Professor Julia Lovell

You can have high quality replicas and models, although the chin mausoleum also has evidence of some burial of humans, whether they were alive or dead at the time.

But there's a huge range and richness of objects found in the emperor's burial complex.

And these objects give us a good idea of what he himself saw as important.

There's his army of bodyguards, plus hundreds of sets of armour made of stone tiles.

There are statues of stable boys, charioteers...

chariots horses plus real life hay and straw and skeletons of actual horses there's a pit of terracotta officials so you'll have bureaucrats to run your state in the afterlife so there is still tax after death i'm afraid yes fine we hear a lot about the terracotta warriors but not enough about the terracotta accountants the real heroes

The afterlife isn't there.

There's also an entertainment pit which contains terracotta acrobats, strongmen, musicians and life-size bronze birds.

So an incredible cornucopia of things.

These three main pits are about a mile to the east of the tomb, so they represent the eastern frontier of the burial complex.

So pit one, which is the biggest, has the main army, perhaps around 6,000 soldiers, 160 chariots, and the soldiers were all originally set out in almost 40

single file lines.

In front of them there's an advanced guard of archers and I should point out that they were all armed to the teeth with battle-ready bronze weapons.

Then pit two has a mix of cavalry, archers and war chariots.

Pit three contains high-ranking officers so it seems to be a command post and as you say there's also a fourth empty pit and the fact that it was empty

might be a sign that the site was unfinished when Qin Shi Huangdi suddenly died and had to be buried.

Well, the first thing it tells us is exactly as Phil surmised, that the Qin state, then empire, was an intensely militarised society.

And that's why the Qin succeeded in destroying all the other states to found its unified empire.

Every household had to supply an able-bodied male for the state's conscript army.

And then strict army discipline made them ruthless fighters.