Ancient army invades museum

ancient paint. So tucked inside one of the crates sent from China was a painted warrior head.

The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis is in a brightly coloured building in the heart of the city. Contained within its walls are more than 120 000 objects from around the world. But the museum is not designed only for kids.

“We necessarily create spaces where adults and children can learn together, manipulate things together, talk together and enjoy the exhibit together,” says the museum’s president, Jeffrey Patchen.

The museum’s newest gallery, called Take Me There: China, immerses visitors in Chinese culture. Kids can practise calligraphy, learn about kung fu and explore Beijing. To kick off the new gallery, which opened on Saturday, museum curators brought in Terracotta Warriors: The Emperor’s Painted Army.

“In the exhibit, you get a little background on the emperor. You get to see an extraordinarily wellpreserved head with a good amount of paint on it that the scientists have been able to preserve, and then leap right into a lab environment,” says Charity Counts, the museum’s associate vice president of exhibits.

The lab is like a giant playground for kids and adults. Visi- tors can mould their own miniature terracotta warriors or sculpt a life-size warrior face, just as the craftsmen did more than 2 000 years ago. Computer interactives reveal the secrets behind the paint that the workers applied to the clay figures and allow guests to digitally paint their own archer or general. Kids can also take on the role of archaeologist and piece together a life-size, 3-D puzzle of a kneeling archer.

The army is set to march back to China in November.

Here are some interesting facts about the terracotta army:

● The army was discovered in 1974, over 2 000 years after it was covered over during the burial of Emperor Qin. The army was located 1.6km from the tomb of the emperor.

● The horses in the army are saddled. This shows that the saddle had been invented by the time of the Qin Dynasty.

● There are four main pits that house the army, about 6.4m deep.

● The bronze weapons were found in excellent condition because they were coated with a layer of chromium that protected them for thousands of years.

● Most of the statues were broken, but archeologists have been carefully putting them back together for years.

● Terracotta is a common type of hard-baked clay. Once the soldiers were shaped with wet clay, they would have been allowed to dry then baked in a very hot oven called a kiln so the clay would harden. – Washington Post

FINE IMITATION: A half-size reproduction of a 2 200-year-old terracotta chariot with four horses from the emperor’s tomb in China.

INDIVIDUALLY SCULPTED: Life-size terracotta warriors were found in the pits, some wearing armour, others not.