Revenge of the terracotta warriors

Another case of no good discovery going unpunished:

Before his lonely suicide . . . Wang's life was far from unremarkable. He was one of a seven-strong team of workers who, while digging a well on their communal farm in 1974, stumbled across the most priceless archaeological discovery of modern times - the 2,200 year-old Terracotta Warriors.

It is a discovery that has brought tens of millions of foreign tourists to Xian in north-western China and made many businessmen and, it is claimed, local officials extremely rich. But for the farmers who found the buried army and the ancient village they grew up in, the warriors have proved more a curse than a blessing.

As the biggest ever overseas exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors began at the British Museum last week, we tracked down the surviving men who discovered the stone soldiers and found them bewildered at the greed and destruction the warriors brought to the surface with them.

Their farmland has been claimed by the government, stripping them of their livelihoods, their homes and those of their neighbours were demolished with little or no compensation to make way for exhibition halls, parking lots and gift shops - and their village with its 2,000 year history has all but disappeared.

Posted by David on September 18, 2007 9:30 PM