Last year, the museum of Xuzhou in Jiangsu open to millions of visitors.... The show room is located under water where terracotta warriors and horses are displayed.
Located under the Lion Lake, in the turistic area of the Han culture of Xuzhou, the show room is divided in two buildings. The first one has kept the original features of the excavation, and the second shows the old armies of warriors and their layout under Han dynasty.

On the picture below, we can see the visitors in the museum catching pictures of the terracotta horses, they are walking very close to the statues, they could even touch them...

Click to view attachment

I was wondering if these statues are copies, and if the original ones are stored in a safe and cool place, to avoid any alteration...
It is amazing to see these visitors so close to these treasures...
Do you know anything about the way these treasures are preserved from light, air, people, and passing time...
Do they keep the original terracottas in safe places ?

Thank you, Liu

The proximity of the horses is an illusion due to the perspective of the photographer. The rail would need to be crossed to touch an item. Not advised, although the failure to put them behind glass is odd. If the pieces really are valuable there would be PLA gaurds watching. ceramics of this style are not first class relics however.
The angle also makes the size of these figures hard to judge, it seems like they are trying to be made as large as possible but riders in ceramics are often smaller than infantry in such Han buried armies. Han buried armies are minaturised versions.
Typically these horsemen are about knee-high and infantry up to waist high (examples at Jingdi's tomb of a different type were 60cm tall, with much smaller cavalry.

Since there are trace paint pigments on these pieces a sealed enviroment would be better to preserve them, as even an underwater museum would require circulating of air to extract moisture from peoples breath.
Perhaps there is glass, or glass to be added later. I see the reflection of a flash on a side panel, so it seems there is no glass on front at the time of the picture.
The flip-side to efforts made to preserve them is that Han ceramics, wariors and horseman, are not really especially rare items, and turn up in pits containing hundreds when they are found. To put out a few ranks from a much larger group might not be such a concern for the museum given the enjoyment people might get.

Han horsemen seem to be around in some numbers. Any Han official the wealth to do so would want to stock their tomb with items that reflected the luxuries they enjoyed in life, and attendant warriors were part of this lifestyle.

Thanks for posting those nice pictures.
I had read that the sculptures had originally had vivid colors, but the examples I had seen were only small hints at the real color intensity.

That's interesting! Thanks for your reply Kenneth. These pictures are very nice, and we can see very well the colours, and imagine better the small size of these statues.

Could you tell us more about these colours, their meaning and how they found such pigments. Does the orange colour made with cinaber ? Also, this is the first time I see white colours on terracottas... Did they find some terracottas with other colors like blue or green ? (I'm thinking about 丹青)
I was also wondering about the making of such statues, do you have some information about it, and about the role of the people who created them.

Thank you!

Liu

I think I originally saw the terracotta warriors in the National Geographic a few years ago. In that they made mention of some of the faces were painted either blue or green, I can't remember which.

^The only green terra cotta I know of would be one found in QinShiHuang's terra cotta army. People speculate that this skin color would mark him as a foreigner, though I don't recall any race with green skin bf. Perhaps the burial, as well as the time, changed the color, or perhaps the soldier's just really really sick.

Sub-forum on Qin there is a thread on colours of the terracota warriors. Many have been found with paint of various colours.
The faces were painted flesh coloured, the uniforms have several colours and mixes on the troops. Green, purple, blue shades are more common. Red cord tied the lamellar armour together.
In the Han period red, black, white (in that order) can be the primary uniform fabric colour. The breeches (pants) are often blue or green. Most troops had a mix of bright colours in this period Zhou-Han.

The colour red is likely one of the easiest to make, since 'ochre' (red mainly) is a pigment availible to stone age people.
While Chinese could have made paints from complex mineral compounds there are all sorts of options and so there is no definite answer other than to say they did make the colours seen on ceramics.
A bit of coarse paint for a ceramic object is not so amazing as dying a silk garment after all, and later ceramics had glazes from the Han onwards so this is not a highly complex aspect.

Bear in mind the colours on this piece may be 'retouched' in modern times but the colours are still correct. I have seen similar bright colours on a number of Han warriors, some of those in museums.

Statues like this seem to be mass produced, from certain production locations, and then moved around like bronze vessels. This is the best explanation for uniformity and was confirmed when I discussed it at Shaanxi museum with a curator. Like later porcelian factories in China for overseas export there would have been key producing areas of kilns & workshops to supply demand.
There was an industry, what I call the mortuary industry, that could have emplyed many people supplying rich folk with the items they want for their tombs.
...Place an order for 100 or 500 warriors and so many bronze & pottery vessels etc. and skilled people would produce them for a price.

In modern times there are fake 'antique' ceramics for sale (although not so many warriors to be seen) and if you have enough cash a real one could be purchased too. The picture I attached is from an experienced art dealers site a couple of years ago.



BTW, the 'blue' face is likely and undercoat since the faces were given flesh coloured paint, some survived very well.
Here the 'flesh' over the darker layer can be seen.


A few thumbnails show paint and uniform colours.
Movies like 'Hero' got it all wrong.
Click to expand;







For more pictures of Han infantry/cavalry, ceramic warriors and a few modern artists reconstructions see;
http://z8.invisionfree.com/Bronze_Age_Cent...hp?showtopic=42

Thanks a lot Kenneth, I've visited all the links you gave: Very nice with impressive illustrations !!!...I'm impressed.

Just one more little thing maybe... I've been told that german scientists found a way to keep colours in terra-cottas: they would have find a solution to inject in the terra cotta. Did you heard about this ? I'm sorry I have no other information...

Thanks again, Liu

I don't know specifics of the process you might have heard. I only knew that German experts have been working, and are working on the long term buried army excavations.
Injecting the terracotta would seem unlikely, but a surface treatment may have been developed.
The best way would be to stabilise the pigment is in a sealed & controlled enviroment without modifying the artefact but since thousands are are under the roof of the main pit and being breathed on by hundreds of thousands of tourists this would not work on such a scale.
The painted warriors are mainly shown in pictures on the warriors still sticking out of the soil, and in the past it was said the paint is affected by exposure. I never saw any in the main body/formation that showed paint, although some were stained black by the ancient fires lit there.

The very best examples of painted warriors should be removed and sealed in cases to protect the paint since adding modern chemicals makes later study more difficult (i.e laboratory tests).
Given the numbers turning up though it may have been better to apply a sealant or stabilising agent to the paint itself. Injecting the terracotta wouldn't be as effective as application of a thin liquid to the porous ceramic surface or bonding & sealing the paint surface, by soft brush or aerosol even. Sticking needles into painted warriors doesn't sound to have an advantage over a more conventional & gentle application of ordinary conservation products like resins or waxes.

BTW I also heard that it is possible pollution in the air in China was having a visible (probably minor) effect on some of the warriors. It was first thought tourists might be affecting the warriors but the poor air quality itself was said to have had the effect of affecting some colours.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terracotta_Army