The army a farmer found digging a well

Qin Shi Huang became the first emperor of a unified China in 221 BC, having spent the preceding decades conquering the six other states that made up the fractured territory before him. He standardised the currency, the writing system and the width of cart axles, began the network of fortifications that would eventually become the Great Wall, and then spent much of the rest of his reign preparing an enormous mausoleum for himself outside his capital, Xianyang, near what is now Xi'an. Buried with him, arranged in battle formation in pits beside the tomb, was an army: thousands of life-sized clay soldiers, horses and chariots, built to protect him in whatever came after death and left entirely undisturbed until March 1974, when a group of farmers digging a well struck fragments of clay a few feet down.

What they had found, and what archaeologists have been excavating in stages ever since, is one of the largest and most peculiar funerary projects ever undertaken. Current estimates put the total number of figures at around eight thousand, the great majority of them still unexcavated in pits that have not been fully opened. The tomb mound itself, a short distance away, has never been excavated at all; historical accounts describe traps and rivers of mercury inside it, and modern soil tests have found mercury concentrations in the surrounding earth unusually high enough to lend the old accounts some credibility. It remains sealed, whether from caution, respect or the simple difficulty of excavating something that size without damaging it.

No two faces the same

The detail that tends to surprise visitors most is not the scale but the individuality. Each soldier was assembled from separately moulded parts, head and body built up in the manner of an assembly line, and then finished by hand with distinct facial features, hairstyles and expressions, so that no two figures in the army are identical. Officers stand taller than infantry and dress differently; the horses pulling chariots are modelled with the same care as the men. The figures were originally brightly painted in reds, greens and purples, though almost all of that colour has flaked away or vanished within minutes of exposure to air after two thousand years underground, which is one reason archaeologists have been deliberately slow about opening further pits until conservation techniques improve.

Xi'an before and after the emperor

Xi'an, then called Chang'an, was already an old and significant city before Qin Shi Huang, and it went on to become one of the great capitals of the ancient world, the eastern terminus of the Silk Road and, under the Tang dynasty centuries later, arguably the largest city on Earth. The Terracotta Army sits some way outside the modern city, in Lintong District, but Xi'an itself carries plenty of the same layered history at closer range: a Ming-dynasty city wall still substantially intact and walkable, the Muslim Quarter with its centuries-old mosque built in a distinctly Chinese architectural style, and the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, built in the seventh century to house Buddhist scriptures brought back from India.

What the pits actually look like

The excavation is organised into three main pits, now enclosed under a purpose-built museum hall. Pit One, the largest, holds the bulk of the infantry in long straight columns, rank after rank stretching back into the gloom at the rear of the hall where restoration work continues; broken figures, recovered in pieces, are laid out for the slow process of reassembly, which can take a conservator months for a single soldier. It is not, on the whole, a place designed for a quick look. Most itineraries allow the best part of a morning, and it rewards that generosity.

When to see it

Xi'an sits inland, warmer and drier than Beijing in winter but still cold, and hot and dusty by midsummer. Spring and autumn suit it best, both for the temperature and for slightly thinner crowds at what remains, understandably, one of the most visited sites in the country. The pits are unheated and largely uncovered from the elements beyond the museum roof, so a cold day outside is a cold day inside as well.