The Terracotta Fleet

China is building a robotic force to guard its interests at home and abroad. Winning that race takes three things at once, the bodies, the brains, and the power to run them, and the West is only now organizing to compete on all three.

Two millennia ago, a Chinese emperor buried an army. Qin Shi Huang, the man who first welded the warring states into a single country, ordered roughly 8,000 life-sized clay soldiers made and set in the ground near his tomb. Horses, chariots, officers, archers, each figure with its own face. The scale was confounding for its time. Records point to hundreds of thousands of laborers and decades of work, all of it to guard one dead man on his way to the next world. The soldiers were built the way you would build them today, on something close to a production line, with heads, arms, and torsos molded separately and assembled at volume. Then the whole thing was covered over and forgotten for more than two thousand years, until a few farmers digging a well in 1974 hit a clay head.