China's Terracotta Army, 8,000 strong,
fully armed and built for eternity.
Created more than 2,000 years ago, it was lost
and only recently discovered.
Now this stunning treasure reveals the first empire
to rule ancient China.
We found amazing archaeological objects.
ANDREW BEVAN: And the implications
are enormous for archaeology.
It's going to be truly revolutionary.
NARRATOR: But who made this vast army?
How and why?
It's the creation of an amazingly advanced civilization.
MIKE LOADES: The Chinese crossbow is
two millennia ahead of its time.
NARRATOR: Its ancient weapons excel in rigorous modern tests.
MARCOS MARTINON-TORRES: You cannot make
a better arrowhead than this.
NARRATOR: Archaeologists piece together clues
and try to decode these ancient wonders.
Warriors and weapons.
Chariots and horses.
An entire world buried for more than 2,000 years
now sees the light of day.
Revealed in all its original glory,
the "Emperor's Ghost Army."
Right now on NOVA.
NARROR: Majolt's been called VA the Eighth Wonder of the World.
A vast army of almost 8,000 warriors,
all over 2,000 years old.
Larger than life-sized and made from terracotta or baked clay.
A stunning array of infantry...
cavalry...
and chariots.
Creating on such an epic scale must have been
an extraordinary challenge.
How was it done?
And what can it tell us about ancient China?
Now a series of archaeological excavations shows
the Terracotta Army is only the start,
a small part of a vast complex
estimated to be over 21 square miles.
On the outskirts, there's chilling evidence...
The mass graves of the people who built it, piled with bones.
The site contains hundreds of subterranean tombs,
filled not only with the clay warriors, but also birds...
horses...
musicians...
and acrobats.
All of this surrounds a huge man-made mound,
the tomb of the man responsible
for creating China's first empire.
So far, archaeologists have excavated
about 1,900 terracotta figures,
only a fraction of the number believed to be buried
in three major pits.
Each figure is intricately detailed,
weighs 300-400 pounds
and is made from seven main parts.
The archaeological work has taken 40 years
and much still remains to be uncovered.
JANICE LI: We found amazing archaeological objects.
So I think we cannot guess what's buried beneath
in the whole tomb complex.
NARRATOR: But now archaeologists are finding new answers
to many of their questions.
Why was the Terracotta Army created?
And how and when was it engineered?
Who were the people who built it?
And what was their fate?
Scientists have dated the charcoal found in the pits
as well as the clay in the figures.
All the evidence indicates that the Terracotta Warriors
were made around 2,200 years ago,
more than 200 years before the birth of Christ.
It was the end of what historians call
"the warring states period,"
when for over two centuries, China was devastated
by rival states fighting for dominance.
Mass invasions and battles raged across the countryside.
But finally one of those states conquered all the others
and created the Terracotta Army.
And all in a single lifetime.
The great mystery is how.
It's a mystery because the oldest surviving literary source
was written nearly a century
after the Terracotta Army was built,
by the father of Chinese history, Sima Qian,
who wrote these classic records of the warring states
and later dynasties.
Surprisingly, he made no mention of the Terracotta Army.
Nor does any other source.
Over 2,000 years ago,
these warriors were buried and forgotten.
No one knew they ever existed.
Then, one day in 1974,
during a drought in Shaanxi province,
Mr. Yang and other local farmers started digging a well.
He tells China historian Jonathan Clements what happened.
(translated): I used a pickaxe to dig the hole.
JONATHAN CLEMENTS: As they were digging down they found what they first thought
to be the rim of a pot.
I said, "There's bronze under ground."
They also found bronze.
They found metal artifacts, so they start dragging cartful's
of broken terracotta out of this well.
Then a shoulder and chest appeared.
CLEMENTS: As they dug away the earth around it,
they realized that they were looking at the body of a statue.
They had the top of the armor and they saw an arm.
I told my friend, "This is a temple."
CLEMENTS: What if they have disturbed gods in an old temple?
That is bad news.
(Yang speaking Mandarin)
CLEMENTS: Of course what he didn't know was the importance
for the entire planet.
Because this is the most important archaeological finding
in China of the last 100 years that you can look at
and say ancient China was amazing.
NARRATOR: Archaeologists soon found heaps of broken terracotta...
Bits of legs, headless humans and even horses.
All smashed after 22 centuries underground.
They were buried in three large pits.
Pit Two has only been partially excavated
and still looks as it did when first unearthed.
The roof planks are thought to cover nearly 1,000 warriors
and scores of chariots.
Pits One and Three have also been partially excavated
and an elaborate restoration process begun,
repairing hundreds of warriors
and recovering their lances, arrowheads and swords.
(translated): It astounded the world when it was first discovered
and is truly unique.
We have five ongoing archaeology sites in the mausoleum.
NARRATOR: The Terracotta Army Museum
has become a major international tourist attraction,
housing a vast treasure trove
of ancient art, technology and information.
But can it be used to clarify how a 2,000-year-old culture
overcame all the challenges
of creating such an epic masterpiece?
It's a mystery that a joint team from University College London
and the Terracotta Army Museum is investigating.
MARCOS MARTINON-TORRES: There are two types of visitors to the Terracotta Army.
Some appreciate the beauty in the detail.
You can choose
any of these warriors and you will immediately admire
the very personal facial expression,
the individual hairstyle.
Other people are more taken by the sheer scale of this site,
its magnitude.
How was it possible to orchestrate
all the technological knowledge, all the resources
and all the manpower needed and to do it so quickly?
NARRATOR: It was built in an amazingly short period,
all within 37 years,
the length of the reign of Qin Shi Huang,
the first emperor of China.
That's according to Sima Qian's historical records,
which state that he was enthroned in 246 B.C.
and that this is when work started on his mausoleum...
and that 37 years later, he died and work stopped.
But by then Qin Shi Huang had built an empire.
His Qin state ended over two centuries of war
and conquered all its powerful neighbors.
The first emperor now ruled many millions of people
and an area that rivaled the size of the Roman Empire.
The Qin Empire gave its name to China,
along with a legal system and one currency.
But the first emperor also had a reputation for extreme cruelty.
CLEMENTS: What we now call China is only called China
because of the first emperor.
The problem the Chinese have today is reconciling this idea
that he was a cruel tyrant
and that hundreds of thousands of people suffered and died
under his regime.
NARRATOR: His story in Sima Qian also lists some of his crimes
as massacring prisoners of war, burning books
and slaughtering his critics.
CLEMENTS: But also that he did some good.
He unified China.
He took these disparate states with different languages
and with different writing systems, and he forced them all
to be Chinese.
NARRATOR: Sima Qian's accuracy has been questioned, since he lived
a century after the first emperor died and was a member
of the succeeding dynasty.
But his account describes the emperor's obsession
with immortality...
which may help explain the motivation behind the building
of his vast tomb.
LI: What he believed when he died,
he still can carry on his life in the underground kingdom.
So he brought all of the things
with him to the underground kingdom.
NARRATOR: The ancient Chinese saying "treat death like birth"
meant he could enjoy his possessions in the afterlife.
This may have inspired the elaborate planning
of his vast mausoleum and, overshadowing it all,
the first emperor's own huge tomb mound.
The grand historian said the imperial coffin was buried
under the mound, which was originally 350 feet high.
The mound has not yet been excavated
for fear of damaging it, and it won't be
until the contents can be safely preserved.
But Sima Qian vividly describes how a model of the empire
surrounded the bronze coffin with miniature rivers of mercury
flowing into seas and heavenly bodies on the ceiling above.
The tomb mound is the center of a mausoleum
unrivaled in history,
built so the emperor's afterlife
matched his luxurious life before death.
Dams diverted streams around the tomb.
Over 300 coffins were filled with horse skeletons.
Other pits held models of exotic animals
and even members of the emperor's court.
So we're finding musicians and acrobats and weight li.
So we're seeing an entire culture revealed to us.
NARRATOR: This is not just a mausoleum, but an eternal pleasure palace.
Two half-size chariots made up of over 3,400 parts.
Each is pulled by four bronze horses.
Their harnesses embellished with gold and silver.
LI: They got bronze chariot for his spirit to travel
in the afterlife.
And also he got terracotta warriors with him
to protect him in afterlife.
NARRATOR: Such beliefs may explain the creation of the Terracotta Army
and why it is located a mile to the east of his tomb.
It stands guard between the emperor's grave
and the states he subjugated to the east.
He may have feared that the spirits of his many victims
would seek revenge in the afterlife.
So perhaps the terracotta bodyguards were created
to combat any threat from the underworld.
The ongoing survey work has mapped the newest finds
and shows the site is far larger than originally thought...
covering the area of 10,000 football fields.
But how did the Qin craft
so many imposing and intricately designed clay warriors?
Reassembling the broken figures is the first part
of their restoration and reveals the clues to how they were made.
Each figure was hand-crafted from the local clay.
You can see on the broken figures how the torso
was created by coiling clay around in layers
to build the upper body.
LI: That's the marks here.
Probably the hand holding inside and then smooth outside.
NARRATOR: Master craftsman Mr. Han has studied the figures
with the museum curators and worked to replicate
ancient production methods.
So what's the weight of an average warrior?
(speaking Mandarin)
LI: About 200 kilos.
That's over 400 pounds, wow.
Yes, so that's very heavy.
NARRATOR: Limbs, boots, hands and heads were all cast
from the local clay, which was pressed into molds
shaped for each body part.
Originally the legs were based upon molds used for drainpipes.
The molding process creates a variety of limbs
that can be combined with the various torsos in different ways
to create a mix of figures:
Archers, heavy infantry,
cavalrymen, generals, officials
and charioteers and even their horses.
Once the hollow mold is filled out with clay,
it's joined and allowed to dry before the figure is assembled,
ready for firing in a kiln or oven.
Mr. Han has built a replica of an ancient Qin kiln.
MARTINON-TORRES: So it's based on the real Qin archaeology.
LI: Yeah, that's based on the Qin, real Qin archaeology.
NARRATOR: The figures are sealed up
and then fired for days to harden them.
The original figures are a combination of molded parts.
But are they clones or individuals?
There are a variety of different faces.
They are dark and light skinned...
with varying facial hair.
They have many different eye shapes...
and a dazzling array of hairstyles and headwear.
There are clearly differences among the figures,
but is each one truly unique?
The scientists hope to provide a definitive answer,
by making 3D models to allow precise comparisons.
Each figure will need to be scanned into the computer.
But 3D laser scanning is time-consuming and expensive.
So Janice Li is using a still camera as the first step
in a process that will turn 2D pictures...
into 3D models.
ANDREW BEVAN: This is a very new technique
and the implications are enormous for archaeology.
And it's going to be truly revolutionary.
NARRATOR: Back in London, Andrew Bevan is compositing the photographs
to create a 3D model.
BEVAN: What the software tries to do is to go through each photograph
and define a set of features
that it can recognize.
It might be, for example, the tip of an ear.
NARRATOR: In humans, no two ears are the same
and Andrew Bevan wants to know
if this is the case for the terracotta figures.
The computer maps the features in three-dimensional space,
then joins them up to create the head.
BEVAN: We've done this particular warrior in all of his glory.
NARRATOR: These models are designed to allow precise comparison
of everything from hands to heads,
arms to armor
or figure to figure.
Effectively, the sky's the limit.
In this particular case, I'm going to slice off the ear
of the warrior so it could be compared to some others.
NARRATOR: This will show if they are all anatomically unique.
The results indicate that the ears vary in shape,
with different sized earlobes.
What we've discovered so far through these 3D models
is that no two ears are demonstrably the same.
These warriors seem to be very individual
in the same way as a typical human population.
NARRATOR: Some archaeologists suggest
that they are even portraits of real people.
So this was an army of individual warriors,
each strikingly real and unique...
the product of the skill, dedication
and technique of the craftsman creating them.
Han's work really reflected the processes
of making terracotta warriors 2,000 years ago.
(speaking Mandarin)
Yes, so, it normally takes three days for Han to carve,
you know, the details.
NARRATOR: Even today the individual style of the craftsman
clearly shows up in his work.
MARTINON-TORRES: Mr. Han's ears.
LI: Yeah.
It's really big ear lobes there, yeah.
NARRATOR: But years of careful restoration, preservation
and analysis have given rise to clues that the Terracotta Army
was originally quite different from what we see today.
Flakes of bright pigments still cling to the surfaces
of torsos, hands and heads,
showing the warriors were once highly decorated
and suggesting a colorful, even gaudy array when first created.
We can now see how the warriors may have looked
over 2,200 years ago.
A dazzling display of colors, with painted figures
and ornate chariots,
all fully armed and intimidating.
But were they carrying sharpened war-grade weapons
or merely symbolic representations?
After the wooden parts rotted away,
all that was left on the floor
are the bronze weapons once placed in the warriors' hands.
But how were these weapons made?
And how were they used?
To analyze them, Janice Li is creating silicon casts
of the ancient weapons,
using a technique originally developed for dentists.
LI: We use this silicon mold
to get very clear impression on the surface.
NARRATOR: By putting the silicon impression
under a scanning electron microscope,
Janice Li avoids any damage to the original weapon
and can examine the blades in extreme close-up.
The screen is filled by a tiny section of the blade.
The marks show it was originally sharp and still is today.
LI: These parallel fine marks show this really massive effort
for sharpening these functional lethal weapons.
MARTINON-TORRES: So consistent.
You cannot do these by hand.
Every one of the 40,000 arrowheads was sharpened
by somebody on a wheel.
NARRATOR: The identical parallel lines on so many weapons show
this is mechanical sharpening on an industrial scale.
Only one type of machine could make these fine, even lines...
a rotary lathe that uses a spinning stone
to sharpen blades.
All the swords, all the lances, all the halberds,
and every one of the 40, 000 arrowheads
have been sharpened in the same way.
NARRATOR: Combat damages the edges of bronze weapons.
But the Terracotta Army ones are unmarked.
MARTINON-TORRES: There's no sign whatsoever of them having been used.
These are freshly made weapons delivered directly
to the Terracotta Army.
I think it's obvious these are not representations
for religious purposes.
These are real lethal weapons made to kill.
NARRATOR: This is the earliest evidence of rotary lathes being used
for sharpening weapons on an industrial scale
anywhere in the world.
They're really well done.
This is fantastic.
I think we are onto something exciting.
Yes.
NARRATOR: So the Terracotta Army was fully armed.
The heavy infantry carried the deadly "G" or halberd.
Some were over six feet long.
Military historian Mike Loades demonstrates
how it was a highly flexible weapon
and the Qin army's best defense
against their greatest foe... cavalry.
A major threat to all Chinese armies of all states
was cavalry...
both horsemen and charioteers.
And the principal defense against them was the halberd.
Whoa.
Now obviously I had to stop the horse there
or he would have impaled himself on the spear
and that's really the first function of the halberd.
And you'll see it's got this cross piece,
this transverse bar, so if I had gone hurtling
into a line of halberds, this would have skewered
the poor horse here, but it would have stopped,
so the halberdier himself doesn't get trampled.
He can also use the spike to take out the horse's legs.
But what if the animal gets past the point of the halberds
and I'm coming in with a lance?
He could use his halberd to lift the point so that it's done that
and that's pushed it onto my throat and he has pushed me
and where he can obviously be quickly dispatched.
NARRATOR: As well as the halberd,
the Qin deployed a range of bronze weapons,
including spears, lances and long swords.
But the ancient Chinese led the world
in one particular branch of warfare: Archery.
A variety of pre-Qin sources show the Chinese invented
the crossbow centuries before the first emperor.
But how and why did it evolve to become
the most effective offensive weapon of the age?
LOADES: The Chinese battlefield was full of arrow storms.
Storm after storm of arrows.
But that takes skill and training.
How could you do that with an army full of peasant conscripts
that were there for a few months?
Well, the answer was in the Chinese crossbow.
Just a simple stock of wood easily mounts any bow,
so the bow is already made.
It fits onto there and just with putting a cross piece
in there you could lash that into position.
NARRATOR: None survive.
This is a working replica.
Its importance is shown by the ranks of terracotta archers,
armed with crossbows and ready for battle.
But all that is left of the Qin crossbows
after the wooden parts have rotted away
are clusters of strange bronze objects found in the pits.
This is a bronze crossbow trigger,
one of the most sophisticated
three-dimensional engineering mechanisms of ancient times.
NARRATOR: They were mass-produced
with all the parts made to fit together precisely
as historians of the day recorded.
MARTINON-TORRES: The annals of Liu Wai who date to around the time
of the first emperor,
claim that if there's any misalignment
in the parts of a trigger, it will not function.
NARRATOR: Using a replica, Mike Loades demonstrates
the design of the trigger.
The real genius was the trigger.
The bronze, the cast bronze trigger, produced
to a standardized form in their hundreds of thousands.
So it's got its very simple interchangeable component parts.
It comes apart very easily, and it goes together very easily,
and this whole assembly just drops into a pre-carved slot
in the bow, and you have got a bow ready to shoot.
NARRATOR: The trigger locks tightly and can securely hold...
And smoothly release... The power of the bow.
LOADES: It is an ingenious bit of mass-produced,
standardized military equipment.
NARRATOR: But any crossbow is only as deadly as its arrows.
Over 40,000 arrowheads have been excavated from the pits.
This is just one bundle of 100, a quiverful...
discovered here in the middle of Pit One.
So what were these arrowheads made of?
A portable X-ray fluorescent spectrometer is used to explore
the details of Qin metalworking.
This is today the simplest, fastest,
even cheapest way we have of determining
the chemical composition of something.
It's only recently that we are beginning to use it
archaeology, bringing about a revolution in the way
we can characterize materials.
NARRATOR: It shows the Terracotta Army's weapons
are nearly all made from bronze,
an alloy that's a mixture of copper, lead and tin.
At first the researchers assume that every part of the arrow
will be a single blend of bronze.
MARTINON-TORRES: This is telling us the recipe
that the weapon makers had
for each of the parts of their weapons.
There's the head proper and then what we call the tang,
which would be inserted in the longer bamboo shaft.
The tang contains 3% tin, 1% lead, and the rest is copper.
So it tells us that this is a bronze
with relatively low amounts of lead and tin.
We can now turn it over.
We can immediately see a relatively high tin content
that's around 20%.
This is an alloy that we know would be extremely hard.
NARRATOR: More tin makes for a harder, sharper arrowhead.
But less tin makes the tang more flexible
and less likely to snap.
MARTINON-TORRES: When you only have bronze, you cannot make
a better arrowhead than this.
This is as good as a bronze weapon is going to get.
NARRATOR: So they used two different alloys of bronze
in one fused section of the weapon:
The arrowhead and the tang,
the part connecting the arrowhead to the shaft.
But how?
Master forger Andy Lacey is experimenting,
trying to reproduce the casting techniques developed in China
over 2,000 years ago.
You have your tang pre-cast, already exists.
You just insert it into the mold.
You can see that it sits within the space that's the arrowhead,
and then... and put the top part on and clamp it together.
Then you see the tang just sticks out there and that's
the funnel that would take the metal in.
It's got these two components beautifully together.
MARTINON-TORRES: Yeah, that's the important thing.
And it's welded on very tightly.
Very tightly.
NARRATOR: Joining the two bronze alloys reveals
the Qin's impressive technical sophistication
and innovative production skills.
But only a test can show if the replica arrowheads
perform in practice.
Ancient Chinese sources give clues to how the bows
that shot them were loaded.
We have some evidence that the Qin laid on their backs
to span their bows.
That would suggest pretty powerful bows
of about 200 pounds, which is more powerful
than a hand bow is going to be.
NARRATOR: Mike's demonstration bow replicates the mechanism
of an authentic Qin bow,
but only creates a quarter of the force.
LOADES: And we're now shooting with more than four times the power.
NARRATOR: To test the replica arrows to the limit, he's using
a modern bow with a 200-pound draw weight
of the original Qin bows.
It's devastating against ballistic gel.
But how will it fare against Chinese armor?
This is the level of armor that an arrow has to defeat.
It's lamellar armor.
That means you've got scales, which overlap each other,
and then behind that is soft textile armor.
And you can see on the Terracotta Warriors
they're wearing quite bulky clothing, and armor is
a composite defense of hard exterior with soft padding,
and they've probably got felt coats under that.
Deep inside here is a piece of pork to represent
the human being inside.
So that's the challenge an arrowhead has...
Delivering that crucial thump to the target.
Safety off.
Well, it's stuck in.
It's done something.
By God and it's gone right through the pork.
That is a dead enemy.
It's actually gone right through
and it's come out the other side...
Through the pork,
through three layers of hardened leather,
through multiple layers of gathered silk,
through a thick piece of felt,
through a side of pork, and here it is out the other side.
NARRATOR: The Qin used the crossbow to powerful effect.
In 223 B.C., the Qin faced the vast Chu army on the banks
of the Yangtze River.
The Qin tricked them and then attacked
with their devastating archers.
This seemingly simple mechanism
is two millennia ahead of its time.
NARRATOR: It would take over 1,500 years for European crossbows
to surpass the Chinese ones in power,
and only then with cumbersome levers and pulleys,
making them far slower to use and difficult to master.
LOADES: You can learn to use this in less than two minutes,
and it enabled a peasant army to be converted
into state-of-the-art troops.
NARRATOR: The Qin army had become so well organized and equipped,
it conquered all its rivals and ended two centuries of war.
The Qin leader now ruled all China as the first emperor.
The historian Sima Qian, writing a century later
from the prospective of a succeeding dynasty,
describes a frenzy of book burning.
JONATHAN CLEMENTS: All of the books in his kingdom were destroyed,
possibly thousands
of Chinese documents that we'll never get back.
A terrible cataclysm for Chinese history
and for Chinese historians.
NARRATOR: It was, according to Sima Qian,
a descent into complete tyranny
as 700,000 workers were forced to expand the tomb complex.
On the far western edge of the site, chilling evidence
has revealed the dark secret behind the making
of the Terracotta Army.
Janice Li is heading into the orchards...
(speaking Mandarin)
Where mass graves have been excavated,
filled with the bodies of workers,
including women and children.
Worn down by the relentless toil.
Archaeologists also found leg and neck irons,
while Sima Qian refers to some workers as convicts
and men condemned to castration.
The all-controlling Qin bureaucracy gave each body
an inscribed death certificate or dog tag.
Each is a moving testimony to an individual story of hard labor.
LI: Bu Geng Jiu
is the builder's name.
(speaks Mandarin) means like he owed the government money.
So he needs to work here instead of paying off the money
to the government.
NARRATOR: The story of worker Bu Geng Jiu is typical.
He was forced to work because he couldn't pay a crippling debt
he owed the government.
It was this forced labor that enabled the Qin to create
the Chinese empire.
Protected with the earliest stages of the Great Wall,
connected with intercity highways
and irrigated with networks of canals and locks.
Conscripted laborers and slaves also assisted skilled artisans
in making the 8,000 Terracotta Warriors.
But how did the Qin do it all on such a vast scale
and with such attention to detail?
The careful study of both the figures and the weapons
now enables us to understand how the workforce was organized
and controlled.
Inscriptions on the warriors reveal who made them.
They were built by groups, or cells,
led by 92 master craftsmen,
each probably controlling about ten workers.
These cells came from the palace factories or local workshops.
And the weapons also provide evidence
of this highly productive and tightly controlled organization.
MARTINON-TORRES: We have hundreds,
thousands of weapons here,
but we want to find out how that was achieved.
How is it that they could produce so many weapons
in such a relatively short period?
NARRATOR: To help answer this, Janice Li has meticulously plotted
all the armaments found in Pit One.
LI: This is the map of all these bronze weapons discovered
in the east part of Pit One.
So, like the red one showed the bronze triggers,
crossbow triggers, discovered in the pit,
and the black dots represent the arrow bounders.
NARRATOR: The plots are then compared with the analysis
of the metal content of the arrowheads.
LI: This group really are very different from...
MARTINON-TORRES: Yes.
NARRATOR: And the precise shape of the triggers.
This reveals that the triggers fall into distinctive groups,
defined by their characteristic shapes.
For example, this hanging knife here is curved at this corner.
This other one here ends at an angle.
NARRATOR: The plots of the armaments in Pit One identified
several distinct batches of triggers.
All the trigger combinations located
in the top northeast corner
are identical in size, bronze content and design,
suggesting they were made by the same cell of workers,
while this set of triggers is different,
showing it was made by another cell of workers.
This is a series of cells working individually
to create these metal weapon.
MARTINON-TORRES: All of this requires a very versatile workforce
that can produce a sword today, a crossbow tomorrow,
a halberd the day after,
depending on what's needed as the work moves forward.
NARRATOR: The worker cells were trained to be not onlyroductive,
but versatile.
I think this production model holds the key to understand
how it was possible to produce something so colossal, so big,
but also so sophisticated in a time window maximum 40 years,
quite possibly less.
NARRATOR: Janice Li has also found crucial evidence
about how the workers were organized
by decoding inscriptions chiseled into their weapons.
They reveal a structure of strict supervision,
where all the workers had to record their names.
MARTINON-TORRES: We can see individual workers working on different years
of the reign of Qin;
Above them, the craftsmen,
foremen that will be working with them;
The officials;
And then, on top of all, Lu Buwei,
who was then the prime minister or the chancellor of Qin.
NARRATOR: The craftsmen at the bottom had to sign their names
so any substandard work could easily be traced.
MARTINON-TORRES: Sometimes people referred to this supervisory system
for quality control as a carrot-and-stick system.
If something was wrong with a particular weapon that didn't
fit the standard, then one could identify worker Jing
in particular and make him accountable for his error.
NARRATOR: Everything had to be perfect for an immortal army,
created to defend the first emperor
in his perpetual afterlife.
And perfection was achieved through fear.
Some recently discovered Qin legal codes detail
a harsh system, where even minor crimes
had terrible consequences.
CLEMENTS: The state of Qin
didn't just define things like theft and murder as crimes.
Incompetence was also a crime,
so not meeting a particular standard of workmanship
would also have been met with savage punishment.
Maimings, you have tortures, you have executions.
NARRATOR: This was all part of the system the Qin had created
to rule every aspect of life in the empire.
It was called legalism.
The grand historian Sima Qian describes a society
organized into small groups,
each person responsible for the others' behavior.
CLEMENTS: Every unit of five or ten houses
was obliged to report on each other.
If anyone committed a crime within your cell
and you didn't report it, the entire cell would be punished.
It's very likely that just as the army and society
was divided up in this cellular way,
that the artisans, the blacksmiths and the potters
of the Qin world also worked on very similar lines.
It creates a vicious, brutal society of people
informing on each other, and everyone was terrified.
NARRATOR: All the evidence shows that the Qin deployed small groups
of skilled workers capable of mass-producing
both weapons and individualized figures.
They were controlled by a rigid system of incentives
and punishments.
In 210 B.C., 11 years after he conquered all his neighbors,
the first emperor died.
Sima Qian records he was buried in a bronze coffin
surrounded by rivers of mercury,
laid out in a map of the empire.
His tomb mound has never been excavated.
But the Terracotta Army opened the door to a lost world.
This massive site stands as testimony to the ingenuity
and ruthlessness of the ancient Qin civilization.
Its pioneering system of flexible manufacturing,
combined with authoritarian rule, allowed it to create
the eternal wonder of the Terracotta Army.
This remarkable discovery gives a glimpse
into how one small state created a vast empire,
perhaps foreshadowing the rise of a sup
modern China.
Landslides: devastating killers.ess GH access.wgbh.org.
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