Ultimately, the painting was recovered undamaged. Why the image has become a fad is a puzzle. Perhaps it's a kind of pop primal scream therapy, or maybe just a way to get through a bad hair day. Sixteen years ago Smithsonian printed pictures of an extraordinary find. Discovered by farmers near the city of Xi'an in Central China, it was an entire army, some 7,000 men sculptured in terra-cotta.
Historians tend to regard the emperor as a tyrant.
He conquered all of China, abolished feudal privileges, once had 460 scholars buried alive and completed the Great Wall. A sampling of the soldiers and other tomb treasures is on tour and will be in Honolulu through June 18. Some 26 million Chinese, and more than 2 million foreigners, have journeyed to Xi'an to see the museum that the Chinese government has set up. The terra-cotta army, in fact, is only part of a vast, as yet largely unexplored complex said to have taken 720,000 workers 37 years to complete. Xi'an is one of the most monumental archaeological discoveries of all time.