[11] In his report, Sima Qian (c.145–86 BCE) explains that the First Emperor made 12 monumental bronze statues as one of the major endeavours of his reign: 收天下兵, 聚之咸陽, 銷以為鍾鐻金人十二, 重各千石, 置廷宮中.

He collected the weapons of All-Under-Heaven in Xianyang, and cast them into twelve bronze figures of the type of bell stands, each 1000 dan [about 30 tons] in weight, and displayed them in the palace.

[14][12] The Twelve Metal Colossi were commented upon for several centuries, and relocated several times by the successive rulers of the country, first by the Han dynasty, which moved the statues to the Changle Palace, at the front of the Daxia Hall.

[15] The Eastern Han tyrant Dong Zhuo (d. 192 CE) melted 10 of the statues to mint new coinage[16] to finance a personal castle in Mei County near Chang'an.

[21] According to Ban Gu, the Qin emperor took their visit as a favorable omen of his military victories, and decided to model the twelve statues after their likeness.

Therefore, he melted down the weapons of all-under-heaven and cast the twelve bronze men to represent those [the "giants" from Lintao].A 3rd-century commentary of the Hanshu, explained that these statues were inscribed with the following inscription: 其铭曰: 「皇帝二十六年, 初兼天下, 改諸侯為郡縣, 一 法律, 同度量.大人來見臨洮, 其長五丈, 足跡六尺.」 The inscription said: "In the 26th Year of the Emperor, when he first brought together all-under-heaven, divided the principalities into provinces and districts, and unified the weights and measures, [these] giants appeared in Lintao [the Far West].

[28] Due to the lack of direct evidence on their precise form, scholars have focused on "possible origins or inspirations of such giant statues, which were absent in pre-Qin China.

Duan Qingbo, Chief Archaeologist and Director of excavations at the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor from 1998 to 2006, believes that the twelve "men of great stature" were unlikely to be East Asian and were possibly subjects of the Macedonian empire, such as the Greco-Bactrians (250-100 BCE).

[11] Diodorus Siculus recounts how Alexander the Great, when he reached the easternmost point of his conquests in India about 325 BCE, established altars to the 12 Greek gods, his idea being to make "a camp of heroic proportions and then leave to the natives evidence of men of huge stature, displaying the strength of giants".

[11] Lukas believes the first Qin Emperor seems to have made monumental bronze statues on a western model for his palace, which provides an intriguing precedent for the Terracotta Army in his mausoleum.

[11] Highly realistic statues made by the Qin Emperor, such as the Acrobats, may have received Western influence through the intercultural exchange involved in the design of the Twelve Metal Colossi.

[36] According to Chen, the twelve Big Men (大人 daren) were not statues but exceptionally tall visitors and an "omen related to human illness manifested in physical abnormality.

"[37] The account of the twelve Big Men appears in the "Treatise on the Five Elements" (五行志 Wuxing zhi) in the Hanshu and was narrated as part of several physical abnormalities that portend imminent calamity caused by the usurpation of the ruler by their subjects.

This sequence of omens is illustrated in the "Commentary on the Five Elements in the Great Plan" (洪範五行傳 Hongfan wuxing zhuan): goblins that attack by shooting, plagues of dragons and snakes, disasters involving horses, human illnesses manifested in inferiors encroaching upon superiors, and "irregularities in the paths of the sun and the moon, and retrograde movements of planets and constellations.

[27] There is also no linguistic precedence for da ren (大人) denoting statues in ancient Chinese texts while the Treatise makes clear that they referred to exceptionally tall visitors that represented an omen of human illness.

[43] Wu Hung describes six bronze sculptures found in the Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, dated to the 5th century BC, as "naturalistic" and displaying an understanding of human anatomy.

Wu Hung says there may be some truth to this hypothesis, but notes that there is a temporal gap of 200 years between the Twelve Golden Men and the figures, which are "human-shaped components" (caryatids for bells) and fundamentally different works than free-standing sculptures.

[44] Wu Hung believes Ban Gu and others' descriptions of the Twelve Golden Men lend support to the assumption that they were based on Hellenic statuary, but does not consider these records to be reliable historical information.