An accidental find
The Terracotta Army was not found by an expedition looking for it. In the spring of 1974, villagers digging a well in a farming area near Lintong, roughly 30 kilometres east of Xi’an in Shaanxi province, hit fragments of baked clay and some bronze objects. The region was suffering a dry spell, which is why they were digging for water. Accounts of the exact date and of who was in the group vary a little in retellings, but the broad outline is well agreed.
Villagers at first took the pieces for broken pottery or the remains of an old kiln, and some fragments were reportedly treated as scrap. Local cultural officials were alerted when the pieces turned out to include parts of life-sized human figures and bronze arrowheads. Provincial archaeologists were soon called in.
Why nobody had found it before
The site lay about a kilometre and a half east of the huge earth mound that had long been known as the tomb of Qin Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor. That mound had been recognised for two thousand years. What no one knew was that the tomb complex included separate underground pits full of life-sized figures. The Shiji, the main historical source, describes the tomb in dramatic terms, but it does not mention a buried army. The pits were covered by farmland and had simply been forgotten, and the figures had been buried well below the plough.
Trial trenches and the first pit
Archaeologists began with test trenches in 1974 and soon found that they had a very large rectangular pit. The first pit, now called Pit 1, is more than 200 metres long and in the order of 60 metres wide. Inside, earth partitions divided the space into long corridors, and the floors were paved with fired bricks. The ceilings were timber beams covered with matting and packed earth.
When the roof timbers rotted or burned, the ceilings fell in and crushed the figures beneath. The first work was therefore not to uncover standing soldiers but to recover thousands of fragments in the order they lay. Many warriors were later pieced back together, sometimes with parts of several figures having to be sorted. Traces of burning have been found in parts of the pit. Accounts of the later Qin collapse say that rebels looted and set fire to Qin buildings, but whether the fire in Pit 1 was deliberate, accidental or the result of later events is debated.
The wider complex is mapped
In 1976 core drilling located two more pits to the north of Pit 1. Pit 2 contains a mix of units, with chariots, cavalry, archers and infantry. Pit 3 is much smaller and appears to represent a command group. A fourth pit was found in the same area but seems never to have been completed, which is often cited as a sign that work stopped when the empire fell into crisis.
Other finds in the funerary complex followed over the next decades, including bronze chariots in 1980 and pits that held models of other kinds, such as officials and entertainers. These later discoveries show that the army was only one part of a larger tomb landscape, and that the clay soldiers are best understood as First Emperor tomb guardians within a much bigger funerary design.
From excavation to museum
Work in the 1970s was organised by Chinese state archaeologists, and a large hall was built over Pit 1 so that excavation could go on under cover. The museum opened to the public in 1979. In 1987 the complex was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Further excavation of Pit 1 and Pit 2 has continued in phases ever since.
Estimates of the total number of figures are often given as around 8,000 across the pits, but only a part has been excavated, and the numbers given in different publications differ. Treat any single figure as approximate.
What the find showed about archaeology
The case is a reminder of how much of archaeology depends on chance. A discovery that changed the understanding of the Qin empire came from a well, not from systematic survey. It also shows why the order of work matters. The way the pit was recorded and the broken pieces lifted affected what could later be learned about the figures. Modern archaeological methods, such as careful recording of fragments and later scientific analysis of pigments and clays, were applied only gradually in the years after 1974.
Compared with a famous modern find such as the Tutankhamun tomb discovery, the Chinese excavation was long and slow. It was carried out as a state project, and it is still continuing nearly fifty years later. The first discovery was only the beginning: the work of recording, restoring and understanding the army has taken decades.
The significance for Qin history
Before 1974 the best evidence for the Qin empire came from written sources composed after its fall. The pits gave scholars physical evidence of Qin military equipment, dress and craft organisation. The monument itself was made possible by the rapid consolidation that followed Qin unification, which gave the ruler the resources and labour to build on this scale.
The story of the find is therefore more modest than the legends that grew around it: a well, a drought and an unexpected pile of clay. Its consequences have been far larger.