  I review the status of the search for extremely metal-poor halo stars with
the Hamburg/ESO objective-prism survey (HES). 2194 candidate metal-poor
turn-off stars and 6133 giants in the magnitude range 14 < B < 17.5 have been
selected from 329 (out of 380) HES fields, covering an effective area of 6400
square degrees in the southern extragalactic sky. Moderate-resolution follow-up
observations for 3200 candidates have been obtained so far, and ~200 new stars
with [Fe/H] <- 3.0 have been found, which trebles the total number of such
extremely low-metallicity stars identified by all previous surveys.
  We use VLT-UT2/UVES, Keck/HIRES, Subaru/HDS, TNG/SARG, and Magellan/MIKE for
high-resolution spectroscopy of HES metal-poor stars. I provide an overview of
the scientific aims of these programs, and highlight several recent results.
