ARE THE TERRACOTTA WARRIORS AUTHENTIC?

It is difficult to imagine what is real and what isn’t.  Every warrior that is excavated is restored to perfection. There isn’t a chip or piece of clay missing from their faces. We couldn't help but think that there was barely anything authentic about them.

We wondered if any of them were original or if they were all replicas.

During our tour, we were told that the underground army had been raided at one point in time and peasants burnt it to the ground.  It contradicts everything we were told by the same guide.

It’s always interesting to try to figure out the truth about archaeological sites, especially such magnificent ones. According to the Wikipedia entry: “In 195 B.C., Liu Bang himself — the first emperor of the dynasty that followed the Qin — had ordered that ‘twenty households’ should move to the site of the mausoleum of the First Emperor of Qin..to watch over the tomb. To this day, twenty villages sit in the immediate vicinity of the mausoleum, one of them the hamlet where the Yang family lived; the terracotta army may have been rediscovered by the direct descendants of the people left to guard it. For centuries, there were reports of pieces of terracotta figure and fragments of the Qin necropolis — roofing tiles, bricks, and chunks of masonry — having been occasionally dug up in the area.” So it seems that the “discovery” in 1974 was essentially a re-discovery.

Also, I found in an article from May of 2010 in China Daily that in Pit One, where a company of 114 Terracotta Warriors was found with paint still in evidence: “‘traces of burns on the clay warriors and the walls prove that the pit had been set on fire,’ Liu {Zhanchang, director of the archaeology division of the Museum of Qin Shihuang Terracotta Warriors and Horses} said, adding more studies were needed for details.” So it seems those 114 Terracotta Warriors were burned. Also, they were broken: “It was hard work to restore the clay warriors as they were broken into pieces.” (quote from Xu Weihong, head of the excavation team).