The Farmers Who Found the Terracotta Army in a Drought
The Well at Xiyang Village, March 1974
Yang Zhifa was 41 years old and thirsty. Lintong County had gone dry that spring, and on 23 March 1974 he and his five brothers, with a neighbour named Wang Puzhi, started sinking a well in a patch of persimmon and pomegranate trees south of Xiyang village. The ground there had a reputation. Ploughs had turned up fragments of fired clay for generations, and villagers treated them as unlucky, reburying or smashing them. Five days into the dig, several metres down, the shovels stopped cutting earth and started scraping something hard and hollow.
Yang hauled up a head. Life-size, red clay, eyes open, hair tied in a topknot. More pieces followed: arms, a torso, bronze arrowheads. The men were not archaeologists. They sold some of the arrowheads for scrap and kept digging for water.
Word reached the county cultural office in April. Zhao Kangmin, a farmer turned museum curator who had personally unearthed three kneeling clay crossbowmen from a nearby field a decade earlier, went out to look. He ordered the digging stopped, loaded the fragments onto trucks, and spent three days in his museum fitting shards together, some of them the size of a fingernail. Two warriors stood up. Each was 1.78 metres tall.
Zhao then did something that tells more about China in 1974 than about the Qin dynasty. He kept quiet. The Cultural Revolution was in its final convulsions, he had already been dragged through a self-criticism session for being a man "involved with old things," and he half expected the figures to be smashed as relics of the feudal past.
The Report That Reached Beijing
A Xinhua journalist named Lin Anwen was visiting relatives in Lintong that summer and heard about the statues. Zhao showed him the two warriors and asked him not to write about them. Lin went back to Beijing and wrote about them.
The timing saved the army. Mao's government was in the middle of a campaign to "Criticise Lin Biao, Criticise Confucius," and its heroes were the Legalist statesmen of the Qin. The First Emperor, reviled for two thousand years as the tyrant who burned the books, had just been promoted to progressive. A national excavation was ordered within weeks.
The well was never finished. Yang Zhifa would spend decades signing souvenir books in a museum shop built over the field. In 1998 he shook hands with Bill Clinton on the spot. The persimmon grove had been the roof of a pit holding an estimated 6,000 soldiers, and the pit was the smallest part of what lay underground.
Everything about the site radiates from one fact. Qin Shi Huang conquered every state in the known world and could not conquer his own death, so he tried to bring the world down with him. The clay army is not the treasure. It is the fence around a hill, and the hill contains a sealed palace that every emperor after him was warned never to open, that a Han historian described in detail a century later, and that modern instruments say is still intact, still full of mercury, and still exactly where he left it.
Ying Zheng: The Hostage Boy Who Became the First Emperor of China
Born in Handan, King at Thirteen
The man was born in 259 BCE in Handan, capital of the enemy state of Zhao, where his father Zichu was being held as a diplomatic hostage. His name was Ying Zheng. The family's fortunes were being managed by a merchant named Lü Buwei, who had gifted Zichu a dancing girl who became Zheng's mother, and who was rumoured for the next two millennia to have been the boy's real father. Zichu escaped Handan and left his wife and son behind. They spent years hiding from a hostile city before being ransomed back to Qin.
In 246 BCE Zichu died after three years on the throne and Ying Zheng became King of Qin at thirteen. Lü Buwei ran the government. In the same year, according to the historian Sima Qian, work began on the king's tomb at the foot of Mount Li.
The boy was not yet a man and his grave was already under construction.
The Unification of 221 BCE and the Name He Gave Himself
Qin was the western frontier state, mocked by its neighbours as semi-barbarian, and it had spent a century turning itself into a machine. Farmers were ranked, taxed and conscripted by law. Officials answered to written codes rather than to family. Armies were rewarded by heads taken. Between 230 and 221 BCE Ying Zheng used this machine to swallow Han, Zhao, Wei, Chu, Yan and Qi in nine years.
He then invented a title. Kings had been kings; he became Huangdi, a compound of "august" and a word previously reserved for gods and mythic sage rulers. Qin Shi Huang means "First Emperor of Qin." He standardised script, weights, coinage and the axle width of carts so that every road in the empire wore the same ruts. In 213 BCE his chancellor Li Si persuaded him to burn the histories of the conquered states and the private copies of the classics, leaving only Qin's records and manuals of medicine, divination and agriculture. Scholars who discussed the old texts were to be executed.
The empire was eleven years old when he died. The tomb was thirty-six years old and still not finished.
The Assassination Attempts That Taught Qin Shi Huang to Fear Death
Jing Ke and the Dagger in the Map, 227 BCE
The state of Yan sent an assassin named Jing Ke to the Qin court in 227 BCE with two gifts: the severed head of a Qin defector, Fan Yuqi, packed in a box, and a map of Yan's richest territory, rolled up. Inside the roll was a poisoned dagger.
Jing Ke unrolled the map in front of the king. When the blade appeared he grabbed Ying Zheng's sleeve and lunged. The sleeve tore. The king tried to draw his ceremonial sword and could not, because it was too long to clear the scabbard, and he ran around a pillar with the assassin behind him while his courtiers, forbidden by law to carry weapons in the throne room, watched. The court physician Xia Wuju threw his medicine bag at Jing Ke's head. Someone shouted at the king to push the sword round to his back and draw it that way. He did, cut Jing Ke's thigh, and Jing Ke threw the dagger and missed. The guards finished it.
The king was 32. Yan was erased from the map within a year.
The Blind Lute Player and the Hammer at Bolangsha
Jing Ke had a friend, a musician named Gao Jianli, who went into hiding after the failed attempt. Years later the emperor heard of a brilliant lute player and summoned him. Gao was recognised and, instead of being executed, was blinded so that his music could be kept and his eyes could not be used for aiming. He filled the body of his lute with lead, waited until he was close, and swung. He missed too. He was killed on the spot.
In 218 BCE, on a tour through the east, the imperial procession passed through Bolangsha. A young aristocrat of the conquered state of Han, Zhang Liang, had hired a strongman and armed him with an iron hammer said to weigh 120 jin, about 30 kilograms. The strongman threw it. It crushed the wrong carriage. The emperor had taken to travelling in a decoy.
After Bolangsha the paranoia became architecture. Sima Qian records that the emperor connected his 270 palaces around Xianyang with covered, walled walkways so that no one outside could see which one he slept in, and made revealing his location a capital crime. A man who feared being killed by any hand he could see began looking for a way to stop being killable at all.
Qin Shi Huang's Search for Immortality and the Mercury That Killed Him
Xu Fu and the Ships That Never Came Back
In 219 BCE a court magician named Xu Fu told the emperor that three mountains of the immortals stood in the eastern sea, and that the herb of eternal life grew there. The emperor gave him ships and, in Sima Qian's account, several thousand boys and girls as tribute for the gods. Xu Fu sailed and came back years later with nothing, explaining that a giant fish had blocked the passage. He asked for archers. In 210 BCE the emperor, on his fifth tour of the east, stood on the coast at Zhifu and personally shot a great fish to clear the sea lane. Xu Fu sailed again and was never seen in China again.
The emperor was meanwhile taking the medicine his alchemists were making for him: preparations of cinnabar, the red ore of mercury, which glows like blood and was believed to confer the permanence of a metal on the body that absorbed it. He also had himself referred to as "the True Man" rather than "I," a Daoist term for one who has left the mortal condition behind.
Death on the Road at Shaqiu, 210 BCE
He died in the summer of 210 BCE at Shaqiu, in the middle of the north China plain, aged 49, hundreds of kilometres from his capital and with an heir in exile. Sima Qian does not give a cause. Modern historians point at the cinnabar.
The chancellor Li Si, the eunuch Zhao Gao and the emperor's youngest son Huhai were with the body. They told no one. The corpse was kept in its closed carriage while the procession turned for home, meals were delivered to it and reports were read to it. Late summer heat did its work, and to hide the smell the ministers had a cart of salted fish drawn beside the imperial carriage so the whole column stank of fish instead of emperor.
On the road they forged an edict in the dead man's name ordering his eldest son Fusu, who had been sent north for objecting to the persecution of scholars, to kill himself. Fusu obeyed. Huhai became Second Emperor. The body reached Xianyang and was carried to the mountain that had been waiting for it since he was thirteen.
Building the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang: 700,000 Workers and the Ones Who Never Left
The Graves at Zhaobeihu
Sima Qian wrote that after the unification, 700,000 conscripts from across the empire were sent to Mount Li. Archaeology has found the town they lived in, Liyi, commissioned in 231 BCE as a construction base, and it has found where some of them ended up.
West of the tomb's outer wall, near the modern village of Zhaobeihu, excavators uncovered more than a hundred plain graves. Thirty-two of them yielded over a hundred skeletons, mostly young men, thrown in together, some pits holding fourteen bodies. Several were still wearing iron leg shackles. Others showed cut marks on the bone. Women and children lay among them, consistent with the Qin law that punished a criminal's whole household for his crime.
Eighteen fragments of roof tile had been laid over the dead with names scratched into them. One records a man's home county and his sentence. These tiles are the oldest epitaphs known from China, and they belong not to the emperor but to the convicts who built his hill. Stable isotope studies of the shackled dead show diets low in millet and heavy in wild protein, the signature of the southern Chu region, which means these men had been marched a thousand kilometres to die on a construction site. The tiles inside the pits and the stamps on the warriors' bodies name foremen and workshops. The system that built the tomb was the same system that filled the graves beside it.
The Craftsmen Sealed Inside
The tomb chamber was closed after the funeral in 210 BCE. Sima Qian describes what happened next in two sentences that have not lost their force in 2,100 years.
The Second Emperor ruled that any of his father's concubines who had not borne a son should follow him in death, and a great many died. When the coffin had been lowered and the treasures sealed, someone pointed out that the craftsmen who had built the mechanisms inside knew what was buried there and where. The middle gate was shut. The outer gate was lowered. The workmen were still inside.
Trees and grass were then planted over the mound so that it would look like a natural hill.
Inside the Terracotta Army Pits: What Has Actually Been Excavated
Pit 1 to Pit 3, and the Empty Fourth
The warriors stand a kilometre and a half east of the mound, outside the tomb walls, facing east towards the states the emperor destroyed. Pit 1, under the roof Yang Zhifa's well came through, is 230 metres long and holds an estimated 6,000 infantry in eleven corridors; around 2,000 have been excavated. Pit 2 holds roughly 1,400 archers, cavalry and charioteers. Pit 3 is small, 68 figures around a war chariot, and was the command post. Pit 4 was dug and never filled. The workforce ran out of emperor before it ran out of pit.
No two faces are the same. The bodies were mass-produced in moulds, but the heads were finished by hand, and each figure carries the stamp of the foreman who oversaw it. They were armed with real bronze weapons, which is why the well diggers found arrowheads. Most of the swords, spears and crossbow triggers are gone. In 206 BCE the rebel general Xiang Yu took Xianyang, and Sima Qian records that his army looted and burned the mausoleum complex. The pit floors carry a layer of charcoal, and the roof beams collapsed onto the soldiers below, which is why almost every figure came out of the ground broken.
Later pits filled in the emperor's household. A pit of terracotta acrobats and strongmen. A pit of civil officials with knives and grindstones for scraping bamboo records. Forty-six bronze waterfowl along a mock river, accompanied by kneeling musicians. Thousands of limestone armour plates, drilled and wired together, for soldiers who would never wear them. In 1980 two half-scale bronze chariots with drivers and horses were lifted from a trench twenty metres west of the mound, each made of more than 3,000 parts.
The Colour That Dies in Minutes
The grey soldiers in the photographs were painted. Every one wore lacquer over the clay and pigment over the lacquer: red tunics, green trousers, pink faces, purple ribbons. The purple was a barium copper silicate the Qin workshops synthesised in the kiln, a compound with no natural source. Two thousand years in damp earth left the lacquer waterlogged and elastic. On exposure to dry air it begins to shrink within about fifteen seconds, curls, and lifts the paint off with it. Whole faces have flaked away in the time it took to lift a figure from the pit. Conservators now soak new finds in polyethylene glycol and work under humidity tents, and still lose colour.
That is the first reason China gives for not opening the hill. The second is that what protects the hill also protects the warriors. A 2019 study finally killed the long-repeated claim that the Qin had chrome-plated their swords to prevent rust. The chromium turned out to be contamination from the lacquer. The blades survived because Xi'an's alkaline, fine-grained loess and the bronze's high tin content preserved them. The soil, not the emperor, did the work.
The Unopened Tomb of Qin Shi Huang: Mercury Rivers and the Case for Leaving It Sealed
What Sima Qian Said Was Inside
Writing around 100 BCE, Sima Qian described the contents of a chamber he had never seen. Workers had dug through three underground streams and poured bronze to seal the floor. Inside were palaces and towers for a hundred officials, and the rare objects of the empire. Craftsmen had built crossbows rigged to fire at anyone who broke in. Mercury had been made to flow mechanically, forming the Yangtze, the Yellow River and the great sea. The ceiling carried the heavens and the floor carried the earth. Lamps burned fat from a creature Sima Qian called the man-fish, chosen because it was meant to burn forever.
Historians treated the passage as literature for two thousand years. In 1981 geochemists from the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences drilled soil cores across the mound and found a mercury anomaly, strong and sharply bounded, concentrated over its centre, with readings in the central zone far above the regional background. A second survey a few years later found the same shape. In 2020 a Chinese-Swedish team parked a laser radar 650 metres from the mound and measured mercury vapour in the air above it at up to 27 nanograms per cubic metre against an ambient 5 to 10. The hotspots on the slopes lined up with the earlier soil samples. The tomb is breathing mercury into the sky at a rate the team estimated as a few hundredths of a gram a second, and has presumably been doing so since 210 BCE.
Ground-penetrating radar and gravimetry have done the rest. Under the mound sits a structure roughly 140 by 110 metres and 30 metres high, an "underground palace" in the archaeologists' phrase, with a central chamber about 80 by 50 by 15 metres whose ceiling lies around 30 metres below ground level. The walls have not collapsed. Nothing indicates that Xiang Yu's men, or anyone since, got in.
Why China Will Not Dig
The mound today stands about 50 metres high on a base roughly 350 metres a side, a footprint larger than the Great Pyramid at Giza, though erosion and two millennia of farmers' ploughs have taken perhaps 25 metres off the top. State policy since the 1980s has been simple: the tomb is not to be opened until the contents can be guaranteed to survive opening. Every argument for waiting comes back to the same problem the warriors posed. Air that is fine for the living is fatal to anything that has spent 2,200 years in sealed damp. The paint on the soldiers taught the lesson. The mercury adds a physical hazard for anyone who would break the seal. The scale means the digging would have to be total; nobody sinks a shaft into a 140-metre palace to have a look.
There is also the memory of how the world's other famous sealed tomb was handled. When Howard Carter broke into the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922, the textiles, organic offerings and painted surfaces began deteriorating the moment the seals came off, and Chinese archaeologists cite it directly. The excavation of the Ming Dingling tomb in 1956, where silks crumbled and the emperor's bones were later burned by Red Guards, is the domestic version of the same story, and the official reason no Chinese imperial tomb has been deliberately opened since.
The result is an inversion of the usual archaeological fantasy. The tomb of Genghis Khan has been hunted for eight centuries because nobody knows where it is. The tomb of Qin Shi Huang has been mapped to the metre, and nobody is allowed to look.
The Legacy of Qin Shi Huang: From Tyrant of the Histories to Mao's Role Model
Two Thousand Years as the Villain
The Qin dynasty lasted four years after its founder died. Zhao Gao murdered Li Si and then Huhai. Xiang Yu burned the palaces. The Han dynasty that followed built its legitimacy on being everything the Qin was not, and Sima Qian, writing under the Han, gave the First Emperor the verdict that stuck. In 212 BCE, after two magicians fled the court and mocked him, he had 460 scholars in Xianyang investigated and, in Sima Qian's word, "pitted," which readers have taken to mean buried alive for two millennia. Whether it means that or means executed and dumped is argued to this day. The number and the image were enough. Chinese schoolchildren learned for twenty centuries that the First Emperor burned the books and buried the scholars.
In May 1958 Mao Zedong addressed the second session of the Eighth Party Congress and took the insult as a compliment. Critics had compared him to Qin Shi Huang, he said, and they were wrong only in scale: the First Emperor had buried 460 scholars and the Communist Party had buried 46,000. The Qin legacy, he added, had been to unify China, standardise its writing and build its roads, and he was happy to be Qin Shi Huang a hundred times over. Sixteen years later the same government pulled the emperor's army out of the ground and hailed it as the achievement of a progressive centraliser. Mao's portrait still hangs over Tiananmen Square, a few hundred metres from the man's own preserved body, which is more than the First Emperor managed.
The Warriors as Diplomacy
The clay soldiers became the People's Republic's most reliable ambassadors. Queen Elizabeth II walked Pit 1 in October 1986. Clinton stood in it in 1998 and met Yang Zhifa, in a photo opportunity so valuable that a rival group of farmers immediately claimed they had found the first head, a dispute the New York Times covered and Lintong never settled. Touring exhibitions of a dozen figures at a time have drawn millions in London, Chicago, Melbourne and Philadelphia, and in December 2017 a 24-year-old man at an ugly-sweater party in Philadelphia's Franklin Institute slipped past a rope, took a selfie with a 2,200-year-old cavalryman, snapped off its left thumb and put it in his pocket. The thumb was recovered from his desk drawer weeks later. A federal jury deadlocked on whether the theft was a crime or a drunk mistake, and the figure went home to Xi'an with a repaired hand and a museum director who called the damage irreparable.
The museum at Lintong receives millions of visitors a year, and the mound at its heart receives none. Excavation continues around the tomb, in the pits, the walls and the satellite burials, and every season adds another few hundred figures to the roster. The estimate of 8,000 soldiers is an estimate. The emperor has been under his hill for 2,236 years and archaeology has been counting his household for 52 of them. The count is not close to finished.
Visiting the Terracotta Army and Qin Shi Huang's Mausoleum Today
The Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum sits in Lintong District, about 40 kilometres east of central Xi'an, and is one of the most visited places in China. Two sites share the ticket. The Terracotta Army museum encloses Pits 1, 2 and 3 under hangar-sized halls, with the bronze chariots in a separate building, and it is where the crowds are. Pit 1 is the image everyone comes for: rows of soldiers seen from a raised walkway above the excavation, with the unexcavated corridors still roofed in packed earth at the far end and conservators sometimes visible working in the trenches. Pit 2 is largely unexcavated and shows what the ground looked like before anyone dug. Pit 3 is small enough to take in at a glance and shows the generals.
Lishan Garden, a shuttle ride away, is the tomb itself. Visitors walk paths through the cypress and pomegranate plantings over the inner-city walls, past the marked outlines of the satellite pits, and up a stepped path onto the mound, where a stone marker records the emperor's name and the wind is usually the only sound. There is nothing to see. That is the point of standing there. Around 30 metres below the grass, according to every instrument pointed at it, a room the size of a cathedral holds a bronze floor, a mercury sea and a man who died on the road with his ministers pretending to feed him.
The site opens daily, is fully wheelchair accessible in the main halls, and is best entered at opening time before the tour groups arrive from Xi'an. Photography is permitted; flash is not. Guides, official and otherwise, are plentiful, and the souvenir shop where Yang Zhifa used to sign books still sells his signature in printed form. Most visitors spend three to four hours. Combining the trip with the Huaqing Palace hot springs at the foot of Mount Li, where a later emperor lost a dynasty over a concubine and Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped in 1936, fills a day.
A few kilometres west of the pits, under farmland and modern villages, lie the graves at Zhaobeihu. They are not signposted. The men in them built everything a visitor has just walked through, were buried in chains, and had their names scratched on broken roof tiles by whoever threw them in. The emperor's name is carved on top of his mountain. Theirs are in a museum storeroom. Both are the only things about this place that have survived intact.
Frequently Asked Questions About Qin Shi Huang's Tomb
Why has Qin Shi Huang's tomb never been opened?
The central burial chamber under the mound at Lintong has never been excavated because Chinese heritage policy forbids opening it until its contents can be guaranteed to survive exposure. The painted lacquer on the terracotta warriors begins to curl and flake within seconds of meeting dry air, and archaeologists expect anything organic inside the sealed chamber to behave the same way. Soil and air surveys have also confirmed high concentrations of mercury above the tomb, which poses a physical risk to excavators. The scale of the buried structure, roughly 140 by 110 metres, means any dig would have to be total rather than exploratory. China has not deliberately opened an imperial tomb since the damaging Dingling excavation of 1956.
Is there really mercury in Qin Shi Huang's tomb?
The historian Sima Qian wrote around 100 BCE that the tomb contained rivers and a sea of mercury made to flow mechanically. Soil surveys by the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences in the early 1980s found a strong, sharply bounded mercury anomaly over the centre of the mound, far above regional background levels. In 2020 a Chinese-Swedish team using laser radar measured mercury vapour in the air above the mound at up to 27 nanograms per cubic metre against an ambient 5 to 10, with hotspots matching the earlier soil data. The measurements are consistent with a large quantity of liquid mercury still inside the sealed chamber.
Who discovered the Terracotta Army?
A group of farmers from Xiyang village in Lintong County found the first fragments while digging a well during a drought in March 1974. Yang Zhifa, then 41, is the most widely credited, working alongside his five brothers and a neighbour named Wang Puzhi. Zhao Kangmin, curator of the Lintong museum, recognised the fragments as Qin-era figures and reassembled the first two warriors. A Xinhua journalist, Lin Anwen, publicised the find in Beijing over Zhao's objections, prompting a national excavation. Rival groups of farmers have disputed credit for the first head ever since.
How many terracotta warriors are there?
Archaeologists estimate around 8,000 soldiers across the three main pits, along with roughly 130 chariots and more than 600 horses. Pit 1 alone is thought to hold about 6,000 infantry, of which around 2,000 have been excavated. Pit 2 holds an estimated 1,400 archers, cavalry and charioteers, and Pit 3 holds 68 figures forming the command post. Satellite pits have added terracotta acrobats, civil officials, bronze waterfowl and thousands of stone armour plates. The total is an estimate because excavation is still ongoing and a large part of the site has never been dug.
Were the workers who built Qin Shi Huang's tomb killed?
Sima Qian records that 700,000 conscripts built the mausoleum, and that after the funeral the craftsmen who knew the layout of the chamber were sealed inside when the gates were closed. Excavations at Zhaobeihu, west of the tomb walls, have uncovered more than a hundred plain graves containing over a hundred skeletons, mostly young men buried in haste, some still wearing iron leg shackles and some with cut marks on the bone. Eighteen inscribed roof tiles found over the dead record names, home counties and sentences, making them the oldest known epitaphs in China. Isotope analysis suggests many of these convict labourers came from the conquered southern state of Chu.
How did Qin Shi Huang die?
Qin Shi Huang died in the summer of 210 BCE at Shaqiu, on the north China plain, aged 49, while touring the eastern provinces. Sima Qian gives no cause of death, but the emperor had been taking cinnabar-based elixirs prescribed by court alchemists to gain immortality, and most historians attribute his death to mercury poisoning. His chancellor Li Si and the eunuch Zhao Gao concealed the death, kept the body in its carriage with a cart of salted fish alongside to mask the smell, and forged an edict ordering the heir Fusu to commit suicide before installing the younger son Huhai as Second Emperor.
Sources
Records of the Grand Historian: Qin Dynasty — Sima Qian, translated by Burton Watson (1993)
The Terracotta Army: China's First Emperor and the Birth of a Nation — John Man (2007)
The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army — Jane Portal (ed.), British Museum Press (2007)
China's First Emperor and His Terracotta Warriors — Frances Wood (2007)
Mercury as a Geophysical Tracer Gas: Emissions from the Emperor Qin Tomb in Xi'an Studied by Laser Radar — Guangyu Zhao, Sune Svanberg et al., Scientific Reports (2020)
Tracing the Locality of Prisoners and Workers at the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang — Ying Ma, Benjamin Fuller et al., Scientific Reports (2016)
Surface Chromium on Terracotta Army Bronze Weapons Is Neither an Ancient Anti-Rust Treatment nor the Reason for Their Good Preservation — Marcos Martinón-Torres et al., Scientific Reports (2019)
Application of Mercury Survey Technique over the Mausoleum of Emperor Qin Shi Huang — Chang Yong and Li Tong, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences (1983)
Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor — UNESCO World Heritage Centre (1987)
Zhao Kangmin: The Man Who 'Discovered' China's Terracotta Army — BBC News (2018)
Clinton in China: The Antiquities; 2 Tales of Who Found Terra-Cotta Men — Seth Faison, The New York Times (1998)
The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C. — Michael Loewe and Edward Shaughnessy (eds.), Cambridge University Press (1999)
