It is one of the most iconic symbols of Chinese craft and artistry: the 8,000 terracotta statues of soldiers that form the clay army that escorted China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang to his tomb. Unearthed by peasants in 1974, the life-sized human statues remained a mystery, as there was no tradition of such statues in China before the tomb was created. The first Emperor of the Qin dynasty died in 210BC; prior to that time, statues were simple figurines about 20cm in height.
Archaeologists were trying for years to decipher how this shift in art was made possible and now they seem to agree on a new theory: that the Terracotta Warriors were inspired by the art of ancient Greece and that, more significantly, that ancient Greek artisans could have been training locals there in the Third Century BC.
“We now have evidence that close contact existed between the First Emperor’s China and the West before the formal opening of the Silk Road”, said Senior Archaeologist Li Xiuzhen, from the Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, in an interview aired at a BBC special program. “This is far earlier than we formerly thought”. Professor Lukas Nickel from the University of Vienna supports this theory, stating that the Greek influence is clear. “I imagine that a Greek sculptor may have been at the site to train the locals,” he told the BBC, suggesting Greek statues must have arrived in Central Asia after Alexander the Great died in 323 B.C.
A separate study shows European-specific mitochondrial DNA has been found at sites in China’s western-most Xinjiang Province, suggesting that Westerners may have settled, lived and died there before and during the time of the First Emperor.
That is more than 1,500 years before European explorer Marco Polo arrived in China, in A.D. 1275.