Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum

This guide to the Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum in Xi'an opens with the farmer Yang Zhifa, who struck a clay face with his hoe while digging a well in 1974. From there it steps back to Qin Shi Huang, the boy king who unified China and spent decades of forced labor building an underground city meant to outlast him, guarded by rows of individually carved soldiers. You'll hear the historian Sima Qian's account of a chamber sealed somewhere beneath the mound, one archaeologists have never opened. Listen for how a drought year and a search for water is what finally woke it.