China's First Emperor sought immortality and may have been poisoned by it: one theory blames a mercury elixir from his alchemists.

210 BC

The soil of his tomb mound holds 100 times the natural mercury, as Sima Qian wrote of rivers of mercury inside.

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The event

• Terracotta Army210 BC · Mount Li. Qin Shi Huang died in 210 BC and was buried in a vast mausoleum at Mount Li. It is guarded by thousands of life-size clay warriors with horses and chariots, discovered by farmers in 1974.

3rd century BC

More amazing facts

• 240 BC Around 240 BC, Eratosthenes measured the Earth's circumference in Egypt, while Chinese chroniclers made the first sure record of Halley's Comet.
• 240 BC An Egyptian king kept the original scripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and simply forfeited a huge deposit.
• 218 BC · 214 BC Hannibal took elephants over the Alps at almost the same time China began its Great Wall.
• 214 BC · 1368 · 1644 The Great Wall of postcards is younger than it looks: most of its brick sections were built under the Ming, after 1368.
• 202 BC In 202 BC, empires were decided at both ends of Eurasia: Scipio defeated Hannibal at Zama, and Liu Bang founded the Han dynasty.
• 196 BC · 1802 The British Museum's most visited object is a piece of bureaucracy: the Rosetta Stone bears a priestly decree honouring Ptolemy V, repeated in three scripts, and has been on display almost continuously since 1802.

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