In modern China, with its brutal pace of development, it was an unremarkable death. Racked with disease and with no money to pay for medicine or a visit to the doctor, peasant farmer Wang Puzhi waited until his family were out, slipped a rope around his neck and ended his suffering.
Before his suicide, however, Wang's life was far from unremarkable. He was one of seven men who, while digging a well on their communal farm in 1974, stumbled across the most priceless archaeological discovery of modern times: the 2,200-year-old terracotta warriors. It was a discovery that has brought millions of foreign tourists to Xian in northwestern China. It has also made many businessmen and, it is claimed, local officials extremely rich. But for the farmers who found the buried army, and the ancient village they grew up in, the warriors have proved to be more of a curse than a blessing.
Ahead of the biggest overseas exhibition of the terracotta warriors - which began at the British Museum this week - we tracked down the surviving men who discovered the stone soldiers and found them bewildered by the greed and destruction the warriors had brought to the surface with them. Their farmland has been claimed by the government, stripping them of their livelihoods; their homes and those of their neighbours have been demolished with little or no compensation to make way for exhibition halls, coach parks and gift shops; and their village with its 2,000-year history has all but disappeared.
Within three years of Wang's suicide in 1997 at the age of 60, the two youngest members of the well diggers - Yang Wenhai and Yang Yanxin - died jobless and penniless at home, unable to pay for a visit to the doctor to even diagnose their illnesses. Both were only in their 50s.
Today, the four remaining men - Yang Quanyi, 79, Yang Peiyan, 78, Yang Zhifa, 69, and Yang Xinman, 69 - are paid about 1,000 yuan a month to sit in official souvenir shops and sign photo books for queues of tourists who come to see the army that was built to protect China's first emperor in the afterlife.
'Officials and businessmen have made a lot of money from the terracotta warriors, but not us,' said Yang Quanyi, who has been signing the books for nine years, after three months spent learning how to write his name. 'We got nothing for the discovery,' he said. 'It was the days of collective farms and we were given 10 credit points by our brigade leader for finding the warriors. That was the equivalent of about one yuan in our pay packet at the end of the month.'