Lucky Strikes

Question: What accidental archaeological discovery did French President Jacques Chirac praise as the Eighth Wonder of the World?

Answer: Terra Cotta Army

Due to a prolonged drought in the spring of 1974, farmer Yang Zhifa and his brothers needed an alternate water source. They were digging a well in a small, wooded area outside their village, when one of their shovels struck something hard—it was the terracotta head of a Chinese warrior. It would soon become apparent that the farmers had stumbled upon one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century—an entire army of life-sized clay warriors arranged in precise military formation in a series of vast underground pits. This was the afterlife army of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang: more than 8,000 battle-ready warriors—from infantry and archers to horse-mounted cavalry. Entombed in the earth for more than two millennia, they were all brought back to life by one lucky shovel strike.

Excavations began immediately (and continue to the present day), and in just a few short years, the “Terra Cotta Army” of Xi’an was ready to welcome the public. Among the first visitors to the site was the current Mayor of Paris and soon-to-be President of France ...

Jacque Chirac, the one-man army who brought the Terra Cotta Army to the West 

Jacque René Chirac had a deep passion for ancient Chinese history and culture. He would visit China four times during his political career, including in 1978 when he was so struck by the sheer scale and craftsmanship of the Terra Cotta Army in Xi’an that his words got the attention of the entire world. “There were Seven Wonders in the world,” he said, “and the discovery of the Terra Cotta Army, we may say, is the eighth miracle of the world. No one who has not seen the pyramids can claim to have visited Egypt—and now I'd say that no one who has not seen these terracotta figures can claim to have visited China." UNESCO was equally impressed, adding the Terra Cotta Army to its prestigious World Heritage list in 1987.

Chirac made headlines again when he returned to Xi’an for a second tour of the site in 1991. During that visit he famously remarked that the underground army matched the historical weight of Athens and Rome. The French leader also delighted his hosts in Xi’an with his knowledge of China’s ancient roots—especially when he abandoned protocol to give his entourage a spontaneous lecture on the Western Han dynasty. He was often seen waving aside his security guards and shouting out in the dark mausoleum: “Journalists! Come over here, there's something interesting!"

Chirac’s final official state visit as President of France was in 2006. The first Western leader to visit the Terra Cotta Army in Xi’an—and a great friend of the Chinese people—Chirac died in 2019. What was it about this archaeological treasure that impressed him so much? Well, pretty much everything, including how ...

It took an army to build a terracotta army

Crafting a vast army of life-sized statues from the same mold would still be quite an impressive feat. But there is nothing cookie-cutter about the thousands of figures that make up the Terra Cotta Army—because no two are alike. Each one varies in size, dress, hair style, and posture. Faces are so delicately carved, you can see individual strands of hair. Unique features that vary from soldier to soldier even reveal the different ethnic groups that made up China’s army in the third century B.C.

Every soldier was also equipped with real weapons—bronze swords, spears, battle axes, crossbows, shields, and more—and the ones that were found were in an astonishing state of preservation. And it wasn’t just soldiers. There were bronze horse-drawn chariots found, along with hundreds of life-sized terracotta horses. While the paint has faded after so many centuries underground, each figure was originally decorated in a rich palette of colors, including white, red, green, blue, and black.

Coming up with life-sized clay army of this scale doesn’t happen overnight, of course. It would take 700,000 craftsmen working around the clock for 40 years to create the Terra Cotta Army. Built on an industrial scale in government workshops in the late third century BC, artisans would mold the head, torso, arms, hands, and legs of each soldier out of clay. Once a soldier was assembled, facial features, hairstyles, and armor details were added. Then each figure would be fired in a kiln before being painted in bright colors. (Unfortunately, the paint quickly flaked off when they were unearthed and exposed to the elements.)

Something else to keep in mind is that even with ongoing excavations, we’re still only seeing a fraction of the Terra Cotta Army.

Unearthing an entire army is the pits ...

Archaeologists, who have been excavating the site for 50 years, have located some 600 pits related to the Terra Cotta Army. These pits, which represent a complex of underground vaults, are spread out across an area of 22 square miles. Three of these major pits are enclosed inside the four-acre Museum of Qin Terra-Cotta Warriors and Horses (really, just a protective roof built over fully-exposed pits), which opened for public viewing in 1979. Thus far, about 2,000 warriors and horses have been excavated from the three different burial pits. That means there are still at least 6,000 soldiers of the Terra Cotta Army still buried deep in the earth.

Pit One, the largest of the three, is about the size of an airplane hangar. There are close to 2,000 warriors and horses on display here, all facing east toward the ancient enemies of the Qin Empire. In the center, there is another group of armed soldiers and horse-driven carriages. The much smaller Pit Two is still under active excavation, but contains fascinating displays of standing and kneeling archers, along with partially unearthed soldiers in various poses. Pit Three is smaller still, and has some 68 figures on display, including one of the seven generals of the Terra Cotta Army.

There is also a room called the Exhibition of Bronze Chariots, which is just as the name implies. This beautiful exhibition hall showcases some of the stunning chariots and horses of the Terra Cotta Army. Constructed primarily of bronze, each chariot also contains close to 2,000 gold and silver ornaments.

We see his army, but what about the emperor himself?

The Qin dynasty outlived Qin Shi Huang by just four years, and we know exactly where he was buried. The emperor’s tomb lies beneath a forested hill less than a mile away from the current Terra Cotta Army museum. But out of reverence for his imperial resting place, it has never been excavated—and probably never will be. It’s too bad, because a description written by a Han era historian speaks of the tomb containing a “wealth of wonders,” “palaces and scenic towers for a hundred officials,” and even a simulation of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers using mercury to create the shimmering flow of the water (and soil tests do indeed pick up high levels of mercury).

Perhaps some future generations will get to see what lies inside the tomb of the first emperor to unite China. If the Terra Cotta Army is anything to go by, it will certainly be something to behold ...

A bit more about the Terra Cotta Army—and other accidental archaeological discoveries

• A well-armed army—All the soldiers in the Terra Cotta Army were fitted with real weapons of the period, which included bronze swords, longbows, arrows, spears, dagger-axes, and other long-shafted weapons. While many were stolen soon after burial, recovered weapons revealed they had been treated to make them resistant to rust and corrosion—which meant that even after being buried for over 2,000 years, they were still sharp. We don’t know about you, but our kitchen knives get dull in a month ...
• Chirac was an Eastern culture warrior—Jacque Chirac was equally fond of Japanese culture. He especially loved the nation’s sumo traditions, and successfully organized the Grand Sumo Tournament in Paris while he was Prime Minister in 1986 and again in 1995 when he was President. He even named his dog “Sumo.”
• Vive la France!—While some French soldiers were building a fort in the Egyptian town of Rosetta in 1799, they stumbled across an old slab used as construction material. Noticing some writing on it, they gave it to their superior officer, who alerted some scientists. The three scripts inscribed on the “Rosetta Stone,” would unlock the secret to deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Housed in the British Museum since 1802, the recent opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza has renewed calls for the return of the Rosetta Stone and other artefacts taken during the colonial era.
• Another lucky strike—It wasn’t with a shovel like those farmers near Xi’an, but in 1912 workers using pickaxes struck a hard wooden box while they were demolishing a house in Cheapside, London. The box contained some 400 pieces of priceless late-16th and early-17th century jewelry, including a Swiss watch set in a solid emerald; a gold, diamond, and emerald salamander; and a Byzantine gemstone cameo. Stuffing the treasures in their pockets, boots, and hats, the workers sold it all to the owner of a local pawnshop—who turned out to be the head of acquisitions for the London Museum. You can guess the rest ...
• Meet me at the Batcave, Robin—In the fall of 1940, 18-year-old Marcel Ravidat was walking in the woods outside his village in France when he came across the entrance to a cave—although some say it was his dog who was chasing a rabbit who found the entrance. Either way, Marcel returned with three friends to explore the cave and found the walls covered in brightly painted figures of bulls, horses, stags, rhinoceroses, lions, and abstract shapes. They made a pact to keep their find a secret—but that lasted about a week. The Lascaux cave opened to the public in 1948, but closed 15 years later as visitors’ breath was damaging the priceless prehistoric art. A full-scale replica of the cave can now be visited.
• Three Wise Men get their goat—In 1947, three Bedouin shepherds looking for their lost goat followed it into a cave about a mile from the Dead Sea. Inside, they found clay jars containing seven papyrus scrolls, selling them for a pittance to an antiquities dealer in Bethlehem. When scholars realized the importance of the find, they tried to locate the cave without success. They finally found it in 1949 and over the next decade, several excavations would uncover a total of 981 texts. Known as the Qumrun or Dead Sea Scrolls, the writings beat the then oldest known manuscript of the Hebrew Bible by more than a thousand years.
• I thought you’d never get here—When Helmut and Erika Simon were hiking in the Ötztal Alps in 1991, they spotted an upper body jutting out of a glacier. Assuming he was a climber who had recently perished, they reported their find to a gendarme. After trying to extract the body with ice picks and a pneumatic drill (a terrible choice in hindsight), the body was finally freed from its icy tomb—but within days, a University of Innsbruck archaeologist identified the figure as a Bronze Age man. Since then, “Otzi” (named after the mountains where he was found) has been a boon to archaeology due to his remarkable state of preservation. Genome sequencing and other research has revealed much about 5,300-year-old Otzi and even identified 19 men from South Tyrol who are genetically related to him. Oh, and apparently, Otzi was lactose intolerant, too.
• Stop badgering me—It’s not just humans that have stumbled upon important archaeological discoveries. A badger had been digging his den for five years on a farm in Germany when he unearthed a human pelvic bone. Annoyed at the presence of a previous tenant, the badger left—but ensuing archaeological excavations revealed eight 12th-century graves, along with bronze bowls, a double-edged sword, and more. A coin in the mouth of one skeleton was evidence of a pre-Christian funerary ritual. Since that area had been thoroughly Christianized by the 12th-century, the badger is credited with discovering one of the last pagan burial sites in Brandenburg.

Discover the Terra Cotta Army, the Great Wall, and more during our New! China’s Imperial Cities, Natural Splendor & Modern Marvels adventure.