Emperor of the Clay Warriors

On the same day as our visit to the Great Wall, we flew to Xi'an, the ancient capital of China, established by a now familiar figure, the King of Qin, Qin Shi Huang, First Emperor.

The next day, we drove about an hour on our bus through the countryside to the most famous archeological site in China, the home of the Terracotta Warriors, constructed by Qin Shi Huang. The countryside we drove through looked a great deal like California's Central Valley. Except for the blooming locust trees. Open flat country with distant hills and a haze of humidity, dust and other particulates in the air. We saw a funeral procession during our drive as well. Northern China has always grown wheat, not rice, and it has meant that the northern Chinese are larger and stronger. Probably that has more to do with increased protein intake, but we'll let that go.

Qin Shi Huang broke with Confucian tradition by beginning construction of his own tomb almost immediately when he ascended to the throne of Qin at age 13. Confucius held that burial affairs should be conducted by the surviving children, who should strive to honor their father thereby. This isn't the only Confucian wisdom that Qin Shi Huang rejected. I can only suspect that the Confucian emphasis on being satisfied with your place in society was incompatible with his ambitions.


In any case, as part of his burial arrangements, Emperor Qin arranged for an entire army to be made of life-sized clay warriors and buried near his mausoleum, in formation, with weapons and armor, clay horses and bronze chariots.

This site was found in 1974 by a group of people digging a well. A museum and archeological site was authorized in 1975. Something like 7000 clay figures have been excavated from the four pits at the site. The figures are hollow and formed by castings in clay, which makes it even more remarkable that no two of them appear to be alike, each represents a specific person or animal, it appears.

The warriors are arranged in a battle formation. In pit 1, by far the largest pit, The warriors are arranged in seven columns with skirmishers on the flanks, and archers in the vanguard. Pit 1 is now covered over with the equivalent of a giant Quonset hut. It smells of clay with just a touch of moldiness inside. This photo will give you a very good sense of what that space is like, but it's too big to put inline here. Check it out.

The walls of the channels were made from rammed earth. The figures placed within them, and then wooden beams were used to hold up a ceiling of thatching and then sod. During the farmer's rebellion that overthrew the Qin dynasty, the chambers holding the warriors were entered, the figures smashed and the place set to the torch. In other pits you can see the remnants of the wooden beams where they had collapsed.

There's a strange parallel here to the Cultural Revolution, during which many antiquities were destroyed by the Red Guard, and intellectuals were sent to farms for "reeducation", since it was thought that their values were out of whack, and that rural values, farm values were better. Many works of art and culture were seen by the farmers as decadent, even degenerate.

This all seems familiar somehow.

While visiting the warriors, we ate lunch on-site. Xi'an, being in Northern China is a wheat culture, not a rice culture like Southern China is. And so they feature lots of dumplings and noodles and sticky buns. At the lunch room we had the best noodles I've ever had. The dining area was a large room with tables and two stalls where chefs were making noodles by hand. They would knead the dough and then draw it out by hand into an extremely long single strand. No pasta machine here.

After drawing out the noodles, they would get dumped, without being cut, into a boiling pot. In one case, it was a broth pot, and we were served bowls of it directly. In the other case, the noodles were drained and served with a thicker sauce with bits of pork in it. Both were fabulous.

The farmer who discovered the warriors works now at the gift shop. This wasn't always so. Apparently, he was given a small payment for the find, and went back to work in 1975. But when President Clinton visited China, he wanted to see the Terracotta Warriors, and asked if he could meet the person who found them. So they looked him up, and taught him a little English to greet the VIP with. However, it seems he got nervous when he met the President, so he said, "Who are you?"

Clinton, apparently trying to smooth things over, said, "I'm Hillary's husband." To which the man replied, "Me too!"

In any case, you can now purchase a book in the gift shop that is signed by him, and shake his hand. However, he doesn't seem all that enthusiastic about his new position in life. When I shook his hand, he didn't look directly at me, but instead turned his head away. We were told that we were not to take flash pictures of him, that his eyes were bad, but I wonder if this wasn't just to save face for him.

Does he have a choice about working there? I don't know. When you think about it, sitting behind a table, shaking hands and signing your name, all day every day, for years on end could become, well, monotonous. Even if the alternative is farming. Probably especially if...

One final note about the warriors. They were painted before being placed in the pit. They have a few of the figures out of the pits in glass cases where they can be viewed closely. Remnants of the blue coloring on the clothing of one can still be seen.

If you've seen the film "Hero", the king depicted therein is in fact, the Qin Shi Huang. I'm going to spoil it, so don't read any more if that's a problem. In it, the film's hero, portrayed by Jet Li, must decide whether to allow Qin Shi Huang to live, knowing what a tyrant he is, in order to achieve the unification of China. To the positive tally of Qin Shi Huang must also be added these beautiful figures, made for his vanity, but now available to the world. However, in Jet Li's shoes, I don't think I would have made the same choice he did.

The political unification of China has contributed both to it's success and its stagnation. In the fourteenth century, Chinese explorers and sailors sailed far and wide, beating the Europeans to many places, perhaps even to the Americas. But then that Emperor died, and the next one repudiated exploration, had the ships burned, and even some of the ports. And hence China turned inward for several hundred years, emerging to find itself now backward and ignorant of the rest of the world. This would not have been possible if it were not for the political unification of China.