The buried army of life-sized clay soldiers, horses, and chariots arrayed in battle formation around the unexcavated tomb of Qin Shi Huang, China's First Emperor, near Xi'an — made to guard China’s First Emperor in the afterlife, lost for two thousand years, and struck by farmers digging a well in 1974.
In 1974, farmers digging a well near Xi'an struck a head made of clay. They had broken into an army. Beneath the dry fields lay thousands of life-sized soldiers, standing in ranks in long earthen pits, facing east as if waiting for an order that never came. The faces look strikingly individual. They were built to guard a dead man forever. That man was the First Emperor of China, who unified the country and then prepared to rule it from beyond the grave. The clay army is only his outer wall. At the center, under a great green mound, lies his tomb, still sealed, never opened. An ancient historian wrote that inside it ran rivers of liquid mercury beneath a ceiling of stars. Modern soil tests found strange amounts of mercury in the mound. The army was found. The emperor still waits.