IN the hushed environment of the temporarily converted circular reading room of the British Museum, the slightly larger than life figures of Quin Shihuangdi’s terracotta army seem simultaneously threatening, helpless and futile. It is a strange contradiction as they were never real people; they were not even portraits of real people. They are however the physical embodiment of one man’s obsession with power and his conviction that he would live forever, ruling heaven with the same ruthlessness he ruled his earthly empire.
That ambition he never achieved; he even died before his army of earthen warriors, bureaucrats and entertainers was completed. The army stands as a symbol of many things, but looking at the marvelously detailed figures, the futility of the pursuit of power and position in an afterlife comes down to little more than a score of mass produced earthenware figures. It concentrates the visitor’s mind on realizing how utterly powerless rulers are in the face of the inevitability of death. From clay they were made, and to clay they will eventually return, following their emperor. The warriors on show are all literally larger than life. Taller than the average male now at well over six feet, they were made for the afterlife and, although their creamy surface color belies the fact, all brilliantly painted in what are to the modern eye garish and jarring colors. The final exhibit in the walk-through gallery is a replica of a squatting archer painted in the colors, made from pigments exactly similar to those used by the makers that would have graced the warriors.
Discovered in 1974 by a peasant digging a well, the figures, of which 1000 out of an estimated 7000 have been recovered so far, without doubt justify their position as the greatest archaeological find of the 20th century.
What Quin Shihuangdi also left behind, after a period of conquering the warring states that made up China in the third century BC, was a valuable heritage, based in part of reforms started by Xian Yang before him, devised to help him rule more easily that was non-physical but just as permanent: a single currency, standardized weights and measures; a standard Chinese script; a unified state of China and a legalistic based government based on merit.
Legalism differed from the current Confucianism, said Jane Portal, the exhibition curator and editor of the impressive and learned accompanying catalog, which taught that people were fundamentally good and replaced it with a system based on punishment and reward.
Quin Shihuangdi was apparently, whatever his temporal achievements, no peaceful patrician. He remains a highly controversial figure in Chinese history having been reported — by the Confucian based succeeding dynasty who may have wanted to distance themselves from him — as a brutal militarist determined to expand his empire, one who burned books and killed scholars and possibly even the makers of the figures on show and used the state’s resources to finance his hope to secure his position in an afterlife.
The only history — or at least the definitive one about the first emperor — was written by a Confucian scholar. This said Portal was probably why “The first emperor has received a bad press.” He was, thought Portal, indirectly criticizing his own emperor under which he wrote a century after Quin Shihuangdi’s death and certainly had his own agenda.
Even the ‘evidence’ that points to the burning of books and the killing of scholars Portal says was unreliable and may well have been added to the historical record much later.
There have been questions from visitors and academia as to why the negative stories were not included in the exhibition. Portal said that it was because “They are just that; stories. They are not reliable. What we have included is the archaeological evidence. That is why the exhibition is so important, because it is evidence as opposed to stories.”
It was difficult to establish exactly what Quin Shihuangdi’s mind set or beliefs were when he built his incredible and massively time and resource consuming project, thought Portal. What is certain is that he built a whole parallel universe underground for the afterlife. What drove his messianic desire is not clear. The emperor’s family stemmed from lowly horse breeders who over time rose to dominance in their troubled province. It is tempting to think that as success built on success and the family promoted itself though dukedom to monarchy that they somehow perceived themselves as ‘the chosen ones.’ From there to emperor and then eternal life would be a short step by their lights.
In 264 BC he inherited his position as king of the Qin state when he was 13 believing, as his ancestors had, that he had a divine mandate to rule. They had developed their military technology and strategies to such an extent that they were able to dominate the troublesome states to the east and north of Qin.
The tradition of horse breeding probably contributed to the military’s extensive use of cavalry — then a formidable weapon — in his conquests between 230 and 221 BC. The exhibition has on display two terracotta war-chariot horses, a cavalry horse and a cavalryman. The figures themselves show a spread of ethnicity — Portal opined this was because the army was raised by conscription and contained conscripts from captured states. “One or two of the cavalrymen and light infantrymen have big noses and look to me as if they come from the northwest border peoples and are not Chinese, perhaps Turkic.”
What was new was his desire to take over and unify China and indeed the whole universe. He took to himself the title when he became emperor “the great august divine emperor,” clearly thinking himself divine. He traveled his empire, communing with the gods from the tops of mountains and overseeing sacrifices. Whichever way you look at it, there is certainly a discernible continuity and an uncomfortable resonance with modern Chinese social history in Quin Shihuangdi’s determination for political unity and social order above ethnic and religious diversity and any thought of federalism or regional independence and the ruthless suppression of scholarship.
This however has not deterred the visiting public; it has possibly inspired them to have a look for themselves. Portal said that since the exhibition opened, it had been a daily sell out. “Already it’s looking as if we will have to start extending opening hours,” she said just a week after opening on Sept. 13. She said that the reaction from visitors and reviews so far had been extremely positive. She put that down to the facts that the tomb complex was a hugely important archaeological site and that the first emperor is a very important figure in world history.
“There is also the element that people are keen to learn about China because it is developing so fast,” she said. The question as to whether the system of legalism is reflected in present day Communist China Portal thought an interesting one. “In this exhibition we are trying to help people understand present day China through an understanding of the past. But I do not think you can make a direct link between the first emperor and his divisions of society and the neighborhood committees of the Communist Party. However, Chairman Mao did compare himself with the first emperor — indeed the first emperor was used in his political campaigns.”
This is a fascinating exhibition to visit. The artifacts — from coin moulds through weapons to the incredibly detailed terracotta armor and figures — is a magnificent tribute to the craft skills of the Chinese of over 2,000 years ago. It is also deeply worrying. The resources used to ensure this one man’s immortality were enormous and, in the long term, futile. The working conditions for the army of artisans engaged in the construction were atrocious and many, it seems, were killed off. It is true that a unified China with its single currency and script and organized legal based system of administration based on merit, which derived from this drive for immortality, has become the model not only for China but for many other social systems; but at what price?
It is the potential for good and evil in the heady combination of belief plus power plus finance and what it results in that is the worrying element. That and the fact that absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. The exhibition runs until April 6 at the British Museum in London. Visit it and behold.
