A platoon of China’s Terracotta Warriors will leave China for the first time in their 2,200-year history go on display in a Liverpool museum
Ten soldiers and 170 other historical artefacts from museums in the north-western Shaanxi province have made the 5,000-mile journey to Merseyside’s World Museum, ten years since the city was named UK capital of culture.
The exhibition, entitled China's First Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors, opens on 9 February and will run until 28 October.
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Some of the estimated 8,000 warriors buried in the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, China’s first emperor, have visited the UK before - including a 2007 exhibition at the British Museum in London - but the ten coming to Liverpool have never been seen outside of China.
Fiona Philpott, director of exhibitions at National Museums Liverpool, told the Liverpool Echo last year that the loan was a “fantastic, once in a lifetime opportunity” for the city.
“Liverpool is more than capable of hosting and staging these types of events and this exhibition will be a beautiful illustration of that,” she told Cheshire Life. “We are hoping to achieve record figures, with 450,000 visitors estimated.”
The choice of Liverpool for the first UK display of Terracotta Warriors in more than ten years was partially influenced by the high profile of Liverpool football club, The Guardian reports.
“There are more than 1 million Liverpool fans in China, more than in the UK,” said Wu Haiyun, the project manager at the Chinese government’s cultural heritage promotion centre.
Liverpool’s Chinese community was another attraction. The city boasts the oldest Chinatown in Europe, dating to the mid-19th century.
Although today the Terracotta Warriors are one the most globally recognised symbols of Chinese history and culture, the legion of life-sized soldiers, chariots and horses was only discovered in 1974, by a group of villagers digging a well.
The partially excavated site now houses a huge museum built around Qin’s mausoleum, the largest known burial site in the world.
