Chinese team restores legendary Tang dynasty ‘golden’ armour found in Tibetan tomb

“We will not leave the desert till we beat the foe, although in war our golden armour be outworn 100 times.”

Wang Changling’s famous poem from China’s Tang dynasty depicts soldiers in golden armour battling on the desert frontiers. However, for a long time, no Tang dynasty gold-plated armour was unearthed, leaving its appearance to the imagination.

But on January 14, the Key Laboratory of Archaeological Sciences and Cultural Heritage at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) unveiled the only known physical example of Tang dynasty “golden” armour – a meticulously restored suit of gilded bronze armour found in a royal tomb on the Tibetan plateau.

Armour pieces are seen during the excavation. Photo: Handout

The restoration team behind the project not only rebuilt the artefact piece by piece but also produced a video reconstruction showing the likely appearance of the original gold armour.

The artefacts were salvaged and restored from the Tuyuhun royal tombs between 2022 and 2025, including armour, lacquerware and metal objects.

“We adopted a strategy of ‘disassembling the whole into parts and reassembling the parts into a whole’, conducting layered cleaning, extraction and protection while meticulously cataloguing each armour plate,” cultural heritage conservation expert Guo Zhengchen told a press conference at the armour unveiling.

The king’s tomb had been hit by looting and salvage excavations, leaving the armour plates in poor condition.

A 2024 excavation report in the journal Archaeology, titled “Excavation of Tomb No 1 at the Hot Water Cemetery in Dulan County, Qinghai, 2018,” describes the find: “Several bronze armour plates were discovered … The plates are nearly rectangular with a semicircular lower edge, measuring 10cm long, 5cm wide, and 0.3cm thick. A large number of lacquered armour pieces were also found”.

South China Morning Post