When archaeologist Zhao Kangmin picked up the phone in April 1974, all he was told was that a group of farmers digging a well nearby had found some relics.
Desperate for water amid a drought, the farmers had been digging about a metre down when they struck hard red earth. Underneath, they had found life-size pottery heads and several bronze arrowheads. It could be an important find, Zhao's boss said, so he should go and have a look as soon as possible.
A local farmer-turned-museum curator in China's central Shaanxi province, Zhao - who died on 16 May at the age of 81 - had an inkling of what he might find. He knew figures had in the past been dug out of the earth in the area near the city of Xian, home to orchards of persimmon and pomegranate trees, and not far from the tomb of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang.
A decade earlier, he had personally uncovered three kneeling crossbowmen. But he had never been certain that they dated back to the rule of the emperor - who unified the Chinese nation for the first time under the short-lived Qin dynasty (221-206 BC).
But what Zhao was about to find would surpass anything he could have imagined. The farmers, it would turn out, had stumbled upon one of the most stunning archaeological finds of the 20th Century: a terracotta army estimated at 8,000-strong, crafted on an industrial scale 2,200 years earlier to defend the emperor in the afterlife. A ghost army, complete with horses and chariots, hidden underground and never meant to be seen by the living.
Zhao headed to the location of the find with a colleague. "Because we were so excited, we rode on our bicycles so fast it felt as if we were flying," he would later write in a 2014 essay. As he arrived, Zhao told the British historian John Man: "I saw seven or eight pieces - bits of legs, arms and two heads - lying near the well, along with some bricks."
He said he immediately realized these were likely the remnants of Qin-era statues. The farmers - who had made the find weeks earlier and already sold some of the bronze arrowheads for scrap - were told to stop their work immediately.
---BBC
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