Yang Zhifa’s shovel hit something hard. It was March 1974. The farmer was digging a well in an orchard in central China. He looked down to find that he had struck a piece of clay that looked like a man’s head. Yang didn’t know it yet, but he had just made one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time.
He had found a statue of a life-sized soldier made of a type of baked clay called terra-cotta. It turned out to be the first of many. Over the next few decades, archaeologists would uncover an entire army of terra-cotta warriors in the area.
Experts were amazed at how detailed the statues were. No two warriors looked exactly alike. The army, which was built more than 2,200 years ago, was buried in several enormous pits. The soldiers were neatly lined up, as if preparing for a battle.
“They’re an incredible record of what an army would have looked like,” says historian Jessica Rawson. She’s a professor at the University of Oxford in England. Rawson saw the statues up close in 1975 and has visited the site several times since.
Fifty years after the discovery, researchers are still uncovering new clues about China’s ancient clay army.