The Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest presents a major exhibition focused on one of the world’s most famous archaeological discoveries – the Terracotta Army – and the age of the First Emperor of China, spanning more than a millennium of Chinese history. The Civilization of the Qin and Han Dynasties. The First Chinese Emperor’s Terracotta Warriors features over one hundred and fifty ancient artefacts, including spectacular archaeological finds, weapons, ritual objects and symbols. The exhibition, including ten original figures from the emperor’s terracotta army, will be open to visitors until the end of May 2026.

The First Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huangdi, ascended the throne of one of the seven warring Chinese states in the second half of the third century BC, at the age of thirteen. Through decades of conquest he unified the realm and nearly twenty years later he was the ruler of a vast empire. His empire and the age of the Qin dynasty marked the unification, strengthening and rise of China. When the emperor died in 210 BC, he was buried in a vast mausoleum the size of a city, the construction of which was realised by hundreds of thousands of workers over the course of thirty-three years. The mausoleum includes numerous tombs, with a scaled-down model of the Chinese Empire itself in its central area. The centre of the imperial tomb remains unopened to this day, but Chinese archaeologists have excavated many other burial sites of the mausoleum over the past fifty years. The most famous of these is the army of life-size terracotta (clay) soldiers guarding the emperor’s tomb, discovered in 1974 by local farmers digging a well. The thousands of life-sized soldiers, sculpted with individual facial features and buried in precise military formation, have since become the most renowned finds in Chinese archaeology. This exhibition presents the results of half a century of research, providing a more detailed and comprehensive picture of the first imperial dynasty and the functioning of the ancient Chinese empire than ever before. The soldiers of the first Chinese emperor’s army were first seen in Budapest nearly forty years ago, in the spring of 1988, but at that earlier stage in the excavations, only a much smaller and more modest selection could be shown.

The current exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest is exceptional both in scale and in the number of original artefacts on display. Even in a European context, it is rare to see such an extensive selection of original works lent by Chinese museums, providing an extraordinary insight into this important period of Chinese history.

Visitors will be able to trace the centuries-long rise of the Qin State and later the Qin Empire between the eighth and third centuries BC, while seeing the key ritual objects and symbols from the period. The exhibition introduces the age of the First Emperor of China, the details of everyday life, the structure of his army, its weaponry and the uniquely modelled soldiers. It also features bronze and jade ritual objects used by ancient rulers to make offerings to their ancestors, as well as the architectural elements of their living environment. The ancient Chinese concept of the Universe – based on the dynamic interaction of the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal and water) – is evoked by the exhibition installation through the use of the spectacular motifs of traditional Chinese cosmology. Qin Shi Huangdi pursued the secret of immortality with great determination, and his tomb contained beautiful objects linked to the afterlife, such as chariots intended to carry him to eternity; replicas of these are shown at the Budapest exhibition. The large, central section of the show presents the finds excavated from the First Emperor’s mausoleum: not only lifelike figures of soldiers (officers, infantrymen, archers and charioteer) and their weapons, but also objects allowing an insight into the operation of the newly unified empire, its governance and daily life.

Although the history of his dynasty came to an end only a few years after the death of the First Emperor, his reign laid the foundations of the Chinese Empire. The rise of the succeeding Han dynasty and the consolidation of imperial power, illustrated through selected artefacts from the Yangling Mausoleum (middle of the second century BC), one of the most important archaeological finds of the Western Han period, are presented in the final section of the exhibition. The grave goods of Emperor Jing, the sixth ruler of the Han dynasty, not only shed light on westward expansion and the beginnings of Silk Road trade but also offer an insight into the everyday operation of the empire (its coinage, measures and economy). The exhibition extends beyond the First Emperor’s death, as it allows visitors to follow the history of Chinese civilisation up to the end of the Han dynasty in the early third century AD.

Thanks to the carefully selected archaeological material, the exhibition reveals a defining era of China’s dynastic history: the centuries in which the Chinese Empire was born, consolidated and institutionalised.

All the displayed artefacts come from museums in Shaanxi Province, the region that includes China’s ancient imperial capital. The majority are loans from the Emperor Qinshihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, the Han Yangling Mausoleum and the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology.

Accompanying exhibition

The Great Wall of China – Within and Beyond

Xiongnu, East Asian Nomadic and Ancient Chinese Bronzes

Michelangelo Hall

As early as the interwar period, artefacts from the ancient peoples who lived along China’s northern borders were collected with special care in Hungary, with particular attention devoted to relics associated with the Asian Huns. This interest stemmed largely from the early-twentieth-century identification of the Xiongnu known from Chinese sources with the Asian Huns, which became scientifically supported thanks to Sir Aurel Stein’s excavations and publications of their finds. Archaeological material from the Carpathian Basin provided numerous points of connection with finds discovered along the Great Wall. Numerous nomadic peoples inhabited the regions along China’s northern frontiers stretching some three thousand kilometres (approximately the distance from Moscow to Paris) during the first millennium BC. To protect the empire from their incursions, China built the vast defensive system of the Great Wall, which was constructed as a succession of fortifications running parallel in many sections. It was the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, who unified these walls into a continuous defensive line at the end of the third century BC.

The exhibition presents the art of the nomadic peoples who lived along the northern frontier of ancient China, incorporating numerous Chinese influences, and its principal artefacts, the so-called Ordos bronzes, placing them in a broad historical and artistic context. The diverse collection of nearly three hundred objects from the Ferenc Hopp Museum of Asiatic Arts is divided into five major thematic groups: metal garment and belt ornaments, weapons, utilitarian objects, and a highly varied array of horse harness fittings and carriage decorations.

The exhibition’s curator is the sinologist Györgyi Fajcsák, the Director of the Hopp Ferenc Museum of Asiatic Arts.

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