Cold Open

It’s March 29th, 1974 in Lintong, a village near the city of Xi’an, China.

41-year-old farmer Yang Zhifa wipes his brow and takes up his shovel again. It’s a hot day, but there’s little time for rest. Zhifa and his five brothers all work on the same collective farm and today they are digging a new well to water their crops, which have been suffering in a drought. This is their third day of digging, they still haven’t hit water.

Zhifa raises his shovel yet again… but this time, he hits something that’s more than just dirt. Zhifa kneels to take a closer look. Using his shovel, he clears away clods of earth to reveal what looks like an oddly shaped jar. Zhifa gets his fingers under the edge and pulls it loose. He’s disappointed to see that it’s broken - if the jar had been in one piece, he could have taken it home and used it. Instead, he tosses it aside and wearily picks up his shovel.

But it’s not long before Zhifa hits terracotta again. All around him, his brothers are finding pieces too. Zhifa starts piling up the scraps. These discoveries soon draw the attention of other villagers, who are suspicious about removing these items from the ground. They complain that Zhifa could spoil the natural Feng Shui of the land or wake evil spirits - by disturbing these items, Zhifa could bring disaster to the village.

But Zhifa keeps digging. And soon, he notices that the terracotta scraps look more and more like the parts of a body: here is a clay pair of shoulders, there a leg, and most recently he's dug up a torso. Zhifa then digs out the first fragment he’d found, the one he tossed aside. And looking more closely at it now, Zhifa realizes it’s not a jar or a bowl. It’s a terracotta head.

The first, incomplete terracotta figure found by Yang Zhifa and his brothers is just the beginning. Chinese archeologists will soon descend on the site and excavate more than a thousand similar statues, each featuring incredible detail and exquisite craftsmanship. The buried statues will become known as the Terracotta Army and will change scholars’ understanding of ancient China forever. But the army may never have come to light without the swing of a farmer’s shovel on March 29th, 1974.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is March 29th, 1974: The Discovery of China’s Terracotta Army.

Act One

It’s 246 BCE, in the Qin kingdom of what is now China, 2,220 years before the discovery of the terracotta warriors.

In a grand chamber deep within the Royal Palace, 13-year-old Ying Zheng swings his legs on his father’s throne. The seat is too big and uncomfortable for the boy, and his legs don’t even touch the floor—but that won’t stop him from being crowned the new King of Qin.

In the third century BCE, China is a jigsaw puzzle of seven different kingdoms, all differing in size and military strength. But Qin is the strongest, thanks to Zheng’s great-grandfather King Zhoxiang. Zhoxiang created a strong centralized government and won several wars against his neighbors to enlarge his territory. Since then, his descendants have secured supremacy in the region. Now, young Zheng is to be the latest ruler of the Kingdom - and even at his tender age, he’s determined to live up to his illustrious ancestor.

After his coronation ceremonies are complete, one of Zheng’s first acts as king is to order the construction of a royal tomb, and his advisers hurry to put his edict into effect. But as Zheng grows up, the tomb-building program is soon overshadowed by his military aspirations.

Sixteen years after being crowned King, Zheng is no longer a boy. Now, he’s an ambitious 29-year-old, and he launches an offensive to capture more territory. Zheng’s armies invade neighboring kingdoms, winning one bloody battle after another, and after nine years of campaigning, Zheng accepts the surrender of his final opponent and unifies all of China under one government for the first time in history. No longer satisfied with the title of king, Zheng invents a new word to describe his position of ultimate power. From now on Zheng will be known as Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China.

Just as his great-grandfather united his kingdom under a centralized government, the new Emperor applies the same principle to a much larger territory. Under the emperor’s leadership, the government standardizes China’s written language, implements a new currency, and applies strict new legal codes. And the Emperor doesn’t just leave the work to his loyal servants—he’s involved in every decision, even enacting laws regulating the width of cartwheels to aid faster transportation of troops and goods.

And aside from building a strong bureaucracy, the new government also orders the collection of new taxes to pay for large-scale construction projects. The Great Wall of China is strengthened to protect the northern frontier, and the ongoing work on the royal tomb complex grows larger and more ornate. Subjects from across the empire dig the mausoleum into the side of a mountain. Its layout is designed to reflect the Emperor’s palace and includes everything the emperor might need in the afterlife.

But despite the expansion of his royal tomb, the Emperor has no intention of dying. As he gets older, he becomes obsessed with finding a magical elixir, one that will grant him immortality—but he never does. The emperor dies at the age of forty-nine while traveling through China on an inspection tour. His death was possibly the result of drinking mercury in the mistaken belief that the toxic element would help him live forever.

But the Emperor’s death while traveling so far from the capital leaves his empire vulnerable. To ensure a smooth succession, his aides keep his death a secret. His carriage returns home with the blinds lowered, but meals and messages are delivered as if the Emperor was still alive. And when the decomposing body starts to smell, officials order a cart of fish to join the Imperial Entourage to mask the odor.

Finally, the Emperor's body is buried in the vast mausoleum he spent his reign building. To pay respect to the first ruler of a unified China, the Emperor's family, and loyal servants bury him with all sorts of treasures. After commanding his armies to so many victories in real life, the Emperor is buried with a life-size terracotta army: thousands of soldiers carrying real weapons including infantry, archers, generals, and even cavalrymen riding terracotta horses.

The Emperor is buried in the ultimate glory, but the unified Chinese nation that he created will not last long. Within just four years, his empire will fracture into smaller kingdoms once again. And the exact location of the first emperor’s tomb will then be forgotten for more than two thousand years until a group of farmers digging a well will stumble across it - and change history.

Act Two

It’s early April 1974 in Lintong, China, a few days after Yang Zhifa and his brothers discovered a terracotta warrior while digging a well.

38-year-old Zhao Kangmin rides his bicycle along a dirt track, his hair whipping in the wind. Kangmin is an archaeologist working for a local museum, and he’s excited to see this new discovery that’s been reported by the village’s leaders.

But when Kangmin arrives at the village, he’s shocked to see how casually the Yang brothers have treated the pieces of the terracotta figure they’ve found. These ancient artifacts have been piled haphazardly in the back of a cart. Some are broken, others have been thrown away. Kangmin even finds some village children tossing a terracotta finger back and forth between them in a game of catch.

Kangmin takes the finger from the children and gathers all the other pieces he can find. Treating them as delicately as possible, he returns to his office at the Lintong Museum. Kangmin’s place of work is quiet and doesn’t attract many visitors—exactly what Kangmin needs to reconstruct the terracotta figure in peace. And as he puts it together, he soon realizes that the figure is that of a soldier.

Inspired by his reconstruction, Kangmin returns to the village to conduct test excavations. And immediately, he discovers more terracotta warriors. He also digs up metal arrowheads and spear points, but they’re all missing the wooden shafts they were once attached to. They must have all rotted away in the soil. And that's interesting to Kangmin because it suggests that these artifacts are extremely old. And Kangmin soon concludes that they were buried more than 2,000 years ago, as part of the lost mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, China’s first emperor. But even though this discovery has the potential to transform historians’ understanding of China’s past, Kangmin doesn’t report his findings to other archeologists. He feels like he can’t make this knowledge public without putting the statues in danger.

In 1974, the Cultural Revolution is in full swing in China. China’s leader, Mao Zedong wants to strengthen the Communist Party’s grip by eliminating any opposition to his rule. And that includes erasing aspects of Chinese history that do not live up to the Communist Party’s ideals. Under Chairman Mao’s influence, many ancient artworks have been vandalized or destroyed by groups who believe that China’s imperial past should be forgotten.

In this volatile political climate, Kangmin fears that the Terracotta Army he’s found won’t be safe. So, he keeps the discovery quiet to protect it from destruction. The secret leaks, though, when a journalist gets a tip and writes about the archaeological find in a newspaper. Although Kangmin is at first alarmed, the scale and mystery of the Terracotta Army enchants the people of China, and even the Communists don’t dare to destroy them.

In fact, Communist authorities soon pledge to protect the Terracotta Army. An enormous building, the size of an airplane hangar, is erected over the entire area. Using ground penetrating radar, archaeologists discover the warriors are buried in precise lines as if they were on parade. Then they painstakingly dig away the earth surrounding the statues, trying as best they can to keep each warrior intact. Over time, they excavate around 1,500 statues, while leaving thousands of others untouched beneath the ground to preserve them for future investigation.

Microscopic analysis of these statues shows they were once painted different colors. Thousands of years buried in the soil has dissolved the paint but what’s left behind is still impressive. Experts are amazed by the skill of the Terracotta Army’s creators. These ancient artisans created the warriors’ torsos out of a single, hollow piece of clay. Hands, arms, legs, and faces were added later, and the craftsmen paid such attention to detail that no two soldiers are exactly alike—they have individual heights, hairstyles, even facial expressions. These warriors even have different ruffle patterns on their sleeves and at least twelve different individually styled hooks for their belts.

In 1979, a new, state-of-the-art museum dedicated solely to the Terracotta Army opens at the site, transforming the area into a tourist hotspot. A few years later, the Terracotta Army gains international attention as well, when some of the figures are exhibited outside of China for the first time, in Melbourne, Australia.

As these Terracotta Warriors become famous around the world, Zhao Kangmin will be celebrated as the archaeologist who excavated the first statues and cleverly ensured their survival during the Cultural Revolution. But the role of the farmer who had the first glimpse of terracotta pieces while digging a well will long be overlooked. For years, discovering the Terracotta Army will seem more like a curse to Yang Zhifa. But times will eventually change, China will open up to the world, and a visit from the most powerful man on the planet will finally give Zhifa his moment in the sun.

Act Three

It’s June 26th, 1998 in Lintong, China, twenty-four years after farmer Yang Zhifa and his brothers discovered the Terracotta Army.

Zhifa is now 65 years old, and he’s no longer a farmer. Instead, he works at the museum built around the Terracotta Army. Today, he sits at the gift shop as usual, ready to sign his autograph in the books and pamphlets purchased by museum visitors.

In the early years after the discovery of the first terracotta warrior, Zhifa’s life was made complicated. When archeologists realized the importance of the ancient statues, the Chinese Ministry of Culture evicted Zhifa’s whole village. Some of Zhifa’s more superstitious neighbors had warned him not to dig up the terracotta warriors, and they blamed him for being relocated from their ancestral land. For a time, Zhifa was ostracized from his community. But he made peace with his discovery and his neighbors when the influx of tourists visiting the new museum brought a new source of revenue to the region—and today, there’s a special guest that Zhifa has been told to set aside some time for.

The gift shop door opens, and American President Bill Clinton walks in with his family. President Clinton shakes Zhifa’s hand and the two men have a short, halting conversation through translators. It’s a small but important token of recognition for a man who unearthed one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time.

The excavation and study of the Terracotta Army is still ongoing. Although archaeologists have dug up parts of Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s sprawling mausoleum, the actual tomb containing his body remains unopened. The Chinese Ministry of Culture believes it’s impossible to excavate the tomb without destroying what lies inside. So, for the foreseeable future, the first emperor of China will remain at rest, his eternal sleep protected by thousands of ornately decorated soldiers, a Terracotta Army, a triumph of ancient art that was discovered on March 29th, 1974.

Outro

Next on History Daily. April 1st, 1997. The Hale-Bopp Comet reaches the closest point to the sun on its long loop through space, presenting a magnificent spectacle to stargazers on Earth.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Gabriel Gould.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Jack O’Brien.

Edited by Scott Reeves.

Managing producer, Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship, and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.