What you see here is the only Terracotta Warrior ever discovered completely intact protecting the tomb of the first Emperor of China, Qinshihuang. There were more than 8000 Terracotta Warriors buried in a full army formation to protect the emperor in the afterlife, basically serve as his body guards. Now what a lot of people don’t know is that sometime 2200 years ago, this army was dug up, intentionally smashed, burnt, and the bronze weapons in their hands mostly stolen. Exactly who did it I’ll save that for a later episode, but that explains why every warrior except this one was found smashed to pieces and had to be restored, sometimes just restoring one warrior took a year because it was so badly damaged. The craftsmanship on this half kneeling archer is so amazing that it boggles the mind. First, look at the bottom of his shoes, by the Qin Dynasty shoemakers already figured out that when we walk, more force is applied to the front and the back due to the shape of our feet, so look at the way the shoes were stitched, more densely at the top and the bottom and less so in the middle, and the craftsman who created this warrior even managed to capture that detail, how is that not insane? Then look at the inside of his hand, his palm, even the crease lines that we all have in our hands, that’s even captured by the craftsman. So how did this kneeling archer survive. Well, when the smashing and looting were going on around him, the hegemon king responsible for the vandalism here ordered the wooden roofs covering the Terracotta Army burnt. When the top soil then collapsed, the taller fully standing warriors took the brunt of the damage, leaving this lucky archer unscathed. That’s how 2200 years later millions of visitors every year can still see this marvel of ancient human ingenuity!@TheMonkeyKang
source
This is pretty amazing to learn about
Keep up the awesome work