Today in history: The Terracotta Army discovered in China

There are some pretty special sites around the world that I have not had the pleasure of seeing yet and this is one of them. It is a particularly amazing one in my mind and given the size of it, it is surprising to me that something like this was actually unknown to the world and the people of China for many many years and it needed to be "discovered" by accident by farmers for the world to even know that it was there. It is located in the hills near Xi'an.

The year was 1974

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Yeah, it was surprising to me as well that it wasn't longer ago than that. It was discovered by accident by a group of 6 brother farmers, the "leader" of which was named Yang Zhifa. He and his brothers and one other person were out digging a well on their land because it was known for having lots of springs not terribly far from the surface when they discovered the Terracotta army location.

Originally, I thought to myself that this must have been a terrifying thing to encounter.

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But it wasn't like that at all. Yang and is bros didn't move a stone and then find an open room, Tomb Raider style, he just discovered a head or something like that and alerted authorities who then began investigating and removing soil just like you would expect with their little brushes and being very careful. This is because these statues are over 2000 years old.

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There is a lot of guesswork involved with the specifics behind this tomb and none of it involved Brenden Frasier and magic. It is a lavish tomb for the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang. This much is known from historical records.

Most people probably think (I did) the the Terracotta Army was just part of this one amazing room which would be a massive score for the archeology community anyway, but radar imagery and some fancy science gadgets, they are able to determine that the entire area honoring the first Emperor covers nearly 100 square kilometers of land, it just hasn't all been unearthed yet.

Here is something I found extremely interesting and ominous: The main tomb or mausoleum that is believed holds the corpse of the first emperor? They know where it is but they to this day have not opened it. It is hermetically sealed and there are no intentions of changing that. The official reason for not opening this is that the environment outside of it has been known to cause almost instant damage to the terracotta statues and the researches and officials do not wish this to happen to whatever is contained inside the football-field sized tomb room of Qin Shi Huang. I feel as though some people are superstitious and that makes me want them to open it even more.

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We know that the tomb is in this hill but the government has blocked all requests to excavate and unearth it claiming that "China's current technology is not able to deal with the large scale of the underground palace yet."

I suppose they can wait on that because there is so much more to be unearthed already and with such a massive area to deal with, it is hard to imagine but it is true that they have been working on this for over 40 years.

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From photos that I have seen I have always wondered why some of the statues were missing heads or arms but others were not. I always just assumed that someone made a mistake when they were unearthing it and broke it - which may be true. The fact of the matter (according to historians) is that these statues were not completed as a whole unit instead, they had factories that specialized in heads, or torsos, or legs, etc. The pieces would later be stuck together by a process called luting which is basically just a way of gluing stones together. This is the reason why so many of the statues seem to be missing the same pieces and also look almost exactly the same. These were early day assembly line statues.

It is thought that all of the statues were lavishly painted in bright colors as well, but most of this has faded over thousands of years as you would expect.

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Personally I like them better unpainted.

This site is one of the places in the world that is the most intriguing to me and I'd like to say that I'll be able to see it one day but according to friends of mine that have actually been to it, the place is a tourist nightmare so perhaps I'll just stick with the virtual online tour which allows you to get a lot closer than if you were there in person anyway

check it out HERE

That's a very nicely done website but you have to do some tinkering since it is all in Chinese. It's intuitive enough.

Anyway, this discovery made by farmers resulted in one of the most amazing archeological discoveries of all time and it all started today, a mere 46 years ago.