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The Terracotta Army with Dan Snow review: Still a child at heart, historian Dan delights in China's horrible history, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS
Dan Snow may be 6ft 6in, but he is essentially a schoolboy at heart with an infectious enthusiasm for history, especially when involving horrible smells, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS.
Before turning to less puerile comedy with Ghosts, they produced dozens of episodes so pungent, you could smell the rotting veg and dung heaps through the telly. You might not remember that the 8,000 earthenware soldiers were made to guard the first Emperor of China, who died in 210BC, or that their existence was unknown until 1974, when a group of farmers under Chairman Mao’s rule alerted archaeologists to the fragments of pottery in their fields. There’s a touch of Indiana Jones too: booby traps including loaded crossbows were set up in the tunnels, to deter thieves from pillaging the wealth intended for Qin Shi Huangdi in the afterlife.
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