Qin Terracotta Army

Lintong was the burial ground of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor to unify China in a series of bloody wars from 246 BC to 221 BC. Subsequently he laid the groundwork, on strictly Confucian principles, for the following government of China, even though his own dynasty barely outlasted his death in 210 BC. About 700,000 convicts worked in the tomb for 38 years, even after the Emperor's death. The aim was to build a complete army of warriors and horses in terracotta to serve the Emperor in the underworld after his death. The scale of the enterprise was staggering. Spreading out of the central burial mound at the foot of the Lishan Mountains, over 7000 terracotta soldiers and horses, and countless bronzes, have already been discovered since peasants found the site in 1974. This volume examines these treasures of Lintong, their history and how they were made.