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Terra-cotta figure of a middle-ranking officer

3
Height 190 (74 A)
Qin Dynasty, third century BCE (c. 210) ,
From Pit 2 at Xiyangcun, Lintong, Shaanxi Province
Qin Terra-cotta Museum, Lintong, Shaanxi Province

A member of an infantry formation accompanying
a chariot, this middle-ranking officer 1 is distin-
guished from the lower-ranking soldiers by his
armor of overlapping rectangular plates (represent-
ing lacquer-coated leather), joined with cords and
rivets; epaulieres cover his shoulders and upper
arms. A tunic extends below his knees, and he
wears squared shoes. The figure's left hand proba-
bly originally held a sword; the fingers of the right
hand grasp another weapon (now lost). The hands
of the Qin army figures were created through a
combination of molding and modeling and then
inserted into the hollow arms. Their manufacture
exemplifies the module system, which rationalized
and speeded the production process: using double-
or single-section molds, the artisans created palms,
to which fingers (usually separately modeled) were
then attached. Working with a limited number of
prefabricated variations, the sculptors created sev-
eral basic forms — hands with fingers bent or with
fingers outstretched — that could be fitted to vari-
ous types of bodies. 2
The officer's face, with its elaborately styled
mustache and beard, displays a remarkably vivid,
attentive expression; individualized features include
the incised wrinkles that crease his forehead. The
detailed treatment of the Qin warriors' faces has led
some scholars to identify the figures as portraits of
3
individuals; others have divided the physiognomies
into types and identified these with particular
regions from which the ranks of the Qin army were
4
drawn. The faces, however, are to a large extent
stereotypical, a fact directly related to their mass
production. The artisans used a variety of standard-
ized, molded components to create the heads of
the figures; combinations of particular elements
and hand finishing "individualized" the figures. 5
That the terra-figures do not convey distinct, indi-

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