Issue 97

November/December 2007

Contents

news

Curlew care leads to lost royal residence find

Wat's Dyke dated: was it Coenwulf's dyke?

Little dig goes to big festival

Orkney finds confirm early Scottish colonisation

In Brief & Phase 2

features

Made in China
The exhibition that you will never forget opens in London

Viking treasure
An early inside look at the Viking hoard from Harrogate

Caribbean tragedy: under the volcano
David Miles and Julian Munby say island heritage matters on Montserrat

on the web

Recommended websites
Archaeological science, and digging up a hearth (and home)

letters

Views and responses

CBA correspondent

Campaigns, comment and communications from the CBA
Dan Hull explains the CBA's pioneering initiatives in archaeological publishing

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

features

The first August divine emperor – and the pottery men – are waiting for you

The British Museum's exhibition of choice artefacts from third century BC emperor Qin Shihuangdi's mausoleum is essential viewing. Iron age Yorkshire chariot burials will never look the same again – and neither will western art.

Qin Shihuangdi, born in 259BC and ruler of the Qin dynasty (pronounced Chin) from 221–210BC, was China's first emperor. This self-styled title cannot be taken away from him: he created China, unifying warring states with an imposed common script, a road and canal network, a law code, and standardised money and weights and measures. He protected the northern boundary with the original Great Wall, whose earthen form was rebuilt in brick over 1,500 years later. Unlike the Roman empire, at its height in the second century ad with an army containing less than half the men reputed to have built Qin's tomb, China was imagined by one extraordinary man – and it still exists, the world's oldest political entity.

Yet there are no contemporary descriptions of Qin's achievements. Instead they are recorded by the succeeding Han dynasty historian Sima Qian (c 1457–85BC) who berated his cruelty. Later commentators complained of Qin's lack of culture and megalomania, and blamed the violent civil war that followed his death on his superstitious tyranny. The written records, says Jane Portal, curator of the Chinese and Korean collections at the British Museum, are "deeply flawed".

The construction of Qin's vast pyramidal tomb had been described by Sima Qian. But when in 1974 four farmers digging a well in a persimmon grove over 1.5km from the mound found a "pottery man", the investigation began of a part of the emperor's mausoleum whose existence had never been suspected. It is estimated that 7–8,000 terracotta men and horses were entombed in highceilinged corridors: approaching 2,000 slightly larger-than-life soldiers have been uncovered to date. As work continues on the army, survey and excavation have identified other finds in the complex, such as human skeletons with missing limbs, rare birds and animals in clay boxes apparently buried alive, and hundreds of sets of stone armour.

The tomb itself, however, in a remarkable inversion of the usual fate of ancient monumental complexes, remains untouched. There is a recent law that forbids excavation of imperial tombs, but the principal reason for archaeologists' reluctance to dig is the sheer challenge.

Jessica Rawson, British Museum keeper of oriental antiquities until 1994, says the excavations, conducted entirely by Chinese teams, are "admirable and efficient".

Conservators from Germany and Italy have helped to improve recovery of pigments, and there is an exchange scheme of specialist staff with the British Museum. But the demands on facilities for restoration and atmospherically-controlled storage of the many thousands of objects are relentless. "The responsibility of Chinese archaeologists", says Wu Yongqi, director of the on-site Museum of the Terracotta Army, "is to conduct research... [in such a way as to] preserve the entire subterranean city... We should respect our ancestors and our cultural heritage".

The weathered mound was once an estimated 115m high. Remote sensing suggests it covers a huge, complex burial chamber that may be up to 40m below the original ground surface. If one day the chamber is explored, we may at last come to know the emperor's face: no representation is known.

Funerary universe

It is difficult to comprehend the scale of Qin's representation of himself as an embodiment of empire. Nested compounds with outer dimensions of 2.5km × 1km enclose the pyramid mound, and beyond lie scattered pits containing other tombs and artefacts. As presently recognised, these remains already cover an area ten times that of the Roman city of London.

Symbolically, at least, Qin's mausoleum extended yet further. The terracotta army faces east, towards the conquered states from which Qin moulded his empire. If archaeology comes to prove that the other three sides needed no armies, that is because they are bordered by mountains to south and west and the river Wei to the north, co-opted into the emperor's defence. He showed this approach to landscape throughout his territory, mapping himself onto the cosmos. A palace south of the Wei, for example, represented the celestial pole, the river itself the Milky Way. Impressing his presence on both subjects and spirits, he travelled thousands of kilometres, speaking from mountains, performing sacrifices and erecting inscribed stelae.

If Qin believed in a community of the dead that paralleled that of the living, then his mausoleum seems to express his attempt to carry his power through into that other world. As Rawson says, he had plenty to fear of the dead, having significantly increased their number – not least with the state armies he massacred on the route to empire. Protected by his own army, however, he was confident enough to need entertainers and bureaucrats – a future emperor of the dead. In 2001 a pit was found containing terracotta musicians, playing to bronze water birds on a diverted underground river.

Most impressive so far, however, is the complex of pits dug for the army. Rows of infantry soldiers, charioteers and cavalry (with their horses), archers, spearmen and guards of honour once stood as if on parade, their bronze weapons, one imagines, sparkling in the sun as the timbers, waterproof mats and hard red earth were laid overhead and metres of fill above that.

The largest pit, Pit 1, is 230m × 62m and nearly 5m deep. Rammed earth surfaces on ground and walls are as hard as concrete. Apparently running the length of the pit (most of it has yet to be opened) are 11 corridors, separated by equally hard embankments built to support the covering. Bricks paved the floor and timbers lined the walls. Pit 2, which has been excavated only down to the top of its ceiling, shows the sunken shapes of roof planks.

The bodies of the soldiers were built up from slabs or coils of clay, and separately modelled arms, hands and heads were attached with clay slip. The completed men were then painted in bright colours. The face types seem to reflect at least eight different moulds, but every soldier is unique: figures were mass produced and individually finished. Academics say these are not portraits, representation not being a Chinese tradition. We may beg to differ, as local observers claim to recognise regional physiognomy – and as the strongman's muscles and paunch seem modelled on real flesh. The portrayal of diversity would explain the absence of helmets. Yet if these are portraits, the accepted world history of art is undermined.

Photographs of the mass of standing soldiers at the site museum, like scenes from a digitally-realised battle in a modern Hollywood movie, can give the impression that that is how the army was found. In fact the soldiers have been restored. When uncovered, most are fallen and broken, and require painstaking excavation. The pits are thought to have been burned in the wars after Qin's death. There are many rich stories yet to be told about this unique funerary universe.

When you go to the British Museum to see the 134 exhibits loaned by China, you will enter the former reading room, designed by Antonio Panizzi and Sydney Smirke and opened in 1857, through a small door on the side. A black, narrow corridor follows the curve of the wall round to the front, where light from the exhibition draws you up a flight of stairs – large enough to give the impression that you might almost be ascending the lower steps of a pyramidal tomb – onto the steel floor raised over the library benches.

As museum director Neil MacGregor is fond of saying, below your feet is the desk at which Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital. If this requires just a touch of romantic imagination (desk maintenance since the 1860s having been concerned more with practicalities than authenticity), it is worth remembering also that there were (until taken elsewhere while the exhibition floor is in place) real books down there, some no doubt written by readers of British Archaeology, that summarise our knowledge of world civilisations. Above all that, the spirit of the First Emperor could be said finally to have arrived in the west.

The decision to stage this show was taken when Jane Portal travelled to China with MacGregor in September 2005. "I thought then that it would be a winner", she tells me. "I went to China with a wish-list of objects – most of which we got". A feature of the exhibition, which combines high drama with scholarly respect, is that nothing disappoints. You want to see every object, from the small artefacts from across China to the ranks of silent emissaries towering over most visitors. This, you imagine, must have been how people felt in this same museum, seeing for the first time great Egyptian and Greek antiquities in the 18th century.

"Children know about Egypt", says Portal. "I want them to know about China. I want to educate the younger generation." Enlightenment will not end with China. Next year the reading room will house the story of another early empire, that of Hadrian (his wall was smaller, but he packed a punch). The exhibition floor may stay until proposed new exhibition space is opened in years to come – we would say it should be a permanent fixture. With the terracotta army at the heart of the Great Court, Norman Foster's breathtaking conversion has come of age: and the British Museum confirms its presence at the centre of contemporary world culture.

The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army, is at the British Museum (entrance fees) till April 6 2008, with a programme of events and an important book (ed J Portal).

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