Legend has it that one of the terracotta warriors who stoically guarded Qin Shi Huang in the afterlife was turned into stone for a forbidden love affair in the court of China’s first emperor.
Quite how the other 7,999 or so warriors — each about 6ft tall and weighing just over 28 stone — were made more than 2,000 years ago, however, has long been a subject of debate, with experts questioning how the intricately carved figures could have been produced on site in Xi’an, northwestern China.
Now researchers believe they may have finally answered the question. “We noticed one phenomenon during the excavation that many terracotta warriors had arms broken off,” said Shen Maosheng, a researcher at the Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum. “The
