The Terracotta Army Under a Well

The hoe came down, then stopped short.

It was not the sound of loose soil. It was not the sound of a root snapping. It was a short, hard knock that jolted all the way back up into the shoulders of the man holding the hoe.

He crouched down and brushed the yellow dust aside with his hand.

By then the bottom of the pit was deeper than a man is tall. The dry-season sun shone straight down from the mouth of the pit in a column of white light. The other men in the pit stopped work too. They were digging a well. The fields had cracked into a web of fine lines, and the village water was running low, so nine villagers had picked a corner of a field to dig in until they struck water.

What had stopped the hoe was not stone. Stone is never that smooth.

They scraped away another layer of earth. A curve appeared, smooth and slightly glossy. Then the rim of an ear. Then a chin. Then two cheekbones.

At midday, at the bottom of a half-dug well, the men were bending over a human face made of terracotta. The face was looking up at them too, calm, as if it had been lying there waiting for a very long time.

This happened in March 1974, in the village of Xiyang, on the outskirts of the city of Xi'an, in Shaanxi province. The man who swung that hoe was named Yang Zhifa. When the blade stopped short, he thought he had struck a piece of old iron buried in the field.

The broken pottery was loaded up and taken to a museum nearby. A museum official named Zhao Kangmin knew at a glance that this was no ordinary pottery. He sat and pieced the fragments together one by one, rebuilt the first figures, and gave them their name.

On July 15 that year, a large excavation began on that very field. And the earth did not stop at one figure.

Under the dry fields of Xiyang village lay three enormous pits. Together they spread over more than 20,000 square meters. People estimate that they hold about 8,000 figures of men and horses in terracotta. Beside them lie some 40,000 bronze weapons. The figures are as tall as real people. Long ago they were set out in straight ranks, all facing the same way. Then they lay under the earth for more than 2,200 years, from the time of the emperor Qin Shi Huang.

But the best part of the story is not in the numbers. It is in the hands.

No one shaped that army one figure at a time, from scratch. That way, several lifetimes would not have been enough. The craftsmen of the time worked another way.

The yellow clay was mixed with fine grains of sand to make it stronger. Each body was built from the bottom up with coils of clay, and left hollow inside so it would be lighter and less likely to crack in the kiln. Arms, hands and heads were made separately. The heads were made in molds, in great numbers, one head after another.

At this point, the work could have stopped. Thousands of identical heads, and the job would have been done.

The craftsmen of those days did not stop.

On every head fresh from the mold, they added a layer of fine clay and took up a carving stick. They carved a pair of eyebrows. They carved a topknot, strand by strand. They carved a mustache, a square jaw, the corner of a mouth turned slightly down, like the mouth of a man who has just walked a long road. Then they carved on down, to each plate of armor, each belt, each band of cord wound around the shins.

When all that was done, the parts were joined, and the whole figure went into the kiln. It was set upside down so it would stay steady, and fired at about 1,000 degrees Celsius.

That way of working produced something very strange: an army made by mass production, yet with no two faces alike.

Much later, a research team thought of a way to test it. They chose 30 figures, built three-dimensional models of them from photographs, and measured one detail nobody ever notices: the left ear.

Thirty ears, and no two exactly alike. The differences among them were comparable to the differences among the ears in a crowd of real people. Anyone who searches those ranks for two matching faces will not find them.

There is one more thing, something visitors today cannot see.

This army was once painted.

When the figures came out of the kiln, each one was brushed with a base coat and then painted, in more than ten different colors. Cinnabar red. Purple. Pale green. Sky blue. Yellow. Hair and eyebrows were painted black, and faces and hands were painted pink, like the color of skin. Most of the pigments came from minerals in the earth. Only the purple was a color the craftsmen of the time made themselves. They mixed the pigments with fish glue, bone glue or peach tree resin so the colors would hold fast.

Under the paint lay a very thin layer of raw lacquer as a ground. That lacquer had held the colors for more than 2,000 years in the damp earth.

Then the pits were opened.

The air outside was dry. The raw lacquer lost its moisture almost at once. It shrank, curled up like dry bark, and flaked off, taking the paint with it. Within a few minutes, a figure just uncovered, still in its blue robe, its face still rosy, turned gray. More than 2,000 years of color vanished faster than it takes to brew a pot of tea.

It is because of those few short minutes that keeping the color has become a craft of its own here.

Now, the moment a patch of paint appears from the earth, it is sprayed at once with a layer that keeps it moist, so the lacquer has no time to curl. Then comes a layer that strengthens the lacquer so it grips again. Then the figure is wrapped tight in plastic film and moved to the restoration room.

In that room, the restorers work with bamboo sticks, small knives, tweezers and cotton swabs. A newcomer may spend from one to three years practicing a single technique before touching a real piece. When a broken figure is put back together, if a few pieces at the base are off by even a millimeter, the pieces above will never fit together again.

So more than 2,000 years later, there are still people who sit all day with terracotta, as painstaking as the one who carved that ear.

This part sounds very familiar in Vietnam.

Beside the Thu Bồn River, the pottery village of Thanh Hà fires unglazed pottery in a natural reddish brown, that same terracotta. The village's yin and yang roof tiles have covered the roofs of the old town of Hoi An. On the left bank of the Red River, in Hanoi, the potter's wheels of Bát Tràng turn every morning, and the kilns glow red. Every potter knows the worry of a single crack, and the joy of finishing a shape just right. Earth, water, fire and a pair of patient hands. The craft is the same in every pottery village.

As for Yang Zhifa, the man who struck that first blow, he never became an archaeologist. He remained a man of Xiyang village. But many years later, the museum invited him in, gave him the title of honorary curator, and set aside a small table for him.

At that table, he sat signing books of photographs of the terracotta army, for visitors to take home as keepsakes. The villagers who had dug the well with him that year also took turns sitting there.

In those years, visitors lined up and passed their books across the table. And the hand that once gripped a hoe in a dry pit, in a season of drought, held a pen instead, slowly writing its owner's name on the first page.