Western contact with China began long before Marco Polo, experts say

China and the West were in contact more than 1,500 years before European explorer Marco Polo arrived in China, new finds suggest.

Archaeologists say inspiration for the Terracotta Warriors, found at the Tomb of the First Emperor near today's Xian, may have come from Ancient Greece.
They also say ancient Greek artisans could have been training locals there in the Third Century BC.

Polo's 13th Century travel to China had been thought the first by a European.
"We now have evidence that close contact existed between the First Emperor's China and the West before the formal opening of the Silk Road. This is far earlier than we formerly thought," said Senior Archaeologist Li Xiuzhen, from the Emperor Qin Shi Huang's Mausoleum Site Museum.

The Greatest Tomb on Earth: Secrets of Ancient China will be shown in the UK on BBC Two on 16 October at 20:00 BST
The Chinese emperor who burned books

A separate study shows European-specific mitochondrial DNA has been found at sites in China's westernmost Xinjiang Province, suggesting that Westerners may have settled, lived and died there before and during the time of the First Emperor.

Other discoveries include new evidence that the First Emperor's tomb complex is much bigger than first thought and 200 times bigger than Egypt's Valley of the Kings.
They also include the mutilated remains of women, believed to have been high-ranking concubines of the First Emperor, and the skull of a man with a crossbow bolt embedded in it.
The skull is believed to have belonged to the First Emperor's eldest son, thought to have been killed along with others during a power struggle after the emperor's death.