On 29 March 1974, a group of farmers in the village of Xiyang, in the Lintong district east of the city of Xi’an in central China, were drilling a well in the hard, yellow loess of the plain at the foot of Mount Li, when their steel bit broke through into a hollow space a few metres below the surface. The farmers climbed down into the hollow and found themselves in a long, vaulted underground corridor, and in the corridor, in rows, stood life-size figures of warriors, men and horses, cast in fired clay and painted in bright colours that had not yet entirely faded. The find was reported to the local cultural bureau, and within weeks archaeologists from the provincial institute in Xi’an had begun the excavation of what would turn out to be the most spectacular funerary deposit of the ancient world. The corridor was the first of four large underground pits, and in the four pits there were eventually recovered more than eight thousand life-size ceramic figures, together with horses, chariots, bronze weapons, and armour. The figures were, as the archaeologists soon established, the work of a vast imperial tomb project commissioned in the late third century BCE by the first emperor of a unified China, Ying Zheng, the King of Qin, who in 221 BCE had completed the conquest of the rival Warring States and who had thereupon assumed the new title of Qin Shi Huangdi, the First August Emperor of Qin. The Terracotta Army, as the figures came to be known in the West, was a guardian force for the emperor’s tomb, a life-size ceramic army intended to protect its master in the next life and to demonstrate, in the most literal possible way, the power of the Qin state to project itself into eternity. The figures are now, together with the unexcavated tomb at the centre of the complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the figures are one of the most visited archaeological sites in the world. The First Emperor, who died in 210 BCE, was buried with an army that was, in a sense, larger than any he had commanded in life, and the army has given him a kind of immortality that none of the alchemists and magicians he had consulted during his lifetime were ever able to provide.
The young King of Qin
The state of Qin, in the third century before the common era, was one of the seven or eight major states of the late Zhou Chinese world, and the state of Qin was, in the generation before the unification, the most powerful and the most efficient of the major states. The state was located in the west of the Chinese cultural world, in the upper valley of the Wei River and the lands to the west of the great bend of the Yellow River, in what is today the modern province of Shaanxi. The state of Qin had, for several centuries before the unification, been ruled by a line of kings who had been more or less consistently successful in their wars against their eastern neighbours, and the state of Qin had acquired a reputation for the rigour of its administration, for the discipline of its armies, and for the harshness of its legal system. The state of Qin was, in the late Warring States period, the state that other statesmen looked to as the model of a well-administered military monarchy, and the state of Qin was the state that the famous Legalist philosopher Han Feizi, who had been a prince of the state of Han and who had been executed at the Qin court in 233 BCE, had praised in his writings as the model of an efficient centralised state. The young prince who would become the First Emperor was the son of King Zhuangxiang of Qin, who reigned for only three years from 250 to 247 BCE, and the grandson of the long-lived King Zhaoxiang, who had reigned for over fifty years and who had established the military supremacy of Qin over the other major states. The young prince, whose given name was Ying Zheng, was born in 259 BCE, and he inherited the throne of Qin at the age of thirteen when his father died in 247 BCE. The regency was conducted for the young king by Li Siu, a Legalist statesman from the state of Chu, and by Lao Ai, a courtier who had become the king’s mother’s lover and who would, in 238 BCE, attempt a coup that was brutally suppressed. The young king reached his majority in 238 BCE, and he spent the next seventeen years completing the conquest of the remaining Warring States and unifying the Chinese world for the first time under a single ruler.
The conquest of the Warring States was, on the most reliable reconstruction of the events, completed in a series of campaigns that began in 230 BCE with the invasion of the state of Han and that ended in 221 BCE with the conquest of the state of Qi, the last of the major states to hold out against Qin. The campaigns were, in their military character, conducted with the professional efficiency of the Qin army, which had been the most disciplined and the most heavily armed of the Warring States armies for several generations. The Qin army, in the late Warring States period, was a force of approximately half a million infantry and cavalry, equipped with iron weapons, organised in large units of ten thousand, and supported by a sophisticated logistical system of supply trains, supply depots, and military roads. The campaigns were, in their political character, conducted with a ruthless use of espionage and bribery that the later Han historian Sima Qian, in his account of the unification in the Shiji, attributes to the king’s chief ministers, in particular to Li Siu, who had become the chief minister of Qin by 215 BCE. The campaigns resulted, by 221 BCE, in the annexation of the states of Han, Zhao, Wei, Chu, Yan, and Qi, and the territories of these states were incorporated into the Qin empire. The young king, on the model of the legendary sage-kings of remote antiquity, proclaimed himself Qin Shi Huangdi, the First August Emperor of Qin, and the title of Huangdi, which had previously been a sacred title reserved for the legendary culture heroes of the distant past, was for the first time used as the title of a living ruler. The new title, with its religious and cosmological overtones, signalled a new conception of monarchy that would remain the standard form of Chinese imperial government for the next two thousand years.
Centralisation, standardisation, and the first Chinese empire
The First Emperor, on the model of the Legalist philosophy that had been developed by the thinkers of the late Warring States period, in particular by Shang Yang in the fourth century and by Han Feizi in the third, set out to create a centralised and standardised empire that would be ruled from the Qin capital at Xianyang, on the north bank of the Wei River just north-west of the modern city of Xi’an. The reforms, in the political sphere, included the abolition of the territorial feudal power of the old aristocratic houses, the forced relocation of the wealthy aristocratic families from the conquered states to the Qin capital, the division of the empire into thirty-six military districts each governed by a military commander and a civil administrator appointed by the central government, and the imposition of a uniform legal code based on the harsh Qin code that had been developed in the state of Qin before the unification. The reforms, in the economic sphere, included the standardisation of the weights and measures, the standardisation of the coinage, the standardisation of the system of writing, the construction of a network of imperial roads and canals, and the imposition of a uniform system of taxation and labour service. The reforms, in the social sphere, included the imposition of a strict system of household registration, the encouragement of agricultural production, and the suppression of dissent by means of a system of collective responsibility that held entire communities accountable for the actions of any of their members. The reforms were, in the cumulative effect, the most thoroughgoing attempt at administrative centralisation in the history of China before the twentieth century, and the reforms laid the institutional foundations of the Chinese imperial system for the next two thousand years.
The standardisation of the system of writing was, in the longer term, one of the most consequential of the Qin reforms. The scripts of the various Warring States, by the late third century BCE, had diverged to the point where a text written in the script of one state could be read only with difficulty by a scribe trained in the script of another, and the various scripts were, in the Warring States period, becoming increasingly divergent as the political and cultural divisions between the states deepened. The First Emperor, in 221 BCE, commissioned Li Siu to develop a standardised script that would be used throughout the empire, and the script that Li Siu developed, the Small Seal Script, became the standard form of written Chinese for the next eight hundred years. The Small Seal Script, in the form in which it has been preserved on the inscriptions on the stone drums of the late Warring States period and on the bronze inscriptions of the early Qin, was a simplified and regularised form of the script of the state of Qin, and the script was designed to be written with a brush and ink on a bamboo or wooden surface. The standardisation of the script, by the early Han dynasty a century later, gave way to a more convenient brush-written form known as Clerical Script, and the Clerical Script, in turn, evolved into the Regular Script of the later Chinese tradition. The standardisation of the script was, in the cumulative effect, one of the most important of the Qin reforms, and the standardisation was the basis of the cultural unity of the Chinese tradition for the next two thousand years. The script, in the form in which it is used today, is a direct descendant of the script that Li Siu developed in the year 221 BCE, and the script is one of the most enduring monuments of the Qin unification.
The public works of the First Emperor were, in addition to the centralisation and the standardisation, a series of massive construction projects that were designed to consolidate the new empire and to demonstrate the power of the new state. The most famous of the public works, the early version of the Great Wall of China, was the result of a project to connect and extend the defensive walls that had been built by the various Warring States along their northern frontiers, and the early Great Wall, which ran for several thousand kilometres along the northern frontier of the new empire, was built by means of forced labour and the conscription of soldiers, convicts, and peasants. The other public works included a network of imperial roads that connected the capital at Xianyang with the principal cities of the empire, a series of canals that connected the rivers of the empire for the purposes of transportation and irrigation, a number of massive palaces and government buildings in the capital, and a series of monumental sculptures that were placed in the imperial palace. The public works, in the cumulative effect, transformed the physical landscape of the Chinese world, and the public works laid the infrastructure of the Chinese empire for the next two thousand years. The public works, in the human cost, were also one of the principal causes of the rebellion that would erupt after the death of the First Emperor in 210 BCE, and the public works were one of the most heavily criticised aspects of the Qin regime in the later Chinese tradition.
The first emperor and the search for immortality
The First Emperor, in addition to his political and military career, was throughout his reign an obsessive seeker after immortality. The First Emperor, in the later years of his reign, sent expeditions of magicians, alchemists, and explorers to the far corners of his empire and beyond, in search of the elixir of life and the islands of the immortals. The most famous of the expeditions was the series of voyages to the eastern sea, in the years after 219 BCE, in which the First Emperor sent his chief magician, the fangshi Xu Fu, to find the islands of the immortals that were reputed to lie somewhere in the eastern sea. Xu Fu set out from the port of Langye on the coast of the modern province of Shandong with a fleet of several thousand young men and women, and Xu Fu returned some years later with the report that he had been unable to find the islands but that a sea monster was blocking his path. The First Emperor equipped Xu Fu with additional resources and a contingent of archers, and Xu Fu set out again, this time never to return, and the historical tradition records that Xu Fu settled in Japan and founded a colony there. The other expeditions, in addition to the voyages to the eastern sea, included expeditions to the south-west in search of the elixir of life, expeditions to the north-west in search of the original homeland of the Qin ruling house, and expeditions to the various mountains of the empire in search of the herbs of immortality. The First Emperor, in addition to the expeditions, also established a number of rituals and taboos in his capital, in particular a tabooning on the use of the word death, and a series of taboos on the appearance of comets and eclipses. The First Emperor, in the cumulative effect, was, in the words of the later Chinese tradition, the most enthusiastic of the seekers after immortality in the history of China, and the First Emperor’s obsession with immortality is one of the most striking features of his reign.
The obsession with immortality was, in the later Chinese tradition, the subject of extensive comment, in particular in the writings of the philosophers of the early Han dynasty. The most important of these writings, in the present context, is the chapter of the Shiji of Sima Qian that is devoted to the First Emperor, the Basic Annals of Qin Shi Huangdi, which contains a remarkable and detailed account of the emperor’s reign and of his obsession with immortality. Sima Qian, writing in the early Han dynasty in the early first century BCE, reports that the First Emperor consumed large quantities of mercury in his search for immortality, and the historian attributes the emperor’s death in 210 BCE, in part, to the cumulative effect of the mercury poisoning. Sima Qian, writing in the Han tradition of Confucian historiography, was generally critical of the First Emperor and of the Legalist philosophy that he had adopted, and Sima Qian was particularly critical of the emperor’s obsession with immortality. The account of the obsession, in the Basic Annals, is one of the most vivid in the whole of the Shiji, and the account is one of the most important sources for the First Emperor’s reign. The obsession is also, of course, one of the principal reasons for the construction of the Terracotta Army, since the army was designed to provide a guardian force for the emperor in the next life. The army, in this sense, is one of the most direct and one of the most spectacular products of the First Emperor’s obsession with immortality.
The tomb at Mount Li and the eight thousand warriors
The tomb at Mount Li, in the modern Lintong district of the city of Xi’an, is, on the most reliable reconstruction of the evidence, one of the largest single burial complexes in the history of the world, and the tomb is one of the most important archaeological sites in Asia. The tomb complex, which occupies an area of approximately fifty square kilometres in the valley between Mount Li to the south and the Wei River to the north, consists of a central tumulus that was built over the imperial burial chamber, four large underground pits containing the Terracotta Army and other ceramic figures, a series of smaller pits containing sacrificial animals and human attendants, a number of subsidiary tombs for members of the imperial family, and a number of ceremonial and administrative buildings that are scattered across the surface of the complex. The central tumulus, which rises to a height of approximately seventy-six metres above the surrounding plain and which has a circumference of approximately one and a half kilometres, is in the form of a stepped pyramid with two flat terraces and a flat top, and the tumulus is the largest single ancient earthwork in China. The tumulus, in the present state of the site, is largely intact, and the inner burial chamber, in which the body of the First Emperor was interred, has not been excavated. The decision not to excavate the inner chamber has been, since the discovery of the complex in 1974, one of the most controversial decisions in the history of Chinese archaeology, and the decision has been justified by the Chinese authorities on the grounds that the technologies available at present do not allow the inner chamber to be excavated and preserved at the same time. The decision has been criticised by a number of foreign archaeologists, who have argued that the inner chamber should be excavated in spite of the technical difficulties, and the decision has been one of the most discussed issues in the international archaeological community since the 1980s.
The four large underground pits that contain the Terracotta Army are, in the present state of excavation, the best documented parts of the complex, and the four pits are the parts of the complex that are most visited by tourists and most studied by scholars. The first pit, which is the largest, measures approximately 230 by 62 metres and is approximately four to six metres deep, and the pit contained, on the basis of the archaeological evidence, approximately six thousand life-size ceramic figures of infantry, archers, and officers, together with a number of wooden chariots and horses. The figures in the first pit are arranged in long, parallel columns facing east, and the figures are in three principal lines: a vanguard line of unarmoured skirmishers, a main line of armoured infantry arranged in a long rectangle, and a rearguard line of infantry. The second pit, which is somewhat smaller, contains a more varied range of figures, including cavalry, archers, chariots, and officers, and the second pit is generally considered to represent the main striking force of the army. The third pit, which is the smallest of the three, contains a command group of approximately seventy figures, and the third pit is generally considered to be the headquarters of the army. The fourth pit, which is empty, is generally considered to be the unfinished or the abandoned part of the complex, and the fourth pit is the part of the complex that is the most puzzling to the archaeologists. The figures in the three excavated pits total, on the present state of the evidence, approximately eight thousand, and the total number of figures in the complex, when all four pits are taken into account, is estimated to have been between eight and ten thousand.
The figures themselves are, in their physical character, one of the most remarkable achievements of ancient ceramic art. The figures are, in the first place, life-size: the average height of a standing infantryman is approximately 1.80 to 1.90 metres, the average height of a cavalryman is approximately 1.70 to 1.80 metres, and the average height of a general is approximately 1.95 to 2.00 metres. The figures are, in the second place, individually made: although the basic form of each figure was made in a series of moulds, the head, the hands, and the feet of each figure were modelled individually by the craftsmen of the imperial workshop, and no two figures in the complex are exactly alike. The faces of the figures, in particular, are individually modelled, and the faces of the figures are one of the most striking features of the complex. The hair styles, the facial features, the expressions, the moustaches, the eyebrows, and the ears of the figures all differ from figure to figure, and the differences are sufficient to allow the figures to be classified into a number of distinct ethnic or regional types, including Han Chinese, Tibetan, Mongolian, and various Central Asian types. The classification, which was first developed by the Chinese archaeologists in the 1980s, is one of the pieces of evidence that the Qin army, in the late third century BCE, was already a multi-ethnic force that included soldiers from the various regions of the empire.
The figures were, in the third place, originally painted in bright colours. The colours, which were applied to the figures after they had been fired, included vermilion, cinnabar red, azurite blue, malachite green, and various shades of yellow and brown, and the colours, when the figures were first excavated in 1974, were still largely intact, although they faded rapidly on exposure to the air. The conservation of the colours, since the discovery of the complex, has been one of the most difficult problems in the field of conservation, and the conservation has been one of the principal reasons for the slow pace of the excavation. The figures were, in the fourth place, equipped with real weapons. The weapons, which were made of bronze, included swords, spears, halberds, axes, crossbows, and arrows, and the weapons were, in many cases, in a remarkable state of preservation when they were first excavated. The swords, in particular, were coated with a layer of chromium oxide that has been the subject of considerable scientific interest, since the chromium-coating process was not thought to have been known in the ancient world before the twentieth century. The presence of the weapons, together with the armour and the other military equipment, has been one of the principal sources for the reconstruction of the military equipment of the Qin army, and the weapons have been one of the most important contributions of the complex to the study of Chinese military history.
The long afterlife of the First Emperor
The First Emperor, in the standard Chinese historical tradition, has been one of the most controversial figures in the long history of China, and the First Emperor has been both praised and condemned by successive generations of Chinese historians. The Confucian historians of the Han dynasty, in particular, took a strongly negative view of the First Emperor and of the Legalist philosophy that he had adopted, and the Confucian historians represented the First Emperor as a tyrant, a despot, and a destroyer of the moral order. The most famous of the Confucian denunciations is the famous passage in the Basic Annals of Qin Shi Huangdi in the Shiji, in which Sima Qian lists the principal crimes of the First Emperor, including the burning of the books and the burying of the scholars, the construction of the Great Wall, the destruction of the feudal order, and the obsession with immortality. The Confucian denunciation of the First Emperor, in the cumulative effect, was one of the most influential in the whole of the Chinese tradition, and the denunciation has shaped the way in which the First Emperor has been understood in the West and in East Asia for the last two thousand years. The First Emperor, in the Confucian tradition, was the archetypal tyrant, the model of the bad ruler, and the warning to the emperors of the later dynasties of the consequences of the abandonment of the moral order.
The modern reassessment of the First Emperor, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has been more nuanced. The modern reassessment has recognised the magnitude of the achievement of the unification, the standardisations, the centralisation, and the public works, and the modern reassessment has, in particular, recognised the importance of the script standardisation and of the legal reforms for the subsequent history of China. The modern reassessment has also recognised the importance of the tomb complex as a source for the study of the late Warring States and early imperial periods, and the modern reassessment has, in particular, recognised the importance of the Terracotta Army as one of the most remarkable achievements of ancient ceramic art. The modern reassessment has not, however, been a complete rehabilitation, and the modern reassessment has continued to recognise the negative features of the First Emperor’s reign, in particular the burning of the books and the suppression of dissent. The First Emperor, in the modern reassessment, is a complex and ambivalent figure, neither the archetypal tyrant of the Confucian tradition nor the model of the enlightened ruler of the modern nationalist tradition, and the First Emperor is one of the most studied and most debated figures in the long history of China.
The discovery in 1974 and the archaeology of the complex
The discovery of the Terracotta Army in 1974, by a group of farmers digging a well, was one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century, and the discovery has been the subject of extensive historical, archaeological, and art historical research since 1974. The first excavations, in 1974 and 1975, were conducted by the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology and the Museum of Qin Shi Huangdi, and the excavations revealed the first pit and the first of the figures. The excavations were, in the early years, hampered by the lack of conservation facilities, and the figures that were excavated in the early years have generally suffered more from the conservation problems than the figures that have been excavated more recently. The State Council, in 1979, established the Museum of Qin Shi Huangdi and the Tomb of the First Emperor, and the museum has been the principal site for the exhibition of the figures and the study of the complex since 1979. The excavations, in the years since 1979, have been conducted under the leadership of a succession of distinguished Chinese archaeologists, in particular Yuan Zhongyi, who directed the excavations from 1974 until his retirement in the 1990s, and Duan Qingbo, who has directed the excavations since the 1990s. The excavations have, in the years since 1974, produced an enormous body of evidence for the military equipment, the ceramic technology, the social organisation, and the artistic conventions of the late Warring States and early imperial periods, and the excavations have, in the cumulative effect, transformed the study of the late Warring States and early imperial periods in China.
The international reception of the discovery was, in the years after 1974, one of the most extensive in the history of Chinese archaeology, and the discovery has been the subject of major exhibitions in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, and a number of other countries. The most important of the international exhibitions was the 1978 exhibition of twenty figures at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, which was the first exhibition of the figures outside China, and the 1988 exhibition at the British Museum in London, which was the first major international exhibition of the figures. The international reception, in the cumulative effect, has made the Terracotta Army one of the most recognisable cultural objects of the ancient world, and the international reception has placed the figures in the cultural imagination of the modern world in a way that is matched by very few other ancient objects. The Terracotta Army, in the present moment, is one of the most visited archaeological sites in the world, and the site is one of the most important cultural tourist destinations in China. The site is, together with the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, one of the three most visited sites in China, and the site is, in the cumulative effect, one of the most important cultural monuments of the modern Chinese state.
The First Emperor, in the long view of Chinese history, was the founder of the imperial tradition that would dominate the Chinese political world for the next two thousand years, and the Terracotta Army is, in this sense, the most spectacular surviving monument of the founding of that tradition. The army, in the present moment, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the army is one of the most important cultural and historical sites in the world. The First Emperor, who died in 210 BCE and who was buried with an army of eight thousand ceramic warriors, has, in the most literal possible sense, achieved a kind of immortality that none of the alchemists he had consulted during his lifetime were ever able to provide. The army, in the modern world, is a witness to the ambition, the ruthlessness, the brilliance, and the brutality of the state that the First Emperor founded, and the army is, in the cumulative effect, one of the most powerful and one of the most enduring monuments of the Chinese imperial tradition.
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