“When Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s funerary army was excavated outside Xi’an from 1974 onwards, the terracotta figures emerged from their burial pits in vivid polychrome and then, almost immediately, began to lose their colour.
The pigments on the armour, trousers and faces were laid over a thin lacquer ground that had survived two millennia underground at constant humidity but began to flake within hours of exposure to dry #Shaanxi air.”
#china #cdrama #archeology