The Terracotta Army with Dan Snow (Channel 5)
Dates, genders and quotes are never easy to remember. But the facts of the past become unforgettable when they are soaked in a good stink.
The Horrible Histories team knew it. Before switching to a less childish comedy with Ghosts, they produced dozens of episodes so sharp you could smell the rotting piles of vegetables and manure through the television.
And Dan Snow knows it too. His Chinese expedition to discover the Terracotta Army was liberally peppered with stinking anecdotes that stick in the mind.
You may not remember that the 8,000 pottery soldiers were deployed to guard the first emperor of China, who died in 210 BC. Nor were they known to exist until 1974, when a group of farmers under Chairman Mao alerted archaeologists to pottery discoveries in their fields.
Historian Dan Snow, pictured, visited the Terracotta Army in China during his latest series
Snow, pictured with a fake reconstructed Terracotta head during the documentary series
But you will never forget that when the emperor died, aged 49, on the borders of his vast kingdom, it took three days to transport his body to his beautiful tomb. On the hot road, the decomposing potentate began to smell so bad that his courtiers had to requisition cartloads of fish to mask the smell.
With grim pleasure, Dan added that after the burial, dozens of concubines had been sealed in the coffin while they were still alive. The craftsmen and architects who designed the pyramid tomb were also locked inside, so that no one would survive to sell the secrets of its layout to grave robbers.
There’s also a touch of Indiana Jones in it: booby traps with loaded crossbows were placed in the tunnels to deter thieves from the riches destined for Qin Shi Huangdi in the afterlife.
That’s the kind of detail Dan likes. At 6 feet tall, he towered over the rows of Chinese visitors to the mausoleum in Xi’an, 560 miles from Beijing, but at heart he is an overgrown schoolboy.
Over the centuries, the underground habitat the warriors lived in collapsed, crushing them to pieces. Legions of restorers are putting them back together, and Dan watched with fascination as a clay puzzle was gradually pieced together into a complete figure.
His cameras were able to get close enough to show that not only is each face subtly different, but each soldier also has unique details of his clothing. The scale of the reconstruction work is almost as breathtaking as the sheer ambition of the monument itself.
Inevitably, the documentary left a number of questions unanswered. Historians believe that 250,000 slaves were needed to create the tomb and its life-size statues — but how many archaeologists and craftsmen have worked on its restoration over the past 50 years? And is there any way to estimate how much it cost?
And where are their weapons? An empty-handed army is at a distinct disadvantage.
Dan also revealed that the soldiers were originally painted in lifelike colors, but did not explain why this is not being recreated. It seems a shame, if they once had beautiful tunics and dark mustaches, to make them look like Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men.