Field Trip: Terracotta Army, Xi’aN CHINA
Photo Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals. Photos: Pavel Špindler, CC BY 3.0, Gary Todd, via Wikimedia Commons
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: Summer Field Trip, Earth Etched
This week’s focus: Field Trip, where we highlight significant historic, archaeological, and cultural sites around the world
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1,200 words, an estimated 4-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
For our theme this month, we’re embarking on a journey of global field trips.
We’re exploring how people across time and place shaped land — carving or etching into earth, arranging natural materials — to tell stories, honor beliefs, and leave lasting imprints of cultural identity. And how the shaping of land is a shared human experience — bridging time and geography.
Different questions will guide us:
How have cultures around the world shaped the land to reflect their values, beliefs, and practical needs?
What can we learn — and still not know — about a society by examining how they interacted with their environment?
Why do some societies build on top of the land, while others build into it? Essentially, how do different materials (stone, earth, cliff, desert, etc.) influence or shape people’s choices?
To dive deeper into this topic, consider our inaugural monthly theme and its four newsletters: Land Shapes People and People Shape Land.
Last week, we stood among the pine-dotted valleys and cliffs — made of volcanic tuff — carved by Ancestral Puebloans of the U.S. American Southwest.
This week, we are traveling to northwest China, where an emperor ordered the construction of a giant subterranean realm — an army made of earth, buried underneath an empire.
The Terracotta Army of Xi’an China
Location: Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, northwest China
Time period: 3rd Century BCE; built around 246-208 BCE — more than 2,000 years ago!
Virtually visit the Terracotta Army via Google Earth
Virtual Tour
During a routine task of digging a well in Lintong, China — part of the fertile Guanzhong Plain, known for its staple crops like wheat and rice, and sprinkled with persimmons and pomegranate trees — local farmers unearthed something extraordinary: a life-sized head, sculpted from baked terracotta clay, alongside bronze arrowheads.
For generations, this land, a region blanketed by wind-blown silt, or loess soil, had been used for agriculture. Yet, deep below, lay a hidden world — sometimes called a “ghost army” — a long-guarded secret of China’s first empire.
The subterranean realm, constructed well over 2,000 years ago, stretches across more than 56 square kilometers (about 22 square miles), roughly the size of the island of Manhattan, in New York.
Soon, archaeologists arrived to investigate. And what they found was astonishing: several burial pits about 5 or 6 meters underground, filled with millions of broken pottery shards. Careful reconstruction revealed that the tomb held the remains of an estimated 8,000 life-size figures, each uniquely and meticulously crafted from locally sourced loess clay, and created on an industrial scale, using an assembly line method.
This massive collection of terracotta figures speaks not only to the grandeur of the Qin Dynasty but also to the uncompromising vision of Qin Shi Huang — the emperor whose rule, often marked by critical historical perspectives, led to the creation of the immense tomb and its guardian army.
The Role of Geography and the Rise of China’s First Emperor
Cradled by the Qinling Mountains to the south and nourished by the Weihe River, Xi’an’s fertile plains — rich in clay, protected by natural barriers, and abundant in agricultural production — played a crucial role in nurturing the rise of China’s first empire and its founding emperor, Qin Shi Huang.
Before becoming emperor, Qin Shi Huang — then known as Ying Zheng — ascended the throne of the Qin State in 246 BCE at just 13 years old.
During his reign, he is credited with uniting the “Seven Warring States,” launching the first phase of the Great Wall, and standardizing the writing system, weights, and measurements across the newly unified empire. He is also famously known for commissioning the construction of a vast mausoleum, guarded by an army of terracotta soldiers, horses, artisans, and more — everything he believed he would need to protect him in the afterlife.
It is estimated that “more than 700,000 laborers” — including skilled artisans, enslaved workers, and soldiers — constructed the burial pits, sculpted the terracotta figures, and forged the metal weapons that once armed them.
The tomb is described by UNESCO, “As the tomb of the first emperor who unified the country, it is the largest in Chinese history, with a unique standard and layout, and a large number of exquisite funeral objects. It testifies to the founding of the first unified empire — the Qin Dynasty, which during the 3rd BCE, wielded unprecedented political, military and economic power and advanced the social, cultural and artistic level of the empire.”
While this isn’t the world’s only mausoleum — as there are other notable examples across the globe, such as the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt, the Taj Mahal in India, the Tomb of Emperor Nintoku in Japan, the Temple of Inscriptions at Palenque in México — what makes the site of the Terracotta Army unique is its scale, industrial-level craftsmanship, and sheer number of life-sized, individual figures, each standing guard over a subterranean world likely intended for eternal rule.
Zooming In On the Terracotta Warriors
While the Terracotta Army may symbolize order, compliance, discipline, and collective might, it also tells the story of individuality — as no two figures are exactly alike.
Each figure was made to be distinct: with varying hairstyles, body postures, uniforms, weapons, physical builds, and facial features and expressions — some even appear to be smiling.
When archaeologists began to excavate the tomb, they uncovered shattered and possibly burned pottery. Over decades, thousands of terracotta figures — soldiers, artisans, horses, and other types of animals — have been painstakingly reassembled, reconstructed, or replicated from fragments.
Though they now appear earth-toned, it’s widely believed that the figures were once painted in vivid colors: reds, pinks, blues, and greens, likely made from natural materials, such as local minerals and plants. Even more surprising, traces of purple pigment have been found. An artificial or synthetic color, purple samples indicate that advanced chemistry was leveraged in ancient China more than 2,000 years ago.
Describing the findings, Dr. Li Xiuzhen notes: “This kind of chemical reaction is only found in China [around this time]. That’s really revolutionary, that kind of technology 2,000 years ago in Qin Dynasty times.”
Not only does the Terracotta Army and the tomb of Qin Shi Huang represent imperial ambition, industrial power and artisan skill, it also highlights noteworthy scientific innovation.
In the hands of people living in the first empire of China thousands of years ago, what was once wind-blow silt became one of the world’s largest clay baked subterranean realms — a grand story of the afterlife, of empire-building and labor, of art and science, of collectivity and individuality.
A secret of the empire, this underground world was likely never meant to be seen. And for over 2,000 years, it wasn’t — it remained silent and beneath the feet of generations, until a group of local farmers unearthed it by chance.
So we may ask: What might lie beneath our own feet — waiting to be awakened?
Click here to access a 360 view of the Terracotta Army.
Next week, we continue our global field trips — journeying to another place on Earth where people shaped the land and the land shaped them in return.
Stay tuned!
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