Broken Pieces of Stone Armor

Before the Qin Terracotta Warriors unearthed, the land above the soldiers was a large piece of barren pebbles beach, where over 10 ancient tombs from Han (206BC-220) to Qing (1644-1911) dynasties have been discovered. The excavation of these tombs reached as deep as the horizon of soil where buried the terracotta warriors and certainly destroyed the warriors. Having no knowledge about the value of the warriors' fragments, the grave diggers just left them scatter in the land. The seemingly weird land made the local people keep it at a respectable distance.

During a long period of time before the terracotta warriors were formally unearthed, the innocent villagers continually picked up the terracotta warriors' fragments for their own use. A villager found a good brick rod whose central part was slightly curved. As it was a long tradition for Shaanxi People to sleep with heads resting on bricks, he thought it was a nice pillow. But the next day, he found the "pillow" was crawling with maggots. The nauseated sight made him goose lumps and he began to doubt that the "pillow" may be an unlucky funerary objects. Through a careful observation, though finally he was sure that the maggots were from a dead rat, he found that the brick rod was a part of arm of a terracotta warrior or a horse leg which unearthed near the present Pit 2.

In March 1974, the villagers dug wells in this wasteland. When dug a distance of over seven feet deep, they accidentally discovered the burned earth, even deeper, some cavity potteries which looked like human bodies were appeared, and when reached over sixteen feet deep, they found the floor was covered with a piece of blue bricks above which scattered the pottery pieces of human heads, arms and legs. "Is it a site of ancient temple?" they wondered. 
The news spread rapidly in the village. The superstitious old women believed that the digging had disturbed the Earth God. When the night fell, they would come to the site to burn incense and kowtow. An old man thought probably birds would be scared if they saw the weird terracotta warriors, so he put a straw hat on a warrior to make it act like a scarecrow in the sweet potato land. Moreover, the bronze weapons like the arrow heads discovered at the same time were sold as cheap as metal scraps.

However, the team leader in the village found the terracotta warriors were unusual. He immediately reported the case to the superiors, and after full analysis and research from multi-side participation, in 1976, the Chinese government confirmed the royal identity of these Qin terracotta warriors and horses as well as decided to build a museum on the site where they were unearthed. Later, another two pits were discovered. The three pits covered an area of over 23,920 square yards and unearthed over 7,000 terracotta warriors and horses in total.

In 1978, the former French president Jacques Chirac visited the Museum of Qin Terracotta Warriors and Horses. He called the Qin warriors "the eighth wonder of the world". From then on the Qin terracotta warriors became famous all over the world.

Yang Zhifa is the discoverer of terracotta warriors.	Liyi Site, The Mausoleum of Emperor Qin Shi Huang
Unearthed Terracotta Warriors Pieces	Broken Pieces of Terracotta Warriors
The Site of the Builders' Graveyard	The Architectural Ruins of the Mausoleum