The Qin Army: the Men Behind the Terracotta Warriors (EVA0001)

The Qin army in colour: what the terracotta figures were copies of

Almost everyone meets this army as grey statues in a pit. Here it is the other way round — the living army the figures were modelled on: red and blue tunics, lamellar armour of laced plates, white head-cloths, a red chariot behind four black horses, and above it a black banner. Kneeling in the foreground, crossbowmen with their weapons already spanned.

The banner is black for a reason of state

Qin took black as its dynastic colour deliberately, under the doctrine of the five phases: water extinguishes fire, and fire had been the colour of the Zhou they replaced. The flag in this painting is a political argument in cloth, and everyone who saw it was meant to read it that way.

The crossbow was mass-produced, with interchangeable parts

This is the detail that ought to be better known. The Qin crossbow trigger was a precise bronze mechanism, and the surviving examples show components made to a standard close enough that they can be swapped between weapons. Many parts carry the name of the workshop or the craftsman who made them — accountability stamped into the object. It is an assembly line in the third century BC.

The statues were painted, and the colour did not survive

The warriors came out of the ground with pigment on them: reds, greens, purples, faces with skin tones. The lacquer underlayer had been buried for two thousand years, and on contact with dry air it curled and lifted within minutes, taking the paint with it. What is on display is not what was made. This plate is an attempt to put it back.

Every face is different, and every face is modular

No two terracotta heads are alike, which is usually told as a story about individual portraiture. The making is more interesting: ears, noses, mouths and beards were produced from a set of standard moulds and then combined and finished by hand. The same logic as the crossbow — standard parts, varied output.

What it cost, and how long it lasted

Something like eight thousand figures, with horses and chariots, for one man’s burial, built by a workforce the sources number in the hundreds of thousands. The state that could organise that also unified China, standardised its script, its axle widths and its weights — and then fell apart within fifteen years of the emperor’s death.