Arts & Culture
Mortal combat
Published 06 September 2007
China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, searched obsessively for the secret of eternal life. And perhaps he found it; although he died aged only 50, the extraordinary legacy of his burial chambers lives on.
Snow caps the peaks of the mountains rising to the south. The sky above is clear blue and the temperature several degrees below freezing. I have climbed 75 metres to the summit of a man-made hill, a flat-topped pyramid on a fertile plain on the outskirts of Xi'an, in western China. I begin to dance a little jig, foot to foot, shaking out the cold from my bones, until it occurs to me that I am dancing on the grave of the father of the nation.
Somewhere deep beneath my feet, in a vast subterranean palace, lies the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi. According to legend, he is interred in a gold casket sitting in a lake of liquid mercury. Snaking out across the 80-metre-long floor are streams of mercury that map the routes of those great waterways, the Yangtze and the Yellow River. The 15-metre-high ceiling is encrusted with pearls depicting the starry constellations. Antechambers reportedly contain the bodies of wives, concubines and advisers (not that their deaths coincided naturally; when it was Qin Shi Huangdi's time to go, friends and family were forced to follow him into the earth).
Standing next to me on the hilltop is Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, who is here in the name of cultural diplomacy. His mission is to secure the biggest ever loan of treasures from the tomb of the First Emperor, including members of the fabled, 7,000-strong Terracotta Army, guardians of the imperial afterlife.
"The First Emperor was able to dream on a scale that no one else has ever dreamt," he says with a boyish breathlessness. "No one else in history has tried to create a life-sized parallel universe in which he will rule for ever. So much of what modern China is can be seen as a direct consequence of what that man did. There are very few historical figures who changed the world in such a way that we are still living with the consequences."
The reports of the First Emperor's burial arrangements were written by Sima Qian, the same historian who declared that the ruler was a man possessed. From his Records of the Grand His torian, we learn that Qin Shi Huangdi was born Ying Zheng and inherited the Qin kingdom at the age of 13 in 247BC. He proved to be a tyrannical leader, conquering the nine warring feudal states of the region and declaring himself the first emperor of a new nation in 221BC. Under his rule, the borders were mapped, weights, measurements and currency were unified, and a political and legal system was formulated. As if that wasn't enough, he also started building a huge cross-country fortification that would be continued and completed by successive dynasties, and which stands today as the Great Wall of China. Qin is pronounced "chin"; the ancient family name was lent to a nation on the rise.
He ended up deep within the man-made mountain beneath my feet. Qin Shi Huangdi's ruthless pursuit of earthly power during his brief, 11-year reign over unified China was undermined by a paranoid fear of death. During his lifetime, the secret of immortality became his overriding quest. He set off on epic journeys in search of the elixir of eternal life, but died aged just 50 while searching for the legendary island of the immortals off the east coast. Power passed to a young prince so out of his depth that China was soon engulfed by civil war.
These tales have been passed down to us by a group of unreliable narrators from successive generations, all of them in thrall to the legend of the paranoid emperor. But the First Emperor has no one but himself to blame for us having such scant access to contemporaneous Qin history; before his death he ordered the mass burning of history books and the execution of their authors. Nearly 500 Confucian scholars are said to have been buried alive for some long-forgotten failure to please the emperor; others were castrated.
The most outlandish claim about Qin Shi Huangdi - that he declared war on death itself - has now been proved true, so long after his demise. Sima Qian wrote in great detail about the subterranean mausoleum, recounting how the emperor's tomb, with its rivers of mercury and its jewel-encrusted ceiling, was protected by great underground ramparts. According to the historian, the fortifications, built way below the water table, were sealed watertight, and the tomb candles, made from whale oil, were designed to burn for eternity. He even described elaborate booby traps: artisans constructed crossbows that would be triggered mechanically, firing a volley of arrows at any unsuspecting grave-robber.
In recent years, geological surveys have proved his seemingly fanciful descriptions to be accurate. The subterranean chambers, protected by huge protective walls, really exist. Even more astonishing is the revelation that the subsoil of the tomb mound contains unnaturally high quantities of mercury, concentrated in a series of apparent channels - indicating that the silvery streams representing the Yangtze and the Yellow River are still flowing around a gold coffin.
Inexplicably, Sima Qian failed to mention the most audacious part of the plan. A mile from the tomb mound, in a series of enormous pits and deep trenches, stands the army of 7,000 imperial guardians. No guidebook description or photographic reproduction can prepare you for the shock of the terracotta warriors. Neil MacGregor leads me into an exhibition hall the size of Earls Court, where we are met by an elderly Chinese man in a blue mac, shivering against the bitter cold. This is Professor Yuan Zhongyi, the original director of the terracotta army archaeological site, who was appointed soon after peasants chanced upon the eighth wonder of the world in 1974. The local farmers were sinking a well when they struck unnaturally hard earth. Communist Party officials ordered them to dig on, and suddenly their drills felt no resistance. The men widened the hole and dropped into a subterranean void. From the earth emerged the remnants of a secret army that had remained undisturbed for more than two millennia.
I walk to the edge of the balcony that surrounds the first pit, and I gasp. A thousand armoured warriors in formation, four or five abreast, all facing east. Among them are perfectly recreated terracotta horses. Behind the front ranks, the figures are increasingly fractured and broken. Some appear to have fallen in combat; others seem to be emerging from the red clay of which they were formed. I am speechless.
I tell Yuan that it is probably the most amazing sight I have ever seen. He laughs. "At first we didn't know what it was and then slowly we realised that these soldiers were guarding the emperor," he says. "This is where the well was sunk by the farmers." He points down to a spot in the extreme north-east corner of the pit. If they had started digging a few feet further away, the emperor's warriors would still be resting in peace.
So far, 1,000 individual figures have been pieced together, shard by shard, in the first pit. MacGregor and his party are allowed the rare privilege of inspecting the soldiers face to face, an experience that reveals the genetic range of China's population under the First Emperor. Each face is different from the next: some scowl, others smirk; a range of facial-hair styles is displayed. The right hand of every soldier is clasped around an invisible sword. Just a few years after the emperor died and the tomb and surrounding pits were sealed, the silence of the afterlife was shattered by a peasants' revolt. The pits were raided and the real bronze sword or spear that each terracotta soldier had been holding was stolen. The figures were smashed and the pits were torched.
It is estimated that a further 6,000 soldiers are buried here. Elsewhere on the 50-square-kilometre archaeological site that surrounds the central tomb mound, a further 56 man-made pits have been discovered, each containing more terracotta and bronze relics to furnish an empire of the afterlife. The second pit - similar in size to the first - contains the cavalry, their horses, chariots and extensive stables. The third pit appears to be a command centre, populated by generals and military strategists. In recent years, bronze birds, acrobats and scribes have been discovered in various underground chambers close to the emperor himself. A pit containing nothing but suits of stone armour - in which the individual scales of leather that made up Qin-era breastplates was replicated in terracotta - has recently been excavated. Each suit fell from its rotten wooden frame long ago and now lies in tiny pieces, like an ancient jigsaw.
"We don't know much about Qin theology," says MacGregor as we stand precariously on planks suspended just inches above the fragments on the floor of the pit, which is seven metres deep. "It is thought that the stone armour played a key role in the protection of the emperor from attacks from evil spirits in the afterlife."
We may never know quite why Qin Shi Huangdi press-ganged an estimated 750,000 workers into recreating the splendours of his military empire and domestic court in this monumental necropolis. The evidence suggests an egomaniac determined to take on death, but it also shows a great industrialist, one who instituted a process of mass production in factories all over the nation. Such contemporary resonances are emphasised by the small calligraphic stamps to be found on the torsos of warriors and horses, recording the names of the makers and indicating a system of quality control. The records of his book-burning tantrums and burial of dissenting scholars gained the First Emperor a bad reputation. For 2,000 years, Chinese children learned stories of a madman. It was only under Chairman Mao that his political qualities were given any recognition.
It is unclear why the Chinese are reluctant to press ahead with excavation of the rest of the site. Its current director, Wu Yong Qi, says he would rather wait until technology allows a sensitive excavation that would enable him to preserve every shred of evidence from antiquity. Some suspect, however, that superstition may be hindering archaeological ambition. There is even a suggestion that the Chinese authorities may have been inside the tomb already, and that, on realising it had been stripped clean soon after the emperor's death, decided to keep quiet to protect the myth.
Neil MacGregor knows it is impossible to convey the full scope of the tale, or even the sense of awe and wonder that visitors to Xi'an experience as they gaze down into the pits at all the emperor's men. Nonetheless, by introducing a small delegation of warriors, generals, acrobats, birds, horses and armour to a world unimagined by even the king of dreamers, the British Museum will be helping Qin Shi Huangdi realise his vision of eternal life.
"The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army" opens on 13 September at the British Museum, London WC1, and runs until 6 April 2008. http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk
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