Military Precision

For Rebecca Rice, bringing the Terracotta Warriors to Te Papa caps a personal journey

In May 2017, Te Papa curator Rebecca Rice, pictured, was in a field in north-west China peering at a line of Terracotta Warriors. One suddenly caught her eye. “He was a standing archer, simply clad, freshly dug out of an ancient sea of mud,” she told the Listener, relaxing on a chair in the museum cafe.

“I spotted this little bone near his wrist. I couldn’t stop staring, taking in the attention to anatomical detail: his hairdo, the ties on his shoe, and the fall of his robes,” Rice says, flipping open her laptop and clicking on the archer’s picture.

Rice has helped assemble Te Papa’s forthcoming exhibition, Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality, which opens in December and runs for four months.

The centrepiece is a phalanx of the funerary army, including soldiers, horses and chariots. Also included are about 160 works of ancient Chinese art crafted from gold, jade and bronze.

In 1974, farmers digging a well 1.5km east of the First Emperor’s great tomb in Shaanxi province chanced upon the terracotta figures. The 8000-strong army (about 3000 objects have been retrieved to date) is now judged one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century. Some call it the eighth wonder of the world.

With their lifelike clothing, armour, hair and facial features, the Terracotta Warriors have proved a blockbuster attraction wherever they appear. They were last in New Zealand in 2003.