← Back to the gallery
Artwork · 210 BC · Sculpture

Terracotta Army

Artist unknown
210 BC · Terracotta
Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi'an
★ 9.6 editorial score

Thousands of life-size clay soldiers — infantrymen, archers, charioteers, officers, and their horses — stand in battle formation in vast earthen pits, buried around 210 BC to guard the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, China's first emperor. Each figure was assembled from molded parts and finished by hand, so no two faces are alike, and all were once brightly painted. Discovered by well-diggers in 1974 near Xi'an, the army is displayed in place under the halls of the mausoleum site museum, the most staggering funerary undertaking in the history of sculpture.

Movement
Qin

Related works

Other works that share a movement, a subject, or an artist with this one.

Other media

Works in other forms that share a subject with this one.

Other media onSubject·Soldiers
Quote · 1986

“They come from the end of the line, most of 'em—small towns you never heard of: Pulaski, Tennessee; Brandon, Mississippi; Pork Bend, Utah; Wampum, Pennsylvania. Two years' high school's about it. Maybe if they're lucky, a job waiting for them back in a factory. But most of 'em got nothing. They're poor. They're the unwanted. Yet they're fighting for our society and our freedom. It's weird, isn't it? At the bottom of the barrel, they know it. Maybe that's why they call themselves "grunts", 'cause a grunt can take it—can take anything.”

Chris