The Greatest Tomb On Earth: Secrets of Ancient China

I'm Dan Snow and I've come to China to investigate

the single largest burial site on Earth.

Starting with its greatest treasure - the Terracotta Army.

That is one of the most wonderful views in the world.

Over 1,000 warriors guarding their ruler for eternity.

With the possible exception of the Great Wall,

there's nothing more Chinese than these warriors.

And yet, a new theory suggests that this great icon of China

may be guarding an explosive secret.

New evidence suggests that the inspiration for all this

could have come from the West.

There's a possibility they really have some other culture stimulation.

That is such an important idea.

The person who made that had an understanding of anatomy

that is extremely surprising.

It's often thought China grew up isolated from the West

until Italian explorer Marco Polo came here in the 13th century.

But if we could prove that wrong by 1,000 years,

it would rewrite the history books.

To help in my search I'm joined by two expert investigators -

Alice Roberts and Albert Lin.

As our medical scientist,

Alice will be examining any human remains buried here.

This doesn't look like a typically East Asian skull.

Albert will use the latest imaging technology to try and find

the first roads joining East and West.

If I'm right then what I'm standing on right here could be one of

the roads built by the First Emperor.

And I'll be interrogating the secrets of the Emperor's mausoleum

looking for the traces of Western technology.

-Look at that!

-That's fantastic.

Together we'll be exploring an extraordinary possibility

that East and West were connected

far earlier than anyone thought possible

and that connection changed the face of China.

This is the starting point for our investigation,

one of the most hallowed sites in all of China.

The burial grounds of the First Emperor.

Oh, yeah. That, according to legend,

is the First Emperor's tomb.

Albert is setting out to survey the entire burial site

by climbing the tomb.

In over 2,000 years, no-one has been inside this sacred earth pyramid.

It's pretty incredible.

The Emperor's tomb is right beneath my feet.

He was buried at 50 metres below the surface of this mound.

And the Chinese government has decided to protect it further

by denying access to the public.

It's like being on top of Tutankhamun's tomb,

but not being able to get inside,

maybe for good reason,

nobody really knows what's in there.

Even from the top of the overgrown tomb

there's only one way to see the surrounding site...

OK.

Wow! Look at that.

Nobody's ever been allowed to fly here.

This is unprecedented access.

The nearby hills are studded with top secret military instillations

and it's taken us months of negotiating with the Chinese Army

to get permission to do this.

But, once in the air, it's clear it was worth the effort.

Look at that. It just keeps on going. It just expands.

The exterior walls of the mound are over there.

At 100 square kilometres, this is the biggest burial site on Earth.

200 times bigger than Egypt's Valley of the Kings.

Can you imagine building this for yourself for your afterlife?

And that's just what's visible on the surface.

Beneath these fields, archaeologists have uncovered a vast buried world

of more than 600 pits and structures,

each one a gold mine of archaeological riches.

Almost every day there are new discoveries,

and we have unprecedented access to them.

Anyone could potentially link China to the outside world in

the 3rd century BC.

This was the era of classical Ancient Greece,

a time it was always assumed when China existed in total isolation.

That assumption started to crumble because of

the first discovery they made here -

the Terracotta Army.

It's not these buildings over here.

It's the building...

It's that one, it's the one beyond.

The Terracotta Army lies 1.5km away to the east.

Today it's one of the biggest tourist attractions on Earth,

but few people realise this extraordinary collection of figures

contains one of the greatest

unsolved mysteries in China's history.

No-one has ever been able to explain their origins.

The mystery began when all this was farmers' fields.

And one of those fields yielded a life-sized terracotta head.

It was 1974.

Look at that.

So what's happening here?

This is right at the beginning of the excavation, I presume.

So that's you?

Yeah. Fantastic.

42-year-old Yuan Zhongyi

was the first archaeologist sent here from Beijing.

What was the thing which most surprised you?

Yuan's first week here turned into decades.

And today I'm coming to meet the person

who's continuing his pioneering work,

his former assistant Janice Xiuzhen Li.

-Hi, Janice.

-Hi.

-How are you?

-I'm fine. How are you?

-Very good.

They believe the Emperor's Terracotta Army

is an exact copy of the real thing.

So these were going to be his army in the afterlife?

Yeah, to protect him.

What I really notice looking around is I think they all look different.

I can't see any two that are the same.

Some of them have got a bit of a belly on them,

some of them are very, very tall.

Were they all individually crafted?

They're really quite individual.

You see the moustache is different and also the eye shape.

This stunning realism amplifies

the great mystery surrounding these figures.

Where do they come from?

Because they're nothing like any figure made in China before them.

Let me show you the figures made in China before the warriors.

-OK.

-So the figurines is really small.

-OK.

It's about ten inches.

-Oh, so tiny.

-Tiny.

-Suddenly they start producing this.

-Yeah, and this about two metres.

-So something has changed.

-Yes.

These warriors are far more sophisticated,

much bigger and much more realistic.

Yeah, much more detailed.

But were they all made in China?

Yeah. Let me show you the stamps here.

This is the name of the artisan.

So this Terracotta Warrior is produced locally.

The big question is -

how did Chinese craftsmen achieve such an incredible transformation?

Like going from a stickman to a Leonardo in a single step.

Something remarkable happened here 2,200 years ago.

To understand quite how remarkable,

I need to put it in a global context.

The world at the time of the First Emperor, around 220 BC.

Over here, right on the eastern edge of the Eurasian landmass

you've got the Chinese world,

a competing cluster of mini states over there.

Over on the west of Eurasia you've got Roman Empire

starting to expand over here and you've got Greece over there.

Now what's going on artistically in East and West is very different in

the 3rd century.

This is classic Greek art,

absolute high watermark of artistic expression. Beautiful.

Metre and a half tall, intricately painted, human in its look.

But over here in the Chinese world, as Janice has showed me,

you've got that.

Just ten centimetres tall, far more basic.

Then something changes.

In fact, everything changes, there's a revolution.

Suddenly in 220 BC, just after that, you get the Terracotta Warriors.

Light years ahead of what's gone before.

It starts to look far less like it's predecessor

and far more like what's going on in the Western world.

Both life-size, both lifelike, attempts at realism,

using paint and the sculpture to reflect the realities of

the human body, the human form.

And this couldn't be more important because it's always been assumed

that China developed in isolation.

But if that's not the case,

if the First Emperor of China imported Western ideas

and techniques to create his extraordinary necropolis...

Well, that forces us to completely rewrite the history books.

If you're going to rewrite the history books, you need evidence.

You need a lot of evidence.

And I think there is enough evidence just with the Terracotta Warriors.

This is a theory that turns on its head centuries of thinking about

the relationship between China and the West.

It can't just be based on one statue.

It just seems that there are so many

mysteries associated with this place. It's phenomenal.

It just feels as though there's an awful lot more to be discovered.

There is a history, Chinese history, so maybe there's a lot to

the stories that were written in this historical text.

It's amazing to have those texts as well. I mean, how fantastic.

OK. This is it. It's called the Shiji.

We've got 20 pages of a text that was written over 100 years later

by the first Chinese historian called Sima Qian.

He talks about the First Emperor's tomb, but he doesn't even mention

the Terracotta Warriors, they don't even get a mention.

What is now one of the most important sites on Earth

doesn't even get a mention in this.

And, unfortunately, he doesn't mention foreigners

-or people beyond Central Asia.

-Wow.

-So there are gaps in the history.

There's big gaps in the history.

So we're relying on you guys.

Well, you know, the extent of this place is huge.

So what we're looking at here is the main burial mound.

And the Terracotta Warriors are pretty far off to the east side of

the entire burial complex.

And, you know, what I think is the interesting question is -

is there a road network that extends from this?

Do you think you could ever find

connections with points further west?

It's hard to say because it's going to go, obviously,

the roads meander and turn over time,

but I think what's exciting is if we

can start to use different technologies

and maybe we can start to see the traces

of where these roads were going

from this one very important place, obviously.

I'm really interested to know if there's anything else here

in terms of the archaeology, in terms of the material culture

that could point to a Western influence or a Western connection.

Or indeed any evidence of Westerners having been here.

The assumption, I think, is that this whole site was built

-in ten years or so, is that right?

-Very fast, yeah.

And so it seems like the evolution of the material

and the types of artistry that was created over time

is pretty remarkable from the beginning to the end.

How it could just spring into being with no tradition of it at all.

So far our only evidence lies in the Terracotta Warriors themselves.

If they were created with some kind of outside influence,

can we find traces of it in the way they were made?

To find out, Alice and I are going to take a pottery lesson.

We found an instructor,

Mr Han, who runs a factory producing replica warriors.

He's also studied how the originals were made over 2,000 years ago.

-What do we do with this?

-Are we building it up?

Apparently the bodies are not sculpted

but made with the kind of coil pot technique

most of us have tried at school.

Looking at the ranks of the Terracotta Soldiers,

it's clear their bodies are variations on standard shapes,

with arms, legs and torsos

made up of a series of clay cylinders joined together.

Oh, we're building a house, are we? OK.

And I suppose, really, when it comes down to it,

and I know this is an unusual type of pot,

but it really is just a big coil pot, isn't it?

What gives each warrior its sense of real distinct character is

the head and the face.

And again, it's all about ease of production. The mould, we've got it.

This makes more sense. Moulding makes sense to me.

Right. One, two, three.

Yes! This is art.

In fact, making a head turns out to be even easier than the body.

And it seems anyone with a bit of practice

could produce heads pretty quickly using this moulding technique.

Oh! Look at that.

-Look at that.

-That's fantastic.

His nose needs a little bit of work there.

There's something really magical about putting

a lump of clay into a mould like that

and then suddenly what you've got is a face looking back at you.

Brilliant.

The key to this is the original head from which the mould was made.

Someone had to sculpt that head

using techniques that were unheard of in China.

This is our first clear sign of an outside influence.

From the maker's marks on the original warriors,

they've identified just five separate workshops making

the entire Terracotta Army.

So the mass production of thousand of warriors could have been based

on a combination of skilled Chinese potters

guided by a small team of outside instructors.

Is it possible those instructors came from the West?

A few miles from the Emperor's mausoleum

lies his ancient capital city Xi'an.

It's really only in the last 20 years

that China has opened up to the Western world.

I mean, it's not hard to imagine how extraordinary it would have been

for Westerners to find themselves here in the 3rd century BC.

In a totally alien culture on the other side of the world.

If that is what happened,

it took someone of extraordinary vision to make it happen.

China's First Emperor - Qin Shi Huangdi.

This was a revolutionary ruler

who transcended all the boundaries of his age.

In 221 BC, at the age of 40, he put an end to 250 years of war,

conquering six neighbouring states

and forging the civilisation we know today as China.

This was the ancient foundation of the modern superpower.

The Emperor dreamt that his nation would last forever

and he wanted to stamp his mark on it.

Yet if he recruited Westerners to help him create his mausoleum,

bringing them here could have been one of

the greatest challenges of his reign.

There is no history of an established route

in 3rd century BC connecting China with the West.

The Silk Road is not mentioned by name for centuries.

So did the Emperor open this world famous highway long before

the history books acknowledge?

Our only contemporary reference does suggest road building was one of

the Emperor's major priorities.

Now according to the Shiji, in 220 BC,

after a tour of inspection over terrible bumpy roads,

the First Emperor ordered the construction of a series of

speedways radiating out from the capital.

But is there any trace of that network?

The mausoleum's archaeology team has invited Albert to see

a new excavation very close to the Emperor's tomb.

THEY SPEAK IN OWN LANGUAGE

Lead archaeologist Zhang Weixing

believes they've uncovered an ancient road.

Peel this tarp back.

At first sight it looks narrow for an imperial highway.

So when I first came in here

I thought that they were excavating the length of the road.

I mean, it looks about the size of a road.

But what we're seeing from the tracks is that actually

the road is going this way.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, you really get a sense of it here.

MAN SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

Zhang believes this is the cross section

of a vast multi-lane highway

built to bring men and materials to the Emperor's tomb.

Towards the mausoleum?

OK, so this was part of the, I guess,

the construction process, you know.

Wow! Look at that.

When you look at the size of that mound,

it must have been a lot of material that was moved

to build basically a mountain.

These are the tracks of carts that have pressed down in the earth

since Qing dynasty, over 2,000 years ago.

The huge width of this highway shows the Chinese were masters of

road engineering on a vast scale,

capable of building the national network described in the Shiji.

Perhaps reaching beyond China itself.

We need to find that hidden network...

..which means Albert will need the latest aerial sensing technology.

My own investigation, meanwhile, is gathering pace.

The Terracotta Army gave us

the first traces of possible Western input.

But I've just come across a paper written by a German academic

describing a set of terracotta figures whose body show

unmistakable signs of a Western hand.

No-one knows what these figures are meant to be,

the Chinese call them the Acrobats.

They were discovered in a small pit very close to the Emperor's tomb

where I've arranged to meet Dr Lukas Nickel.

Ah, Lukas, hi.

Dan, nice seeing you.

It's very good to be here. I've read your paper.

Have a look at this one.

Here we have a figure with a semi-naked body.

Just this little piece of cloth around his hip

and what we see is a building of a body.

If we look at the arms, we have musculature, we have an idea,

an understanding of the build.

-Also big muscles over the kneecap.

-If you remember,

the Terracotta Warriors are basically standing that way.

It looks like a torso with arms and legs just stuck in,

but there's no attempt to build a proper working human body.

There are believed to be more than 50 of these acrobats

and the conservation team is still trying to piece them together

from thousands of fragments.

Unlike the Terracotta Warriors, they're not made to a template.

Each one appears to be individually sculpted by an experienced artist.

This is now a totally different quality of sculpture.

They want to show an anatomically correct movement

in a quite acceptable, believable way he puts one foot in front,

the other one behind, and you see that the whole body,

relax the knees,

the hip and the upper part of the body are moving along.

Your first impression, that is classically Greek.

Yes, absolutely, no question about that.

It's something we only find in Greece.

Only the Greeks would do that.

The people who made this had an understand of how Greeks

would make sculptures. That is extremely surprising.

To show the human body in this kind of convincing, lifelike stance,

that is extremely complicated.

That is something we know in Greece

that had taken centuries to learn this.

Suddenly at the end of the 3rd century BC in China we get that,

and that is very close to a Greek idea.

So you're seriously suggesting that that statue might have been sculpted

by a Greek sculptor who came all the way out here

and made it for the Emperor?

Well, I imagine a Greek sculptor

may have come here to train the locals.

It's just... I mean, that's amazing.

This feels like a huge breakthrough.

Possible evidence of Western instructors

working in China 2,200 years ago,

perhaps the same people who helped to create the Terracotta Army.

But how did the Emperor know where to find them?

How did they get here?

At the end of the 4th century BC,

Alexander the Great bursts out of Greece here, out of Macedon,

and conquers a huge empire in Asia.

So Alexander the Great's empire reaches it's high watermark

around about the time of his death, 323 BC.

Then in...

Well, from 220 BC onwards another young, charismatic leader,

Qin Shi Huangdi,

creates the beginnings of modern China, unifying China.

Now...did this first emperor of China take advantage of the narrow

gap that now existed between the Greek world and his Chinese world

to import ideas, techniques, materials, maybe even people?

Suddenly China doesn't seem so isolated.

Albert is already planning his search for the road

that might have bridged that gap.

That's about a mile, right? So a mile from here to here.

While Alice is looking for the human evidence of foreigners

who might have come here.

So far they've found more than 600 separate pits

in this vast mausoleum complex.

And one of things they've discovered is that the Emperor didn't just take

terracotta figures to the next world.

Real people were sacrificed to go with him.

This skull is from one of 99 shallow graves

just north of the Emperor's tomb.

Suggesting their occupants were very close to the Emperor himself.

The first revelation is that this skull, like all the others...

..belonged to a young woman.

And Alice has found a passage in the Shiji

that could explain their mass burial.

"Of the women in the harem of the former ruler

"it would be unfitting to have those who bore no sons sent elsewhere.

"All were accordingly ordered to accompany the dead man

"which resulted in the death of many women."

If this skull belonged to one of those women,

she was sacrificed for failing to give the Emperor a son.

Alice is going to see if she can find out more about this girl's life

as well as her untimely death from lead archaeologist Mr Zhu.

So you think these bones could possibly be

the female consorts of the Emperor, the concubines?

They also have poignant evidence of how she lived.

These pearls are absolutely beautiful.

But we are looking at the jewellery that was worn by a woman

who lived in the 3rd century BC, a woman who during life

enjoyed a special position at court and high status.

But she was killed, potentially brutally killed,

and her only crime was to have been a concubine of

the First Emperor of China.

This tragic story may yet have another twist.

Before China was unified, local rulers used concubines

to forge alliances with neighbouring states through marriage.

It's quite possible the first Emperor took that idea beyond

China's borders for the first time and brought in foreign concubines.

The mausoleum is beginning a DNA study to try and trace

the girl's origins.

The problem is, unlocking those secrets could take many months.

Alice's search for Westerners in China continues.

Albert is ready to start his aerial search for

the Emperor's road network.

What we want to do is create a systematic path. So this is...

They're staying close to the tomb

where they already know that there was road construction.

It's open field. Shall we try it?

Albert has borrowed a prototype super sensitive infrared camera.

This is the first time it's ever been used in aerial archaeology.

There we are, at the very edge.

And we're looking for a change in the temperature.

The blue area is where it's a little bit colder.

The red area is where it's a little bit warmer.

And we're talking very subtle amounts here.

The camera's able to pick up the faintest traces left deep in

the earth by centuries of human disturbance.

Albert adds this to satellite imagery

creating a comprehensive deep time picture of the site.

THEY SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE

And right away there is something that Zhang hasn't seen before.

MAN SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

MAN SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

A diagonal line on the landscape. It just doesn't seem to belong.

MAN SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

So you're saying that if this is man-made, then it's a game changer?

Really exciting.

THEY SPEAK OWN LANGUAGE

Could this be the first sign of the road network?

The only way to know is to get out into the field

and do a ground survey

to make sure that what Albert's seen from above

is nothing obviously modern like a sewer pipe or gas line.

All right.

Let's go take a look.

This is really cool.

It's clearly not a pipeline.

In fact, it doesn't seem to have any obvious use, at least not any more.

OK. Where we're standing right now is right here.

And what I didn't know until just this moment was what this was.

But now I'm standing here and what it is is this massive trench

over six feet below the surface of the rest of these farms

with no real explanation for its existence.

There's no reason to have this huge trench here,

there's no river here, there's nothing else.

But, and if I'm right, then what I'm standing on right here could be

one of the roads of the network of roads built by the First Emperor.

It's a breakthrough, but in the wrong direction.

The new line goes north-east towards the interior of China.

We need something heading north-west.

So it's back to the aerial data.

There's this faint signature of some kind of an anomaly

that's running north-west.

You see that right there?

It looks like it's meeting right at the same point and it looks like

it's the exact same feature that we just ground trooped.

What looks like to be another road here.

And they're literally radiating out.

Our big question is - where would the western road be going to?

And how far?

The rest of that ancient road is buried under the modern landscape,

but there is a natural line it could have followed 2,000 years ago

along the Wei River valley.

And there is a possible destination described in the Shiji.

The most western extent of the empire at the time

was this town called Lintao.

The Shiji describes it as, "A garrison town."

It was part of this story of the Great Wall.

The First Emperor created the first Great Wall of China.

Over 5,000km long,

the wall's starting point and base of construction was at Lintao.

It must have been a huge project.

There's builders there, there's soldiers there,

communication was key and the roads that this person built,

the First Emperor, they were the key to that communication.

OK.

Albert, how's it going?

-'Hey, Dan.'

-What have you found?

I'm actually seeing around the First Emperor's tomb site

a road going west.

Really?! Really?!

Farthest it would go that we would know of so far

would be this town of Lintao.

'The most western extent of the entire empire.'

That is very interesting information. Congratulations.

If there was a road going from here as far as Lintao,

can we find any historic reference connecting Lintao to the West?

What's great is there is actually another source that we've got.

And it's not often talked about, but it was just shown to me

the other day and it's absolutely fascinating.

It says, "In the 26th year of the Emperor," which is about 220 BC,

in Lintao, it said, "Daren appeared," that's tall men.

I love that description.

Tall men. They didn't have a word for statue.

But, this is the best bit, "All dressed in foreign robes."

How interesting. Statues.

That is what would become known as the Silk Route through that.

Lintao is perfectly placed. That makes a lot of sense.

And there's more written about these Lintao statues.

Apparently the Emperor had giant copies made in bronze

to adorn his palace in Xi'an.

It says,

"Weapons from all over the empire were confiscated and melted down

"to be used in casting bells, bell stands and 12 men made of metal."

He's melting down all of those weapons and creating these statues

as a symbol of his power over that empire.

It's straight out the playbook of the great conquerors of

the Mediterranean -

the Alexanders, the Ramesses,

erecting massive statues to reinforce their own might,

dominance, legitimacy.

Sadly there are no traces left of the Emperor's original bronze statues.

But the story suggests he wanted the kudos of exotic foreign culture.

And we may have discovered the origins of the sculptures

who brought that culture to China

thanks to a new discovery made by Dr Lukas Nickel.

-Ever seen something comparable?

-That looks very familiar.

-What about this one?

-That is very similar to the stuff

-we're seeing here at the Terracotta Army.

-Absolutely.

This idea of realism and this idea to try to make

a believable figure, that is totally comparable to what we see in China.

That is a sculpture made in Afghanistan,

where the Greeks established a lot of cities at this time.

What we have here, that's a local ruler who apparently employed

Greek craftsmen to make sculptures for his palace.

These Greek craftsmen had the idea, well, why not even moving

further east to the Chinese, of which we know that they're extremely rich.

And that's going on in what is now Afghanistan?

I mean, that's not very, very far from here, really.

It's about the same distance to Athens as it is to the Chinese capital of Xi'an.

Albert believes he's found the start of the Emperor's Road network...

and his hunch that that network could go much further west

seems to be correct.

Albert, how are you doing?

Have you seen some good stuff as well?

-Oh, yeah.

-Hm. Some fun stuff.

Lukas just showed me some extraordinary images of art

from Afghanistan on the borders of modern day China,

-and on what would become known as the Silk Road.

-Looks quite familiar.

Looks quite familiar? I mean, we're not talking about people coming from Athens,

we're talking from Afghanistan, Tajikistan here.

Basically, what we're saying is very similar art styles,

very similar timeframe

and a bunch of connection points between these two.

Bang! East and West.

INDISTINCT

We know the Emperor has Western-style statues created for his capital.

We think there were itinerant Greek sculptors moving east

to a city in what is now Afghanistan.

And it seems there was probably a road linking Xi'an at least as far as Lintao.

So a picture is emerging of a cultural highway

between West and East, a prototype Silk Road.

But the picture is not yet complete.

-Hello?

-HORN BLARES

Oh, hi, Alice. How are you doing?

We've got archaeology, we've got a culture of art techniques of art -

what we don't have is any people. You're the people person.

It would be nice to see some evidence.

I'm headed now to the Shaanxi Institute of Archaeology.

I'm hoping I'm going to see some of the mausoleum workers' bones.

I've talked to the archaeologists and they've hinted that there

might be some kind of Western connection there,

so I'm really intrigued to have a look at this.

The remains Alice is going to see were found several kilometres east of the Terracotta Army.

They're believed to be tomb workers because they were buried in a mass grave at the same period,

close to the remains of a pottery kiln.

There's one skull in particular that I'm really intrigued to have a look at,

because it might offer some kind of connection to people outside of China.

The Shaanxi Institute is the central depositary for all human remains found in the Emperor's mausoleum.

Because of their sacred and sensitive nature,

those remains are closely guarded and access rarely granted.

According to the Shiji, the Emperor brought 700,000 men

from all across China and possibly beyond to build his mausoleum -

more than 20 times the number who built Egypt's Great Pyramid at Giza.

And Professor Sun has evidence that the human cost was correspondingly high.

-Gosh. So do you think this would have gone round the neck?

-Yeah.

Of these individuals. So they're hardly willing workers.

-Would you consider them to be slaves?

-Criminal.

-Criminals?

-Yeah.

-Criminals who were then conscripted to come and work on the tomb.

-Yeah.

And presumably executed? I mean, these are young men.

We presume this was not a natural death that they suffered.

Among the mass victims of the Emperor's brutal forced labour,

there is one individual, according to Professor Sun,

whose features don't look Chinese.

HE SPEAKS IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE

It is quite intriguing to look at him.

This doesn't really look like a typically East Asian skull.

I'm looking for features which might be typical

of an East Asian skull, and they're not there.

Instead, this skull has got quite prominent nasal bones,

and its cheekbones are different as well.

They're not the flattened cheekbones that I would expect to see.

I think it would be fantastic if we could do

a bit of further analysis on this skull.

There's a tantalising possibility we could be looking at an outsider,

perhaps from beyond China's western border.

A simple DNA test would confirm it,

but they won't let Alice take a sample.

Precise cranial measurements are the only other option.

What would be great is if we could reconstruct the face

of this young man, so that we can see what he would have looked like in life.

Reconstructing the face involves weeks of digital recreation,

building muscle groups onto a computer model of the skull.

But the real scientific data lies in the skull itself.

Alice is using a global database of skull types,

which may help pin down the origins of our tomb worker.

Albert logs on to witness the long-awaited reveal,

and Alice and I get ready to greet our worker face-to-face.

Here we go.

-Here it is!

-The moment of truth.

I can't wait to see what this reconstruction looks like.

-There we go.

-Interesting!

-Oh, wow!

-Oh!

-OK.

-Polystyrene sticking to him.

Wow!

Well, he does look incredibly realistic.

What do you think, Albert?

Camera's coming in for extreme close-up.

The thing that sends little tingles up my spine is that this may be

the closest we get to actually being in that moment in that time.

You know, this is one of the guys who built that entire tomb!

It's quite incredible, isn't it, to look at this reconstruction,

having seen the skull in China,

this is our best guess at what this man looked like in life.

My analysis of the skull was quite interesting.

I took lots of measurements of the skull when we were

out in China and came out as very definitely not Western.

-He's not from the West.

-Um, um, um, um...

-Doesn't help us, does it?

It's not the smoking gun. Tantalising.

It would have been very nice to find a ginger bloke in the Tomb of the First Emperor.

But we'd have been incredibly lucky, I suppose, to find the one skeleton

amongst the tens of thousands that must be lying around there.

The data puts our man outside mainland China, but in a vast area -

from Afghanistan to the Pacific Islands.

Plausible evidence that there may have been outsiders working

on the tomb, and it supports the controversial theory

that the First Emperor could have imported foreigners and foreign ideas.

There are always new discoveries coming out of this vast mausoleum site...

..and one of them has thrown us a new line of inquiry.

Not in terracotta, but in bronze.

And not of human figures, but animals.

46 bronze water birds were found in a pit north of the Emperor's Tomb,

all beautifully arranged as though feeding at an ornamental pond.

It's a type of bronze sculpture that appeared in China almost overnight.

Nothing like it had been seen here before the First Emperor.

It's such a beautiful piece of sculpture.

And it's not just a beautiful object.

It might be the techniques for making it came from the West.

The technique is called direct lost-wax,

and its origins can be traced back to the Mediterranean 5,000 years ago.

Before I can talk to the researcher

who has the key piece of evidence,

I'm told I need to see the basic process

to understand quite how complex it is.

As the name suggests,

they start with a design carved out of wax, then go through

a series of processes to replace that wax with bronze.

So this is a sort of mould that gets created around the wax,

and it's this mould that will give the shape to the bronze. So clever!

Lost-wax took centuries to perfect in the West,

and watching it today, I can understand why!

So this is the big moment. It's all about to be put together.

This is their action now.

Wow! Molten bronze.

It's fascinating to watch, but how good are the results?

Ooh! Look at that!

The bronze has taken the form of that wax absolutely perfectly.

So, they're going to cut these off,

stick a head on it and you've got a wonderful bird fit for an emperor.

Ah! Hot!

It's clear this process is too complex to stumble on by accident,

but did someone bring a version of it to China 2,000 years ago?

According to Dr Shao Anding,

there is telltale evidence of the direct lost-wax technique.

It's hidden inside this swan's graceful, delicate neck.

A reinforced structural core of clay.

-This is evidence, a core like that, isn't it?

-Yeah.

So if you want to create these very natural shapes, you need like

-a reinforcing rod running through it to give it that shape.

-Yeah.

-If you don't have this core rod...

-Just snap off.

-Yeah, yeah.

-Shao only discovered the core rod when he X-rayed the swan.

-Oh! There you go. Is that the rod?

-Yes, yes.

-That's very clear.

-Yes.

That's the reinforcing rod on an X-ray.

It hadn't been seen in Chinese bronze before.

We see similar in Egypt bronze sculpture.

-In Egypt?

-Yes.

-Wow.

-I can show you.

-No! Look at that!

-Yes.

-That's uncanny. It's got the reinforcing rod there.

Yes, yes, yeah. It's the same techniques.

So you're saying this technique was normal in the Mediterranean

and never been seen before in China?

Yeah. We haven't seen it.

These techniques are perfect,

so it's influenced or borrowed from the West.

Wow.

That's pretty good evidence!

We now have strong evidence of Western metal workers in China in the third century BC.

Added to the evidence of Greek trained sculptors,

it suggests there was a community of workers brought here by the Emperor.

But unlike terracotta, when it came to bronze,

the Chinese took imported technology to a whole new level.

In the heart of the mausoleum is a gallery showcasing the genius of the Emperor's bronze workers.

Objects like these.

Two half-size replicas of Imperial carriages made entirely of bronze.

I don't think I've ever seen anything

so beautiful of this antiquity.

Over 2,000 years this remained underground.

So lifelike, you can feel the energy in those horses.

I love the fact that it's just waiting, key in the ignition,

ready for the Emperor to rise in the afterlife, take his position

and be taken off to visit his new underground kingdom.

We're getting a clearer and clearer picture of how the Emperor

used Western techniques to enhance his newly unified empire.

And creating the physical infrastructure to connect to communities far beyond his borders.

But we haven't yet found evidence of Western people.

However, Alice has heard about a new study of human remains from around the time of the First Emperor,

and she's meeting its author, geneticist Josh Xu Zhi.

-Hello, Alice.

-Hello, Josh!

-Nice to meet you.

-Really nice to meet you.

-Have a seat.

-Thank you.

They had a European specific mitochondria DNA.

-A U...

-Oh, yeah.

Most of them are U.

So, U on my map here is something which is much more common,

much more frequent in Europe, definitely European looking,

so this is really intriguing.

This must be evidence at some point, then,

of people with European mitochondrial DNA coming into Asia.

It looks like some Western, erm,

Europeans travelled there and they settled down and they died there.

It does make you wonder if this is evidence of people moving

-along a kind of proto Silk Route.

-Yes.

This DNA evidence was found here en route to China,

and within its current border.

It's news Alice needs to share.

So I just met with Josh, who was the first author

on this fantastic paper from Xinjiang Province.

-Right, where the Silk Road is, basically.

-Yes. OK.

Right over in the West of China, and there they found a real mixture.

European mitochondria DNA lineages mixed up with East Asian lineages.

This goes back to the time of the whole great conquests.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and a real mixture of people.

I would think that there has been an inspiration across the two worlds

that you haven't fully accounted for.

We began our journey with a simple question - what could explain the Terracotta Army?

There was one explanation that was Earth-shattering in its implications.

A direct link with the Western world centuries before it was thought possible.

This is the Western end of that connection -

the British Museum's collection of classical Greek sculpture.

Is it possible that people that learned the skills

that created these masterpieces helped to forge the legacy

of the First Emperor of China? The experts certainly think so.

It's a possibility. They really have some other culture stimulation.

This understanding of sculpture was absolutely extraordinary.

I believe Greek sculpture makers moved all the way

to the Chinese capital and sold their trades to the First Emperor.

And not just in terracotta.

I'd say it is influenced or borrowed directly from the West.

With evidence of an ancient road network that could have brought Westerners to China,

and DNA evidence of Europeans living on China's doorstep.

There's lots of evidence to show they really have

communications between the East and the West.

I think this story rewrites the history of the birth of China,

today one of the most powerful nations on Earth.

And it totally revolutionises our understanding of relations

between East and West 2,000 years ago.

But perhaps most importantly of all, it provides vital context

that deepens and enriches our relationships in the present day.