By SIMON PARRY

Last updated at 22:07 08 September 2007

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, 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 a seven-strong team of workers who, while digging a well on their communal farm in Yang village in 1974, stumbled across the most priceless archaeological discovery of modern times: the 2,200-year-old Terracotta Army.

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Their discovery has brought millions of tourists to Xi'an in north-western China and made many businessmen and, it is claimed, officials rich.

But for the farmers who found the buried army, the warriors have proved more a curse than a blessing.

On the eve of a sensational exhibition at the British Museum - the largest ever display of the soldiers outside China - The Mail on Sunday tracked down the survivors from the group who discovered the figures.

But instead of reaping the rewards of finding the treasures, they are bewildered at the greed and destruction the warriors brought to the surface with them.

Their farmland was claimed by the government.

Their homes were demolished to make way for exhibition halls and gift shops.

Their 2,000-year-old village has all but disappeared.

Within three years of 60-year-old Puzhi's suicide in 1997, the two youngest members of the team who found the warriors - Yang Wenhai and Yang Yanxin - died in their 50s, jobless and penniless.

Today, the four remaining men 79-year-old Yang Quanyi, 78-year-old Yang Peiyan and 69-year-olds Yang Zhifa and Yang Xinman - earn £2 a day to sit in official souvenir shops at the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor and sign books for tourists.

"Officials and businessmen have made a lot of money from the Terracotta Army, but not us," said Quanyi, who has been signing the books for nine years, having spent three months learning how to write his own name.

"We got nothing for the discovery.

"It was the days of collective farms and we were given ten credit points by our brigade leader for finding the warriors. That was the equivalent of about one yuan [5p]."

There had always been rumours of buried treasure in the farmers' village.

Then, in March 1974, while digging a well, one of the farmers, Zhifa, struck something about 15m down.

"At first all we saw was the top of a head," said Quanyi.

"Then as we dug further we saw the whole head."

Thinking he had found a bronze relic that the villagers could sell for the price of a few packets of cigarettes, Zhifa used a hammer to break it off and brought it back to the village. "Everyone was afraid to touch it," said Quanyi.

"We thought it was a temple statue - a buddha perhaps.

"We were frightened that the buddha would punish us."

In fact the farmers had found one of more than 8,000 terracotta foot soldiers, archers and charioteers that had been buried with Qin, the First Emperor of China, in 221 BC in a mausoleum covering several square miles.

Officials and archaeologists poured into the village and began to excavate the tomb.

Over the next few years, land that for centuries had provided the village with its livelihood was claimed by the state.

Villagers say almost all the compensation paid by the government was siphoned off by officials.

With China still a relatively closed country and the tourism boom still years off, they sank deeper into what was to prove fatal poverty for three of the seven.

"Families here are too poor to afford medicine," said Quanyi.

"Yang Yanxin died of a skin disease that caused his body to rot away. Yang Wenhai died in great pain at home."

The family of Wang Puzhi, who hanged himself in 1997, are still upset at his death.

"He had acute heart disease,' said Yang Lou Cheng, his stepson.

"He couldn't bear the suffering and he didn't want to be a burden to my mother and me. So one day when he was alone in the house he hanged himself.

My mother died a short while later."

In recent years, as China has opened its doors to tourists, the site at Xi'an has been expanded.

Families were forced to move to new homes a mile away and had to pay £525 per person for the construction.

"The government has taken away our land and our livelihoods," said one villager who didn't want to be named.

"People in Yang village are simple farm-ers.

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"Only a handful of them have been able to make any money by selling food or souvenirs to tourists. But 100 per cent of the local officials here have become rich."

Already there are plans to expand the exhibition space and bulldoze what remains of Yang village.

When a group of villagers travelled by bus and train to Beijing, 1,000 miles away, to petition the government for compensation, they were sent away with nothing.

But what the villagers want most is for the farmers who found the Terracotta Army to receive the recognition they deserve.

Not one of the group of seven is named or photographed anywhere-within the complex in Xi'an.

Other men who had nothing to do with the discovery pose as the original farmers, signing books for tourists. One such man is 60-year-old Yang Xi An, who sits underneath a banner describing himself as the man who made the discovery in 1974, alongside a blownup photograph of him shaking hands with former American President Bill Clinton during his visit in 1998.

But, according to more than a dozen people interviewed in Yang village, the man is an impostor.

He was manager of a factory making replicas of the Terracotta Army visited by Clinton and used the image of his handshake to make money from tourists ever since.

"If the government gave us certificates to prove we are the real finders of the warriors, it would be different," said Zhifa.

He and the other members of the original team also sign books, but with a monthly income of around £65, they earn less than the girls who work on the cash tills.

A manager of one of the gift shops admitted the complex was full of bogus discoverers conning tourists.

"The shops here sell thousands of books every day and everyone wants them signed by one of the men who first found the warriors," he said.

"How can shops sell enough signed books to pay the rent unless they employ impostors?"

When asked why the farmers have been denied recognition, a spokesman for the Shaanxi provincial relic and cultural bureau said: "It is not important who discovered these relics."

Despite the apparent injustice of the situation, Quanyi insisted he wasn't angry.

"These relics have brought many people to the country.

"We only discovered them. They belong to our country."

But his wife, Liu Xi Qin, 70, said her husband still pondered over the superstitions that surrounded their discovery and has vowed never to set eyes on the Terracotta Army again.

"My husband always worries if they did something wrong by discovering the warriors," she said.

"He is afraid they might have brought misfortune in some way --and does still wonder if maybe the soldiers should have been left beneath the ground."