Eighteen life-sized Chinese terracotta warriors, as well as 232 other artifacts, will be on display at an exhibition titled "The Warrior Emperor and China's Terracotta Army" in Canada this summer.

The exhibition will start in Toronto and then travel to Montreal, Calgary, ending in Victoria.

The exhibition showcases one of the most significant archaeological finds in world history: the 1974 discovery of almost 2,000 full-sized terracotta warriors and horses in the underground mausoleum of China's first emperor, Shihuang of the Qin Dynasty (221-206 B.C.). The pottery figures were unearthed from three 2,200-year-old pits near Xi'an in northwest China's Shaanxi Province.

Nearly 90 percent of the featured objects had never traveled outside China before, said Chen Shen, Senior Curator of the East Asian Archaeology Unit of the Royal Museum of Ontario in Toronto.