Professor Julia Lovell

Yeah, it's a genuinely monumental undertaking.

So we know from early written histories, more than 700,000 conscripts from all over the empire are supposed to have been moved over to work on the mausoleum.

and also on the emperor's new capital nearby.

You would have needed access ramps, you would have needed to divert watercourses, you need to build a huge perimeter wall, put loads of burial goods inside, then of course cover it all over with a pyramid about 80 meters tall with yet more buildings on top of that.

Then you need to add to this the manufacture and transport of all the goods involved.

And it seems plausible that only a state like the Chin, which extracted conscript labour so rationally, but also so ruthlessly, could have seen this project through.

It's always good to have a plan B, eh, Phil?

Sure.

There are mass graves about 300 metres to the west of the first emperor's tomb.

Alongside the skeletons, archaeologists have found fragments of pottery, which tell us where they came from, if they were stolen.

serving out a penal sentence, what their crime had been.

The bones which were discovered in the graves, some of them were thickened with evidence of arthritis, others had fractures or showed bone adaptation to intense use of muscles.

So this suggests that these people were

engaged in heavy labour before death.

And a sinister aspect to this, I think, is the secrecy surrounding the site.

The fact that the memory of the terracotta warriors never appeared on the historical record.

So this suggests that the workers may simply have been killed at the end of the work when the emperor was interred to keep the site secret and sacrosanct.

So the DNA analysis of these bones suggests that they came from many different parts of the territory.

So I think they could have been prisoners of war.

But the Chin legal system was very tough, very ruthless.