The Army That
Conquered the World
The martial figures buried
with the first Chinese emperor were discovered in 1974. But the tomb they guard
hasn’t even been opened, writes Jonathan Glancey.
·
By Jonathan Glancey
12 April 2017
In
March 1974, Yang Zhifa, a farmer, along with his five brothers and their
neighbour Wang Puzhi, were digging a well in pomegranate and persimmon fields
an hour’s bus ride northeast of Xi’an, capital of China’s Shaanxi province.
Their shovels hit a terracotta head they mistook for an image of the Buddha.
Within months, teams of archaeologists and officials arrived on the scene.
Red Guards had exhumed the body of another
emperor, publicly denounced it and burned it
What
the farmers had stumbled upon proved to be one of the greatest archaeological
discoveries of the 20th Century. Buried below the fields were thousands of
life-sized and deftly sculpted terracotta warriors dating from the 3rd Century
BCE reign of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a united China.
Qin
Shi Huang, who died aged 49 in 210 BC, was the first emperor to unite the
warring states of China into a single nation (Credit: Wikipedia)
Perhaps
it was lucky that this subterranean army had been discovered at the tail end of
Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. In 1969, zealous Red Guards had made a
manically destructive raid on the underground tomb of the Ming emperor Wanli
(1563-1620) outside Beijng. The skeletons of the emperor and two of his
empresses were dragged to the door of the tomb, publicly denounced and burned.
This was some years before the People’s Republic began investing in tourism and
new museums, some 4,000 of them since the red star set on the Cultural
Revolution in 1976.
Qin
Shi Huang was obsessed with attaining immortality and sent Xu Fu on an sea voyage
to find the elixir of life – Xu never returned (Credit: Alamy)
The
uncovering of legions of life-like terracotta warriors excited China and
thrilled the world. Qin Shi Huang’s soldiers marched into the British Museum in
September 2007. Over the next six months more than 850,000 visitors came to
inspect them. Only 1972’s Treasures of Tutankhamun show drew a bigger crowd.
Some of the warriors are now going on show among 160 other works of art drawn
from 32 Chinese museums and archaeological institutions in the exhibition Age of Empires: Chinese Art of the Qin and Han Dynasties at New York’s
Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a veritable army of visitors is expected.
The
warriors are indeed special. Buried in formation in brick-lined trenches, each
appears to have its own character, although in fact their moustachioed faces
are derived from 10 basic types. Originally painted in bright red, blue, pink
and gold, today Qin Shi Huang’s kit-of-parts warriors are bleached of colour.
Time and the ravages of nature have also robbed the warriors of the real
weapons they once bore.
Ye
who enter
Intriguingly,
the sheer number of warriors and their armoury suggest they were made through
an early form of mass production. And, yet, should we have expected anything
less from Qin Shi Huang, the dynamic young king who united China in 221 BCE and
forged his vast empire together through the imposition of single systems of
writing, money, weights and measures along with die-straight canals and roads?
To protect his northern border, the emperor began construction of the Great
Wall of China.
Qin Shi Huang drank mercury, thinking it
would give him eternal life
Hugely
ambitious, Qin Shi Huang sought eternal life. He dispatched a minister
overseas, never to return, in search of a magic potion. Knowing of ancient
kings and sages who had lived 10,000 years and more by ingesting cinnabar
(mercury sulfide), the emperor took to drinking draughts of wine sweetened with
honey and laced with mercury.
Qin
was interred in a massive mausoleum, still unopened to this day, that was
surrounded by the terracotta army (Credit: Alamy)
By
the time he died at the age of 49, presumably through mercury poisoning, Qin
Shi Huang had all but completed his colossal underground tomb. If he were
unable to rule forever in waking life, then he would be emperor until the end
of time in the afterlife.
More
than 1.5m people visit the terracotta warriors excavation site in Xi’an
annually – and they have drawn huge crowds at museums around the world (Credit:
Alamy)
The
scale of the Chinese emperor’s mausoleum, the size of a great ancient city,
remains breathtaking, its core a pyramid that once rose to 100m (328ft). Less
than half this height today and long greened by vegetation the pyramid remains
clearly visible. In terms of Chinese tradition, it forms the eye of a
propitious landscape that can be read as a dragon.
Tomb
raiders
As
for the 8,000 terracotta warriors, these – standing in line beyond the tomb
itself – are there to guard the secrets of Qin Shi Huang’s underground empire.
And secrets there are, and will be for many years to come, as the tomb remains
sealed.
A river of mercury and crossbows rigged to
fire are said to guard the tomb
Archaeologists
and museologists worldwide agree that opening the tomb would be a disaster, as
exposure to air would damage it irreparably. In early digs to uncover the
terracotta warriors, the lacquer beneath their painted faces and uniforms
curled after just 15 seconds. More than this, though, according to 2nd Century
BCE historian Sima Qian – whose description of the mausoleum has proven to be
far more accurate than modern historians had once thought – rivers of mercury
surround the emperor’s burial chamber. If they do, this would be a treacherous
place to enter. Recent scientific studies have shown that soil here contains
unusually high concentrations of mercury, although whether or not the emperor’s
advisors could have produced so much liquid metal remains a matter of
conjecture.
Terracotta
horses, carts and chariots were also carved and buried to guard the emperor’s
tomb (Credit: Alamy)
If
no one is willing to enter, or even to probe the tomb for fear of causing
damage to the treasures that surely lie within, there are further reasons for
keeping well away. According to Sima Qian, mechanical crossbows guard entrances
and passageways. Do they exist? Have they rotted away, or – chromium-plated –
might they still send deadly bolts hissing through the darkness towards the
flesh-and-blood torsos of would-be Indiana Joneses?
The
radicalized student Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution had previously
exhumed, denounced and burned the emperor Wanli’s corpse (Credit: Alamy)
Until
new techniques are discovered, the secrets of Qin Shi Huang’s tomb will remain
a haunting mystery. In the meantime, the army of terracotta warriors found
beyond it are enveloped in supposition, too. As further pits were revealed
during the 1970s, mounted warriors and chariots driven by life-like horses were
uncovered along with simulacra of generals and high-ranking officials. The
top-knotted infantrymen known to so many museum visitors – in their own special
way, the terracotta warriors have conquered the world – have been joined since
by standing and kneeling archers, spear-wielding charioteers, strongmen,
acrobats, dancers, musicians and exquisite bronze sculptures of swans, ducks
and cranes.
Samples
of DNA taken from a number of skeletons suggest that some of the emperor’s
enormous workforce were of European origin. Had Ancient Greeks shown the
Chinese how to sculpt figures and horses as magnificently as Phidias and his
studio had when they carved the frieze of the Parthenon in 5th Century BCE
Athens? Certainly nothing like the terracotta warriors or their cavalry’s
horses had been seen in China before the building of Qin Shi Huang’s mausoleum.
Yang
Zhifa discovered three statues on his farmland in 1974. There were 7,000 more
to be discovered by others (Credit: Alamy)
We
can only wait to find out more about this astonishing place, its secrets first
uncovered by Yang Zhifa, his brothers and Wang Puzhi 43 years ago. Unlike the
terracotta warriors this gang of seven has struggled to survive – the farmers
made little or nothing from their discovery. In the interest of tourism, their
land was taken away. In 1997, poverty stricken and sick, Wang Puzhi hung
himself. Within three years, Yang Wenhai and Yang Yanxin, jobless and unable to
afford doctors, died in their early 50s.
In
2007, Liu Xiquin, wife of Yang Quanyi, whose family home had been demolished,
told the South China Morning Post, that her husband was afraid that he and his
brothers “might have brought misfortune in some way, and does still wonder if
maybe the soldiers should have been left beneath the ground.”
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