Shaanxi · The Guard, and the Tomb Nobody Has Opened
Terracotta Army (秦始皇兵马俑)
Thousands of life-size pottery soldiers buried in ranks outside the tomb of China’s first emperor, found by well-diggers in 1974. They were painted when they went into the ground, and the tomb they were put there to guard has never been opened.
Quick Facts
The Short Version
| What it is | Pits of life-size pottery soldiers, horses and chariots, part of the burial complex of the first emperor of a unified China |
|---|---|
| Where | Lintong, about 40 km east of central Xi’an |
| Found | 1974, by farmers sinking a well |
| Heritage status | Inscribed by UNESCO in 1987 as the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor |
| How many | The museum’s published estimate is around eight thousand figures across the three pits, of which some two thousand have been restored and stood back up |
| Three pits | Pit 1 holds the main formation and is the one everyone photographs. Pit 2 is mostly still in the ground. Pit 3 is small and appears to be a command post |
| Also here | Two half-scale bronze chariots found in 1980, displayed in their own hall and regularly walked past |
| Time needed | Two to three hours on site, most of a day with travel |
Why Go
Two Things Worth Knowing Before You Go
1. This is the guard. The tomb is still shut
The pits sit about a kilometre and a half east of a wooded hill that is not a hill. It is the burial mound of Qin Shi Huang, who took the throne of Qin in 246 BC, made himself ruler of a unified China in 221, and died in 210. The army was buried facing east, outside the walls of that tomb complex, in the direction of the states he had conquered.
The mound has never been excavated. That is a standing decision rather than an oversight: nobody is confident that what is inside would survive being opened, and the argument for waiting until the techniques are better has held for decades. Soil surveys over the mound have reported unusual mercury readings, which is interesting because the Han historian Sima Qian, writing a century after the burial, described the tomb as containing rivers of mercury. Nobody has been down to check, and most visitors leave without realising the emperor himself is still under that hill.
2. They were painted, and that is why so much is still buried
The figures came out of the ground with colour on them: pink faces, dark hair, red and green and purple on the armour, laid over a lacquer ground. Once that lacquer dries in open air it curls away from the pottery and takes the pigment with it, and the process is measured in minutes rather than days. A great deal of the paint that existed in 1974 no longer exists.
The response has been to slow down. Large parts of Pit 2 have been deliberately left in the earth, and what you see there is collapsed roofing timber, broken pottery and figures lying where they fell. That is not a work in progress that ran out of funding. It is the same argument as the tomb: leave it for people with better methods. The grey you are looking at is not what these things looked like, and knowing that changes the visit.
The catch. Pit 1 is viewed from a walkway around the rim, which means the nearest standing warrior is a good way below you and some distance off. You never get close to one in the pit, and the close views are all in display cases. It is also extremely busy: the main hall handles enormous numbers and the rail at the front end is three deep for most of the day. Come early, go anticlockwise against the flow, and treat the bronze chariot hall as a real stop rather than the thing you walk through on the way out.
Orientation
Getting There, and the Order to Walk It
The site is about 40 km east of the city. Tourist buses run from the area beside Xi’an railway station, the metro plus a connecting bus works, and a car or a driver is the comfortable option. Allow an hour each way and more in the afternoon.
The standard flow sends everyone into Pit 1 first, which is why Pit 1 is worst at the time most people arrive. Going to Pit 3, then Pit 2, then the bronze chariot hall, and finishing in Pit 1 later in the morning is a materially better visit and costs nothing. The burial mound is a separate part of the same site and is usually skipped.
Practical
Things Worth Knowing
Be at the gate when it opens
The difference between nine and eleven in the morning at the Pit 1 rail is the difference between looking at warriors and looking at the backs of heads.
Walk Pit 1 in reverse
The far end of the hall, where the unrestored rows and the earth ridges are, is quieter and more informative than the famous front rank.
Give the bronze chariots twenty minutes
They are in a separate building and most groups pass through in three. As craftsmanship they are the best thing on the site.
Pair it with Huaqing, not with the city
Huaqing Palace is 5 km back toward Xi’an and works as the afternoon half. Trying to add the city wall on the same day makes for a bad version of both.
Timing
When to Go
| Season | The case for | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| March to May | Mild, clear and before the summer crowds arrive | Dust storms occasionally reach Xi’an in spring |
| September to November | The most comfortable weather of the year and good light in the halls | The first week of October is the national holiday and the site is close to unusable |
| June to August | Long opening hours and late afternoons that are quieter than mornings | Very hot, and the halls hold the heat. This is also the domestic peak |
| December to February | The quietest months, and the only time the front rail is easy | Cold, and Xi’an winter air is often poor |
Context
What the Army Was For
Qin Shi Huang inherited one of several warring states and finished the conquest of the rest in 221 BC. The administration he imposed on the result, with standard script, standard measures, standard axle widths and a career bureaucracy in place of hereditary lords, is the template Chinese states worked from for the next two thousand years. His own dynasty collapsed within four years of his death.
Burying a ruler with an army was not new in principle. What is new here is the scale and the substitution: earlier practice in this region had included burying live retainers, and pottery figures stand in for them. Building a full army in clay was an enormous industrial undertaking rather than a craft one, and some figures carry the stamped names of the workshops and foremen responsible for them.
The pits are a fraction of the complex. Survey work around the mound has found dozens of other pits holding bronze waterfowl, stone armour, acrobats and officials, which together suggest an attempt to reproduce a working court and its equipment underground rather than simply a guard. The army is the part that was found first and is the part built for visitors.
Nearby
Other Stops on the Same Trip
Spot · 5 km west
Huaqing Palace (华清宫)
Tang imperial hot spring pools and the site of the 1936 incident that changed the Chinese civil war. The standard afternoon half of this day.
Spot · 35 km west
Xi’an City Wall and Stele Forest (西安城墙)
The complete Ming wall around the old city, and the forest of inscribed stone tablets inside it.
Spot · 70 km east
Mount Hua (华山)
Granite ridges and chain-assisted paths, and the obvious second day out of Xi’an if you want the opposite of a museum.
Where to Base
Xi’an (西安)
Xi’an is the base and needs two to three days of its own: the Ming wall, the Muslim quarter, the Tang foundations at Daming Palace and the Shaanxi History Museum, which holds the context for everything you see out at Lintong and is free to enter with a booking.
The Lintong sites east of the city make one day, the city itself another, and Mount Hua a third. High-speed rail puts Xi’an within a few hours of Beijing, Chengdu and Luoyang, which makes it easy to arrive from almost anywhere.
Experiences
What You Can Actually Do Here
On site · 3 hr
The three pits in reverse order
Pit 3, Pit 2, the bronze chariots, then Pit 1 once the first wave has moved through.
On site · 1 hr
The burial mound
A short drive from the pits, included in the same site, and almost empty. Worth it for the fact of standing on the thing rather than for the view.
Guided · 2 days
Lintong and the city
The army and Huaqing on one day with someone who can read the workshop marks and the pit stratigraphy, the wall and the history museum on the next.
Go at opening, walk it backwards, and hold on to the two facts that the crowd at the front rail does not have: the colour is gone and much of the rest is still buried because of it, and the man these thousands of figures were made to guard is lying under a wooded hill a kilometre and a half away that nobody has opened in two thousand two hundred years.
Do the Lintong Day Properly
Tell us your dates and our local team will get you through the gate at opening, run the pits in the order that actually works, and put Huaqing and the burial mound into the same day without the coach-tour march.