Mount Li

This guide to Mount Li in Xi'an starts in March 1974, when a farmer's hoe struck something hollow during a drought dig and out came a clay face, the accidental discovery of the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang's afterlife guard. It follows Qin's mercury-elixir obsession, the roughly seven thousand life-sized terracotta soldiers unearthed nearby, and the ancient historian Sima Qian's claim that the sealed tomb beneath the mountain holds rivers of mercury shaped like real rivers. The burial mound itself has never been opened.