Guardians eternal: the terracotta army of the First Emperor

The First Emperor didn't want to die. He sent thousands of young men and women on a voyage to search for the land of the immortals. They never came back. He was said to have traveled around his empire searching for the elixir of life. He took pills laced with mercury that his court doctors assured him would prolong his life. Ironically, he would die of mercury poisoning. But while his quest for immortality might have failed, it was in death that he left the world an incredible legacy, assuring that, in a way, he would live on forever.

"The First Emperor is one of the great historical figures of the past, as important as Alexander the Great, Napoleon or any of these major figures," Dame Jessica Rawson, professor of Chinese art and archeology at the University of Oxford and former head of the Asia Department at the British Museum, explains.

The First Emperor (259-210 BCE), who became king of the state of Qin at the age of 13, unified the Warring States by the time he was 38. He took the title of Qin Shihuangdi, "Great August First Emperor of Qin." His achievements were numerous, having laid the foundation for China's famous Great Wall as well as unifying the script, coinage and system of measures in his vast kingdom. Yet, little was known about him in the Western world.

A chance discovery

In 1974, during an extremely dry summer, Mr. Yang, a farmer in Xi'an began digging a well. He found a clay head that would lead to the discovery of the terracotta army that the First Emperor had constructed for the afterlife.

"The excavation of the area around the tomb of the First Emperor is the most important archaeological excavation of the 20th century across the whole world," Dame Rawson says. While the location of the First Emperor's burial mound has been known for centuries, the discovery of a whole necropolis astounded the world.

Dame Jessica Rawson (Image: Radio86)

"The ancient Chinese and to some extent the Chinese down to the present day see the afterlife as a continuation of this present life in quite a pragmatic, material way. So that when a person dies, particularly a very high-level, elite member in ancient China, they were provided with a tomb which contained furniture, clothes, all the things they'll need in the afterlife. Well, if you're an emperor, you need in the afterlife your whole court."

"So buried around the tomb of the First Emperor, which is an area which covers 57 sq km, there is not only the army he would need in the afterlife but there are entertainers for his amusement, there are bureaucrats to run the official business, there are musicians and beautiful birds to give him pleasure. There are also real people buried there. There are the women, the concubines, there are also the great ministers of state, the generals, who he would require in the afterlife to conduct his business."

From the mind of a visionary

Dame Rawson describes the First Emperor as a visionary. "I think that any great ruler who is successful is probably a visionary. You cannot keep going against enormous odds, and he was going against enormous odds, unless you have a sense of an objective, what you want to achieve."

"His objective was to defeat the other adjacent states and turn it into a single empire and then he did these imaginative things, like unifying the script, creating a single coinage, a single set of weights and measures, all of these to enhance trade and communication. That is a legacy that China still has today. It's a huge territory and yet it runs as a single great state and has done so since the time of the First Emperor. Sometimes, it's been divided here and there but essentially, we've seen a single great state. And I don't think this could have happened unless he or the members of his court has had a vision of what kind of state they wanted to rule."

Armoured general. Museum of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses of Qin Shihuang, Lintong, Shaanxi Province, China. (Image: British Museum)

"What is extraordinary about the First Emperor is that he and his court commissioned these extraordinary terracotta figures. These are the very first sculptures in China. Prior to this date, there is almost no sculpture. We in the West think of sculpture as a major requirement, as a major art. It's not a major art in the Far East. The major arts are calligraphy and painting and these sculptures are totally functional, they're not works of art though they look so today. They are here to fight for the Emperor, to entertain the Emperor, to guard the Emperor."

The journey to the British Museum

Jane Portal, curator of the First Emperor exhibit at the British Museum wrote in a piece published by The Telegraph that she traveled with Neil McGregor, director of the British Museum to China in 2005. At that time, a memorandum of understanding to forge the cultural relationship between China and the British Museum was going to be signed in the Great Hall of the People with then British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Premier Wen Jiabao.

Jane recounts that they visited Xi'an to see the tomb of the First Emperor guarded by a huge terracotta army. Then and there, they decided to try to arrange a loan exhibition for the British Museum that would focus on the achievements of the First Emperor and his great tomb.

After two years of negotiations, the terracotta figures began their journey to Britain. They traveled from Xi'an to Beijing by truck and from there to Amsterdam on four different aircrafts. They arrived at the British Museum in the middle of August.

On September 13, the First Emperor exhibition was opened to the public. With about 20 clay figures on loan, it is the largest ever exhibition of terracotta figures outside of China. The well-constructed exhibition in the Museum's converted Reading Room, featuring as it does vessels, coin molds and other artifacts, provides a good perspective of the First Emperor's reign.

Each figure is insured from £750,000 (1.07 million euros), although the figure of the kneeling archer, the first to greet visitors to the exhibition, is insured for £1.5 million (2.14 million euros).

Saving the best for last

Kneeling archer. Museum of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses of Qin Shihuang, Lintong, Shaanxi Province. (Image: British Museum)

The First Emperor ordered the construction of his tomb structure to be built when he ascended the throne. This was quite common practice, according to Dame Rawson, "Emperors normally started preparing their afterlife when they come to the throne. It takes a long time. Also, I think it is less difficult to start preparations when you're young and healthy than when you're verging towards your death. So that he, like many others, apparently commissioned the beginnings of the tomb structure. However, many archaeologists think that the actual making of the figures and the completion of the tomb was done at a late stage and quite fast."

It took more than 750,000 workers and conscripts to finish the terracotta figures that are in the First Emperor's tomb. An interesting part of the exhibit is a model of just how these figures were constructed. Workers worked assembly-line style, beginning with the molding of the parts to firing them to adding individual details to a figure.

When these figures were first interred, they were painted in bright colors. Imagine how impressive that sight must have been. Now, the more than 7,000 figures that have so far been excavated have lost their pigments, but impressive they remain nonetheless.

"There are continually amazing finds in China and I don't rule it out that there would be something more amazing than this. But I think very little will capture the imagination as this does because of the humanity, the sense of the personality of these individual clay sculptures. I think that's what draws people towards them, they feel they can look at ancient Chinese and almost relate to them. And here in this exhibition, where you can be quite close to them, move right up to them, I think you have an opportunity as never before to be engaged with ancient Chinese," Dame Rawson says.

The burial chamber of the First Emperor, with its rumored rivers of mercury and a sky dotted with pearl stars, remains undisturbed to this day. Chinese archaeologists would rather wait patiently than rush in and risk damage to the site. The fascination with the terracotta army, there are still pits that remain to be excavated, makes this wait somehow bearable. In this way, too, perhaps, the terracotta army has remained true to its mandate, of protecting the First Emperor even in his eternal sleep.