兵马俑是什么?
What is the Terracotta Army?
Name: ________________ Date: ________
Key words
| Word | Pinyin | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 农民 | nóngmín | peasant; farmer |
| 硬 | yìng | hard; stiff |
| 支 | zhī | branch; offshoot (as in 支流) |
| 统一 | tǒngyī | unified; uniform; to unify; to unite |
| 专家 | zhuānjiā | expert; specialist |
| 匹 | pǐ | classifier for horses, mules and bolts of cloth |
| 严肃 | yánsù | serious; solemn; stern |
| 细节 | xìjié | detail |
| 灰色 | huīsè | gray |
| 红 | hóng | red |
| 现代 | xiàndài | modern; contemporary; modern times; modern age |
| 当年 | dāngnián | in those years; back then |
English (for the teacher)
In the spring of 1974 it hadn't rained for a long time in Lintong, near Xi'an. A few farmers decided to dig a well outside their village. One day, someone hit something hard. They pulled it out and looked: it was a head made of clay, eyes open, as if it were looking right at them.
They didn't know it, but what they had found was an underground army more than two thousand years old. It is what we now know as the famous Terracotta Army.
The Terracotta Army was made for Qin Shi Huang. Qin Shi Huang was China's first emperor; in 221 BC he unified China. When he was still very young, he had already begun building his own tomb. The Terracotta Army is buried a little more than a kilometre east of the tomb, lined up in neat rows like real soldiers. People think it was meant to go on protecting the emperor in the next world.
So how many figures are there? Experts estimate that the three pits hold more than eight thousand soldiers, a hundred and thirty chariots and over six hundred horses, and most of them are still under the ground today.
The most surprising thing is that the soldiers all look different. Some are fat, some thin; some look stern, some seem to be smiling; their hair and beards are all different too. Experts think the workers started from about ten basic face shapes and then added the details one by one, which is why it's hard to find two faces exactly alike.
The figures we see today are grey, but when they were first made they were painted in bright reds, greens, blues and other colours. Once they came out of the earth, most of the colour came off before long.
So what does Qin Shi Huang's own tomb look like inside? More than two thousand years ago, the historian Sima Qian wrote that inside it, rivers and seas were made of mercury. It sounds like a fairy tale, but when modern scientists tested it, they found the soil on top of the tomb really is unusually full of mercury. To this day the emperor's tomb has never been opened; some people think that is to protect what is inside.
In 1987 the First Emperor's tomb and the Terracotta Army became a World Heritage Site. One of the farmers who dug the well later spent years signing his name for visitors at the Terracotta Army museum. In the end their well never gave a single drop of water, but it brought an army of eight thousand back into the sunlight.