Terracotta Warriors

I remember going Christmas shopping once with my sister and, as we walked through the John Lewis kitchen department, no doubt in search of some delightful present for some lucky family member, it dawned on me that I could plot a path through the shelves in such a way as to arrive quite suddenly in an area surrounded by floor to ceiling terracotta.

For my unsuspecting sister, this was not funny – she cannot stand the stuff, at all, even the thought of it – to me it was, of course, hilarious.

I doubt that the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, had the same motive when ordering the construction of his Terracotta Army – but when somebody goes to these kinds of lengths, you can never be totally sure it wasn’t an elaborate joke…