QIN SHI HUANG: THE TOMB THEY STILL HAVEN’T OPENED: The First Emperor, the Terracotta Army, and the Secrets Beneath China’s Sealed Mausoleum

Qin Shi Huang unified China and built one of the ancient world’s most powerful centralized states, yet more than two thousand years after his death, the chamber believed to contain the First Emperor himself still has not been opened.

QIN SHI HUANG: THE TOMB THEY STILL HAVEN’T OPENED explores the extraordinary mystery surrounding his life, death, and burial. Ancient historian Sima Qian described a vast underground world filled with palaces, treasures, mechanical crossbows, and rivers and seas of mercury. For centuries, those accounts seemed almost impossible. Then archaeology began revealing the scale of the mausoleum complex, including the Terracotta Army, bronze weapons, imperial chariots, and evidence of unusually high mercury concentrations around the burial mound.

But the central tomb remains sealed.

Did ancient looters ever reach the burial chamber? Could the emperor’s remains still survive inside? Were the stories of mercury rivers based on fact? And what else may still be hidden beneath the mound?

James P. Patterson separates archaeological evidence from legend while examining Qin Shi Huang’s rise to power, his search for immortality, the construction of his underground empire, and the scientific reasons modern archaeologists have resisted opening the tomb.

For readers fascinated by ancient China, Qin Shi Huang, the Terracotta Army, archaeological mysteries, lost tombs, ancient civilizations, Chinese history, and unsolved historical mysteries, this book examines one of the most extraordinary unopened tombs in the world.