Every soldier in the terracotta army has a different face
Farmers digging a well near Xi'an in 1974 hit a fragment of a head. What they had found was an army of roughly 8,000 life-sized figures buried in pits to guard the tomb of the first EMPEROR, Qin Shi Huang, and left undisturbed for more than two thousand years.
The faces are individual. The bodies were mass-produced from moulded parts — legs, torsos, arms assembled from a kit — but the heads were finished by hand, with different hairstyles, expressions and ages, and rank shown in the armour and headgear. Each WARRIOR was originally painted in bright colours that mostly flaked away within minutes of being exposed to dry air, and much of the site is therefore left deliberately unexcavated. The tomb mound itself has never been opened.
The Great Wall is not one wall
The WALL is a series of separate fortifications built, abandoned and rebuilt over roughly two thousand years by different dynasties, following different routes. Most of what visitors photograph is Ming, from the 1400s and 1500s — brick and stone, and comparatively recent. Earlier stretches were rammed earth and have largely dissolved back into the landscape.
It is also not visible from space with the naked eye. The claim predates spaceflight entirely, first appearing in print in the 1890s, and astronauts have repeatedly said they cannot see it — it is long but only a few metres wide, roughly the width of a motorway, and made of the same material as the ground beside it. Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut, was asked directly in 2003 and said no.
Silk was a state secret for two thousand years
SILK comes from the cocoon of a moth caterpillar fed on mulberry leaves, and a single cocoon yields a filament around a kilometre long. China held a monopoly on knowing this, and exporting silkworms or their eggs carried the death penalty. The rest of the world bought the cloth at enormous prices without knowing what it was made from — Roman writers guessed it grew on trees.
The secret held until around AD 550, when two monks are said to have smuggled eggs to Constantinople inside hollow BAMBOO canes. The SILK road that carried the trade was never a single road, and the goods usually changed hands many times along it; most merchants travelled one leg, not the whole route. TEA, JADE, PAPER and porcelain went west along the same chain.
Gunpowder was looking for something else
Alchemists working for Tang emperors were trying to produce an elixir of immortality. Mixing saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal instead produced something that burned very fast, and a ninth-century text warns practitioners that several had singed their beards off and burned down the building. It was used for fireworks before weapons.
The COMPASS went the same way round — first a divination tool for aligning buildings, only later pointed at the sea. Both, with PAPER and printing, make up the four great inventions traditionally credited to China. The rest of the grid is the furniture of the place: the DRAGON, the PAGODA, the LANTERN, the KITE, the sailing JUNK, the PANDA, the DYNASTY system that organised three thousand years of EMPIRE, the great RIVER valleys, the TEMPLE, and CONFUCIUS, whose ideas are covered on our confucianism page.