Daily History Challenge · No. 106 · Monday 12 October 2026 · When?
Puzzle No. 106: When?
The event was Construction of the First Emperor's mausoleum and Terracotta Army, in c. 246 to 208 BCE.
The answer
Beginning around 246 BCE, shortly after the young king of Qin took the throne, work began on a colossal funerary complex near Mount Li (modern Lintong, Shaanxi). According to the historian Sima Qian, hundreds of thousands of conscripted labourers laboured for decades on the necropolis. Its most famous component, discovered by well-diggers in 1974, is an underground army of an estimated 8,000 life-sized terracotta soldiers, along with horses, chariots and weapons, arranged in battle formation to guard the emperor in the afterlife. Each figure was individually finished, and the figures were originally brightly painted. The scale of the project reflects both the immense resources the unified Qin state could mobilise and the First Emperor's preoccupation with immortality and the afterlife. The tomb mound itself remains largely unexcavated. The site is one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, offering an unparalleled window into Qin military organisation, craft technology, and imperial ideology.