who unified China and became its first emperor, who died in 210 BCE. Excavation has identified several pits with different contents. The largest holds the main infantry force in columns within corridors separated by earth walls, originally roofed with timber and matting. A second contains cavalry, chariots and archers in mixed formations. A third, much smaller, appears to be a command post. Estimates put the total at around eight thousand warriors, along with horses and chariots, and a substantial proportion remains unexcavated deliberately. Beyond the warriors, other pits around the tomb complex have yielded bronze waterfowl, figures of acrobats and officials, and stone armour, indicating that the intention was to reproduce an entire court and its surroundings rather than only an army. The tomb mound itself has never been opened.

The production system is the aspect that most interests archaeologists, because it is an early example of modular manufacture:

• •Bodies were assembled from separately made parts, with legs, torso, arms and head produced individually and joined before firing
• •A limited number of moulds supplied the basic components, and analysis suggests a small number of face moulds provided the underlying types
• •Individuality was added afterwards by hand, applying clay to modify features, ears, hair, moustaches and expression, so that a handful of base types produced thousands of apparently unique faces
• •Figures were painted in bright mineral pigments over a lacquer ground, so the army was originally vividly coloured rather than terracotta brown
• •Inscriptions on many figures name the foreman responsible, which served as quality control by making defects traceable, and which has allowed archaeologists to identify distinct workshops and their output
• •Real bronze weapons were supplied, many recovered in remarkable condition, with chromium detected on some surfaces, which was long taken as evidence of deliberate anti-corrosion treatment and has since been reinterpreted as contamination from the lacquer

The purpose follows from beliefs about the afterlife and from a specific historical shift. Earlier Chinese practice included human sacrifice at royal burials, with attendants killed to accompany a ruler, and the substitution of figurines for people is a change visible in the archaeological record well before Qin Shi Huang. The terracotta army is the most extravagant expression of that substitution: an entire military force provided in effigy to serve the emperor after death, facing east towards the territories he had conquered. Historical accounts describe the scale of the whole mausoleum project in terms that were long treated as exaggeration and that excavation has repeatedly supported. The historian Sima Qian, writing about a century later, described the tomb as containing a model of the empire with rivers and seas of flowing mercury, protected by automatic crossbows, and sealed after the workers inside were entombed. Soil surveys around the mound have found mercury concentrations far above background levels in a pattern loosely resembling the geography described, which is the strongest reason to take the account seriously.

The site presents an unusually acute preservation dilemma. The painted surfaces survived underground for over two thousand years and begin to curl and flake within minutes of exposure to dry air, because the lacquer layer beneath the pigment loses moisture and separates from the clay, which is why early excavation produced the plain figures now familiar and why the original colour is largely gone. Conservation methods developed in collaboration with German laboratories, using a consolidant applied immediately alongside humidity control, have made it possible to retain colour on more recently excavated figures. The larger decision concerns the tomb mound itself, which Chinese authorities have chosen not to excavate, on the stated grounds that current techniques are inadequate to preserve what would be found and that the mercury poses a genuine hazard. That restraint is unusual and is widely regarded as correct, given that the first excavations at the site destroyed information that better methods would have recovered.

The terracotta army guards the tomb of China's first emperor, comprising around eight thousand life-size figures in battle formation, found by well-diggers in 1974. Bodies were assembled from moulded parts with faces individualised by hand afterwards, so a few base types produced thousands of distinct-looking soldiers, and foremen's names were inscribed for quality control. The figures were brightly painted and the colour flakes within minutes of exposure. The tomb mound itself remains deliberately unexcavated.