The Janice Hawkins Cultural Arts Park at Troy University in Alabama is home to 200 replicas of the Terracotta Army.
Found in China in 1974, the 8000 soldiers were in place as guardians of the burial place of the country’s first emperor. It’s today a UNESCO World Heritage Site. From the Smithsonian piece:
Qin Shi Huangdi decreed a mass-production approach; artisans turned out figures almost like cars on an assembly line. Clay, unlike bronze, lends itself to quick and cheap fabrication. Workers built bodies, then customized them with heads, hats, shoes, mustaches, ears and so on, made in small molds. Some of the figures appear so strikingly individual they seem modeled on real people, though that is unlikely. “These probably weren’t portraits in the Western sense,” says Hiromi Kinoshita, who helped curate the exhibition at the British Museum. Instead, they may have been aggregate portraits: the ceramicists, says Kinoshita, “could have been told that you need to represent all the different types of people who come from different regions of China.”
These 200 replicas by artist Huo Bao Zhu at Troy are a permanent addition to the park.
