Greg Jenner

But actually, Chengqiu 1D also is planning to live forever, Julia.

How do you plan to live forever while simultaneously building your enormous tomb?

Let's talk about the discovery of the terracotta warriors.

Fragments were discovered along with some bronze arrowheads in a field by a family in 1974.

And then archaeologists went, hang on a second.

And so they showed up and they were astonished by the terracotta warriors because they were not expecting them at all.

Do you think that's nice?

Okay, so we've already heard, Phil, that the first emperor was pretty extra in his own life.

How big do you think this mausoleum complex is?

Yeah, Phil, you've said two football pitches.

Well, a football pitch is 0.005 kilometres squared.

Right.

This is 56 kilometres squared, which is bigger than Oxford.

Yeah, that's quite a good bit bigger.

Okay, fair enough.

So we have the ancient Qin historian, Sima Tian, writing about 100 years after the tomb was built...

And he described the complex like this.

The tomb was filled with models of palaces and pavilions and offices, as well as fine vessels, precious stones and rarities.

Artisans were ordered to fix up crossbows so that any thief breaking in would be shot.

All the country's streams, the Yellow River and the Yangtze, were reproduced in quicksilver and by some mechanical means were made to flow into a miniature ocean.