In 1974 a farmer digging on the outskirts of present-day Xi’an in China came across a puzzling object. He saw before him the head of a man, features frozen in an impassive, forbidding gaze, protruding from the ground as if buried alive. The head, it turned out, was made of clay and belonged to an entire terracotta soldier, realised in every detail of costume and armour; and that soldier turned out to be just one of a thousand more, arranged in full military formation to defend, for all time, the tomb of the legendary First Emperor of China, Ying Zheng. This ghostly army, all but bleached of the paint that had once made its soldiers seem all the more fierce and life-like, had lain in the ground undisturbed for more than two thousand two hundred years, following the emperor’s death and entombment. The farmer had stumbled on the single most extraordinary archaeological discovery of modern times.

Remarkable as they were, the terracotta soldiers turned out to be just the beginning of the find. They had been buried in a series of pits more than a kilometre away from a great tomb mound in the form of a square, flattened pyramid. They were the infantry, but there was also a cavalry division and numerous charioteers – more than a hundred have so far been excavated – riding in vehicles made of cast bronze. It soon emerged that the whole area was honeycombed with pits containing what amounted to a replica of the emperor’s entire world. Some contained acrobats, to entertain him in the afterlife. Others housed administrators and officials, while yet more were designed to stable his horses, which were killed and buried along with him and were discovered as a series of skeletons beneath the ground, each one tended by...

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