The Terracotta Army was found by seven well diggers in 1974

China’s Terracotta Army was discovered in March 1974, on 29 March by the date most museums give, when farmers digging a well near Xi’an struck fragments of life-size clay figures. Accounts usually credit one farmer, Yang Zhifa, but seven men dug that hole: six Yang brothers and their neighbour, Wang Puzhi.

They were not impressed. The brothers judged the pieces useless and unlucky, since they came from underground, where the dead live, and for weeks villagers carried figures and bronze arrowheads home as souvenirs or scrap. About a month passed before word reached Zhao Kangmin, director of the museum in nearby Lintong, who linked the fragments to the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, who died in 210 BC. Zhao reassembled the first warriors and later called himself their “first discoverer”. The farmers sued for credit and lost.

Half a century on, most of the army is still underground:

Measure	Figure
Figures excavated so far	2,000+
Figures estimated still buried	about 6,000
Bronze weapons recovered	40,000+
Area of the burial complex	56 km²

The excavated figures come from just three pits in what National Museums Liverpool calls the biggest burial site on earth, and no historical record ever mentioned an underground army.

Why not dig it all up?

Colour is one reason. The warriors were painted brightly over a coat of East Asian lacquer, and when a figure leaves the damp earth the lacquer dries, shrinks and peels, taking the paint with it. Conservators at the Technical University of Munich and their Chinese partners now spray fresh finds with polyethylene glycol to hold the moisture in, but the treatment darkens the surface.

The emperor’s own tomb mound has never been opened. Geophysical surveys have probed it, but excavators have held back. The Han-dynasty Records of the Grand Historian, written about a century after the burial, describes the Yangtze and Yellow rivers recreated in mercury beneath a ceiling of constellations. Like the boys who stumbled on Lascaux, the Yang brothers found the edge of something far bigger than their hole.