Two millenniums ago, when the last shovelful of dirt fell on China’s terra-cotta soldiers, the thought was that they would be seen in this life no more. Buried in an emperor’s tomb, they would thenceforth secure and patrol imperial turf in the afterlife.


Fate had other plans. Since being exhumed in the late 20th century the same soldiers have been on a global Long March, moving from one sold-out museum appearance to the next, and serving as, among other things, emblems of China’s neo-imperial clout in the here and now.


That army, or a small piece of it, has just arrived in New York City in an exhibition called “Terracotta Warriors: Defenders of China’s First Emperor” at Discovery Times Square. Only nine of the estimated 8,000 figures entombed at Xian in central China have made the trip. But they’re in great shape and, fitted out with weapons, armor, livestock, cash and a portable kitchen, they’re a sight to see.


They also come with an action-adventure narrative, part deep history, part archaeological romance. The history goes back to well before the third century B.C., when north-central China was a chaos of feuding states, all intent on domination. The one called Qin, ruled by horse breeders whose main trade came to lie outside China, seemed least likely to succeed. But when, after centuries of clashes, the dust finally settled, the Qin was left standing, and in command.


Its leaders were almost absurdly ambitious.


Forget about being big fish in a small territorial pond. They wanted to fill and control the biggest pond, China itself, then considered the center of the world, and made quick progress toward this goal.


Victories bred further ambitions. Why stop at China? Why not rule the cosmos, or a healthy slice of it?


That was the aim of the penultimate and greatest Qin ruler, Ying Zheng, who was born in 259 B.C., assumed the throne at 13 and bestowed on himself a freshly invented title: Qin Shihuangdi, or First Emperor of Qin, which really meant first emperor of China. Power, for him, was the elixir of life. He couldn’t get enough, and seemed neurotically afraid to stop trying.


Having subdued immense tracts of China’s geography he set about conquering its history too. He gave orders that all chronicles other than those that flatteringly documented the Qin family line be destroyed. Once he had the past under his thumb, he turned a control-freak eye to the future: he would colonize heaven.


This he did, or tried to, by creating one of the most ambitious monuments to self on record: a tomb complex more than 40 years in the making — it was still under way when he died at 50 — that reproduced, to scale and in imperishable form, imperial life as he knew it on earth.


Empires can’t exist without armies, so he commissioned one made up of thousands of fighters, from five-star generals to humble foot soldiers, modeled from clay, roughly life size, ready to serve. Each figure was dressed by rank, though with uniforms individually customized: an extra sash here, a bulkier coat there. Faces were differentiated too. Although a very limited number of facial molds were used, each face was given hand-modeled features — noses, ears, mouths, moustaches and so on — so that no two looked alike.


The collective result was, and is, remarkable: a fighting machine with multiple personalities. All the figures were finally placed, in battle formation and with teams of terra-cotta horses, in three basementlike pits, which were covered over. Other types of clay figures — of civic officials, servants and court acrobats — were buried nearby. And all were under the watchful eye of the emperor, who was interred deep within a mountain of packed earth, his coffin reputedly surrounded by a moat of toxic mercury.


So that was the history. The Qin empire survived the emperor by four years, to be replaced by the long-lived Han dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.). The tomb greened over. Its contents were forgotten for centuries, which is where the archaeological romance kicks in.