![]() Now they realize he took a whole political system with him." "People thought when the emperor died, he took just a lot of pottery army soldiers with him. "We find the underground pits are an imitation of the real organization in the Qin dynasty," says Duan Qingbo, head of the excavation team at the Shaanxi Provincial Research Institute for Archaeology. The emperor's clay retinue includes terra cotta officials and even troupes of acrobats, slightly smaller than the soldiers but created with the same methods. Recent digs have revealed that in addition to the clay soldiers, Qin Shi Huangdi's underground realm, presumably a facsimile of the court that surrounded him during his lifetime, is also populated by delightfully realistic waterfowl, crafted from bronze and serenaded by terra cotta musicians. Among other accomplishments, the emperor standardized weights and measures and introduced a uniform writing script. Qin Shi Huangdi may have conquered China with his army, but he held it together with a civil administration system that endured for centuries. As archaeologists have learned during the past decade, however, that assessment was incomplete. The stupendous find at first seemed to reinforce conventional thinking-that the first emperor had been a relentless warmonger who cared only for military might. (Too fragile to be transported, the chariots are represented by replicas.) The artifacts offer a glimpse of the treasures that attract visitors from around the world to the Xi'an museum site, where 1,900 of an estimated 7,000 warriors have been disinterred so far. ![]() Another highlight is a pair of intricately detailed, ten-foot-long bronze chariots, each drawn by four bronze horses. The statuary includes nine soldiers arranged in battle formation (armored officers, infantrymen, and standing and kneeling archers), as well as a terra cotta horse. In addition to showcasing recent finds, the exhibitions feature the largest collection of terra cotta figures ever to leave China. for display from November 19 to March 31, 2010. It is now at the Houston Museum of Natural Science through October 18, and then moves to the National Geographic Society Museum in Washington, D.C. A second show, "Terra Cotta Warriors," then opened at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California. "The First Emperor," organized by the British Museum, debuted in London before moving to the High Museum in Atlanta. The site ranks with the Great Wall and Beijing's Forbidden City as one of the premier tourist attractions within China.įor those unable to make the journey to Xi'an, some of the choicest specimens unearthed there form the centerpiece of two successive traveling exhibitions that survey the reign of Qin Shi Huangdi (221 B.C.-210 B.C.). A second pit inside the museum demonstrates how they appeared when they were found: some stand upright, buried to their shoulders in soil, while others lie toppled on their backs, alongside fallen and cracked clay horses. In one pit, long columns of warriors, reassembled from broken pieces, stand in formation.With their topknots or caps, their tunics or armored vests, their goatees or close-cropped beards, the soldiers exhibit an astonishing individuality. Some are hard to get to, but three major pits are easily accessible, enclosed inside the four-acre Museum of the Terracotta Army, constructed around the discovery site and opened in 1979. Over the past 35 years, archaeologists have located some 600 pits, a complex of underground vaults as yet largely unexcavated, across a 22-square-mile area. necropolis, says British art historian Jane Portal, constitutes "arguably the most famous archaeological site on earth." Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi's vast third-century B.C. The 1974 discovery of buried vaults at Xi'an filled with thousands of terra cotta warriors stunned the world (the figures in situ today).
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