Terracotta Warriors

For four minutes after they come out of the ground, the terracotta warriors still have their original color. Farmers digging a well near Xi’an in 1974 didn’t just uncover an army; conservators later realized that the lacquer undercoat beneath the paint starts curling and flaking away within fifteen seconds of exposure to air, and the paint is largely gone within four minutes unless a stabilizing treatment is applied on the spot. That single fact explains why every photo you have ever seen of the warriors shows uniform terracotta gray. They were never meant to look that way. Excavated figures were originally coated in vivid vermilion, purple, sky blue, green, and pink, with black hair and pink skin, an entire army painted like a parade rather than a monochrome museum piece. Pits 2 and 3 are now excavated far more slowly and cautiously than Pit 1 was in the 1970s and 1980s specifically because of what was learned, sometimes destructively, from those early digs.

Six months before this was written, archaeologists working Pit 2 announced something that had not turned up in three decades of excavation there: a senior military commander figure, the first of its rank found in that pit since formal digging began in 1994. Only ten such high-ranking commander figures exist among the roughly 2,000 warriors unearthed so far out of an estimated 8,000 total, and this one arrived alongside two officer-level figures and five soldiers in unusually detailed contemporary armor. It is currently being cleaned and reassembled rather than displayed, which is a useful reminder that this is an active excavation, not a finished exhibit. 2024 also marked the fiftieth anniversary of the initial discovery, and the museum has been using the milestone to publicize newer research, including a genuinely interesting open question about why so many of the warriors have single eyelids rather than double, a detail researchers now think may reflect either regional facial features common among Qin-era soldiers or a deliberate artistic choice to convey stern military bearing.

None of this touches the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang himself, which sits under a still-unexcavated mound roughly 1.5 kilometers from the warrior pits and has never been opened. Ancient accounts describe rivers of mercury inside it, and modern soil surveys around the mound have in fact detected mercury concentrations well above background levels, lending some credibility to a two-thousand-year-old text that could easily have been dismissed as legend. China has left the tomb sealed, partly out of respect and partly because current preservation technology cannot guarantee that whatever is inside would survive contact with modern air, the same problem that stripped the paint off the warriors decades ago.

Practically, the site sells same-day tickets at 120 RMB per person year-round, with a published cap of 65,000 tickets a day and a maximum of 13,700 visitors inside the grounds at any one time. That cap sounds generous until you’re standing in Pit 1 at noon in July with a tour group on either side of you, so book online in advance and go straight to Pit 1 first, since it holds the bulk of the standing formations and the crowds thicken through the day. The museum sits about 65 kilometers from Xi’an Xianyang International Airport, roughly an hour by taxi for 160 to 200 RMB, or about ninety minutes if you take the metro to Xi’an North Station and transfer to a direct bus from the Chengbei bus depot for a fraction of the cost. There’s no direct metro line to the site itself, despite what some trip-planning apps imply.

My honest opinion, having weighed the crowd math against the alternative: skip the on-site food stalls near the entrance, which are overpriced and mediocre, and instead eat in Xi’an’s Muslim Quarter before or after your visit. Roujiamo, a shredded braised lamb or beef stuffed into a griddled flatbread, and liangpi, cold hand-cut wheat or rice noodles in a chili-vinegar dressing, are both far better and cheaper there than anything sold near the pits. Combine the trip with the Xi’an City Wall, one of the few complete ancient city walls left in China and wide enough to bike along its full 14-kilometer loop, and you get a full day that pairs a Qin-dynasty tomb complex with a Ming-dynasty fortification without much extra travel. Arrive at museum opening, which runs 8:30 to 18:30 from mid-March through mid-November and 8:30 to 18:00 the rest of the year, and you’ll clear Pit 1 before the tour buses catch up.