North Gate: Entrance to the Underground State

The North Gate belongs to the modern museum. The ancient entrance to the mausoleum was elsewhere, near the burial complex of Qin Shi Huang. The museum begins here, and it had to be built directly over the excavation.

In the summer of nineteen seventy-four, archaeologist Yuan Zhongyi led the first expedition to the fragments found while a well was being dug. Yuan had to determine what the farmers had discovered, clear the site, and prepare a report within a week. The team had ten people. They brought tools, camp beds, and mosquito nets: the assignment seemed short.

At first, the archaeologists documented the fragments, collected pieces of figures scattered across the village, and began looking for the boundary of the ancient pit. They drilled farther, but the edge did not appear. By autumn, the excavation covered several hundred square meters, and there was still no end in sight. Yuan requested additional specialists. By the following spring, his team had established the dimensions of the structure: beneath the field lay a huge underground army pit.

They worked in the open air. One night, Yuan was awakened by a downpour. He roused the team, and they covered the figures already cleared with plastic sheeting and straw mats. The rain showed that it was dangerous to continue the excavation without permanent protection. Yuan later recalled that after that night, he got into the habit of always checking the weather forecast.

Haste also harmed the finds. There were not enough professional archaeologists, so work was halted. Twenty-two cleared sections were covered with earth again; only five in the eastern part were left open. This is an important detail for visitors: the archaeologists deliberately returned to the ground what they had already found, because preserving an object in place proved more reliable than displaying it as quickly as possible.

In August nineteen seventy-five, Wang Yeqiu, head of the state agency for the protection of monuments, flew to Xi'an with the decision to build a museum here. A protective hall covering about sixteen thousand square meters was erected over the First Pit. It opened to the public on October first, nineteen seventy-nine. Yuan Zhongyi's week-long assignment became the work of his entire professional life: he headed the museum and continued studying the complex until his retirement in two thousand three.

Over that time, archaeologists came to understand the scale of the original design. Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, ordered his future tomb to be surrounded by an army, court services, stables, and ritual structures. The mound containing the burial chamber lies about one and a half kilometers from here. The army pits occupy the eastern sector of the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, and across the entire necropolis researchers have identified more than six hundred archaeological objects over an area of more than fifty square kilometers.

Today, the museum admits visitors through the North Gate and uses it only for entry. From the screening lines, the road leads to the hall erected directly over the excavation that Yuan Zhongyi had intended to finish in one week.