Terracotta Army Timeline

The first exhibition of the Terracotta Army figures outside of China was held at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, Australia in 1982, introducing international audiences to the ancient warriors.

An exhibition tour of 120 real-size replicas of Terracotta statues was displayed in the German cities of Frankfurt am Main, Munich, Oberhof, Berlin (at the Palace of the Republic), and Nuremberg between 2003 and 2004.

Warriors and other artifacts were exhibited to the public at the Forum de Barcelona in Barcelona between 9 May and 26 September 2004.

The same exhibition was presented at the Fundación Canal de Isabel II in Madrid between October 2004 and January 2005, becoming their most successful ever.

Between 15 June and 17 September 2006 the exhibition entitled 'Los Guerreros de Terracota: Un Ejercito Inmortal' ('The Chinese Terracotta Army: An Immortal Army'), composed of 73 objects, was displayed at the National Museum of Colombia in Bogotá.

A collection of 120 objects from the mausoleum and 12 terracotta warriors were displayed at the British Museum in London as its special exhibition 'The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army' from 13 September 2007 to April 2008.

The First Emperor exhibition made 2008 the British Museum's most successful year and made it the United Kingdom's top cultural attraction between 2007 and 2008, bringing the most visitors since the King Tutankhamun exhibition in 1972.

Image source: British Museum

In Italy, from July 2008 to 16 November 2008, five warriors of the Terracotta Army were displayed in Turin at the Museum of Antiquities.

From December 2009 to May 2010, the exhibition was shown in the Centro Cultural La Moneda in Santiago de Chile.

From 16 April 2010 to 5 September 2010, nine statues including officials, lancers, and an archer were displayed at the Royal Palace in Milan at the exhibition entitled 'The Two Empires'.

Subsequently, the exhibition traveled to Sweden and was hosted in the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities between 28 August 2010 and 20 January 2011.

Image source: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm

An exhibition entitled 'The First Emperor – China's Entombed Warriors', presenting 120 artifacts, was hosted at the Art Gallery of New South Wales between 2 December 2010 and 13 March 2011.

Image source: Art Gallery of New South Wales

An exhibition entitled 'L'Empereur guerrier de Chine et son armée de terre cuite' ('The Warrior-Emperor of China and his terracotta army'), featuring artifacts including statues from the mausoleum, was hosted by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from 11 February 2011 to 26 June 2011.

Image source: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Soldiers and related items were on display from 15 March 2013 to 17 November 2013 at the Historical Museum of Bern in Switzerland.

Image source: Bern Historical Museum

Several Terracotta Army figures were on display, along with many other objects, in an exhibit entitled 'Age of Empires: Chinese Art of the Qin and Han Dynasties' at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City from 3 April 2017 to 16 July 2017.

Image source: Metropolitan Museum of Art

An exhibition featuring ten Terracotta Army figures and other artifacts, 'Terracotta Warriors of the First Emperor,' was displayed at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle from 8 April to 4 September 2017, then traveled to The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia from 30 September 2017 to 4 March 2018 with augmented reality additions.

Image source: Pacific Science Center

An exhibition entitled 'China's First Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors' was held at the World Museum in Liverpool from 9 February 2018 to 28 October 2018.

Image source: World Museum

The exhibition 'Legacy of the First Emperor' took place in the Western Australian Museum in Perth between June 2025 and February 2026.

Image source: Western Australian Museum

An exhibition took place in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, Hungary entitled 'The Guardians of Eternity' between November 2025 and May 2026.

Image source: Museum of Fine Arts (Budapest)

Art historian German Hafner was the first to speculate on a possible Hellenistic link to the sculptures due to their unusual naturalism relative to general Qin era sculpture, stating: 'the art of the terracotta army originated from Western contact'.

Since 2006, an international team of researchers at the UCL Institute of Archaeology has been using analytical chemistry techniques to uncover more details about the production techniques employed in the creation of the Terracotta Army.

Scientists at Stanford University and the Advanced Light Source facility in Berkeley reported that powder diffraction experiments combined with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and micro-X-ray fluorescence analysis showed that Chinese purple dye (barium copper silicate) used on the figures derived from knowledge gained by Taoist alchemists attempting to synthesize jade ornaments.

Image source: Han purple and Han blue

Some weapons had been coated with a 10–15 micrometer layer of chromium dioxide believed to have protected them from decay for 2200 years; however, research in 2019 indicated that the chromium was merely contamination from nearby lacquer, not a means of protecting the weapons.

In 2021, morphological studies showed a strong resemblance between the statues and the modern inhabitants of the local region, leading some scholars to theorize that the high level of stylistic realism stems from the figures being modelled on actual soldiers.

According to a 2022 study, there is statistically no difference between the facial features of terracotta warriors and contemporary Chinese populations, particularly northern and western Chinese populations.