An Army in Clay

The mighty army of terracotta warriors and horses is one of the most popular tourist attractions in China and one of the reasons for my 6-day stopover in Xi an. The Terracotta Army experience is usually described as an on-site museum built over the top of several excavated pits. It has some elements that are museum-like, but within a whole industry that has mushroomed to catch the tourist dollar – oops, I mean, to cater for the millions of visitors who come see the birthplace of civilisation and power of the Middle Kingdom. 

Since the site was listed as a world cultural heritage site by UNESCO in 1987, and cleverly billed by the Chinese as the Eighth Wonder of the World, every imaginable associated money-making opportunity has been tapped, with businesses small and large claiming whatever share of the pie they can get. The museum part is just a bit dated now – the hanger over the warriors was built back in the 80s. It does a good job of giving thousands of people a decent view of what has been excavated. 

It also is effective in giving the sense that there is much more yet to be revealed. As someone else said, it looks like the archaeologists just went to lunch and decided not to come back. You are left with a lingering feeling that much here is still hidden and unexplained. 

I caught a local bus to the tomb site from the vast plaza in front of the train station in town. A couple of girls with megaphones hustled people to rush on board, as if there was never going to be another bus so you better grab this one right now and be quick about it. Ignore the sight of another 20 buses along the line. Megaphones? Utterly redundant. These girls have voices that could bring down walls. Voices that would herd ducks into line at 500 metres. My bus pulled out less than full, with one of the girls hanging out the door. We proceeded to crawl along the road out of town as she vigorously and loudly exhorted anyone standing nearby, doing her best to fill the empty seats. And it worked, more people got on, the bus filled up as passed hotels and roadside souvenir shops. And so we made our way.

The approach and entry to the site is pretty well organised on a scale appropriate for the modern-day hordes. There are not too many touts, just the tour guides really. It is dismaying to have to wend your way past McDonald’s and KFC and hundreds of other food outlets and tacky souvenir shops lining a huge shopping plaza just to get back to the bus stop, but that’s how it goes. It becomes hard to remember that here is the mausoleum of one of China’s most hedonistic, brutal and cruel Emperors, and a relic of a short-lived and violent empire that nevertheless is credited with joining the warring states to form a country that is now modern-day China. Lessons from the past are not given much thought here.

Then a walk across a vast car park, filing in orderly lines through security, another walk to the lines in front of a long row of ticket counters and finally into, what, a park? Follow all the other folk along pleasant paths for another 10 minutes to get to the main site. This part of the experience is nicely done, with lots of small paths through groves of trees and open park.

You probably know that there are over 2,000 terracotta figures on display in a structure a bit like a huge gym, with a couple of smaller pits nearby that have been other remains in them. State-of-the-art museum this is not, but the main hanger over Pit 1 was built for crowds and does a pretty good job of guaranteeing that everyone gets to see the exhibits first-hand as well as getting a sense of the overall scale of the enormous pit. I kept reading that the terracotta figures are life-sized, but I reckon they are least 15% larger-than-life, especially given that people were on average smaller back then.

I saved Pit One, where the army stands, for last. I lingered through the exhibits in the other two buildings – that is, in comparison to the tour groups, all with their headphones on, being ushered along at pace by flag-carrying guides speaking into microphones that seemed to miraculously swallow up all voice sounds. The English signage is scanty, and I saw no English-speaking groups to tack onto. Maybe it would have been better to have a guide.

Not sure what this says about me, but I was at least as interested in watching the crowds as I was in what was on display. Maybe the scale of the exhibits is hard to get your head around. I really enjoyed getting up close to the individual figures on display in the Exhibition Hall on site and in a couple of the museums in Xian that I visited later but even then I was constantly distracted. The act of viewing and the behaviour of viewers intrigued me as much as the objects being viewed. 

When I wasn’t diving in between phones for a spot at the front of the crowd where I could see what we were here to see, there was plenty of distraction in watching people around me posing for selfies. Often I 'd get my first view through someone else's eyes - just by looking at their phone screens as they zoomed and panned and scanned and snapped. For many people it seems to be I came, I took photo, I went. Maybe actual seeing has time-shifted – then again, do people actually go back and look at the images they collect? 

But back to the Terracotta Army. Pit 1 is believed to contain at least 6000 warriors with only 2000 on display plus some horses, all facing east and ready for battle. In front front there are rows of archers, followed by soldiers, who would have held spears, swords, dagger-axes and other weapons, believed to have been mostly looted at various times. It’s impressive no doubt, but I found it a hard to take in.

There's question of what we do and don’t see at this tomb site. The two bronze chariots on display at the site are clearly signed as replicas. I read that the tomb contained 50 or 80 chariots which raises the question of where they are. Or has the timber simply disintegrated, in which case how do they know how many there were?

Any lucrative tourist activity attracts scams and even though this a UNESCO World Heritage listed site, I can’t help but be cynical. A quick check on Amazon before I got here (site blocked within China) shows I could buy my own full-size authentic reproduction warrior for US$700.

Originally the figures in the army were painted bright colours, which flaked off when they were uncovered. It is interesting that all the replicas for sale are clay-coloured. I didn’t see any painted models for sale, which is too bad because the original greens, reds, blues and purples must have looked pretty good.

Reproductions are a multi-million dollar industry, and my google search revealed there at least 30 factories around the site that turn out warrior replicas, some of which are made pretty much the same way and out of the same materials as the originals.

Thousands of visitors who paid to see some of the warriors in a museum in Hamburg in 2015 only found out later that they were fakes. If a German museum can pull that off, what else is possible?

Just saying I’m taking it all with a grain of salt. The actual tomb where Emperor Qin was buried has never been opened and the usual story is that it is highly toxic, due to him having ordered that it include a river of mercury. Or is that excavations are on hold to keep the remains sealed until archaeologists are confident that their method won’t damage any of the contents? I have read both explanations, and perhaps both are true.

Another good museum story – in 2017 a Philadelphia Museum exhibited 10 of the warriors loaned by the Chinese government. You know how staff Christmas parties can go? So someone wandered into the exhibition space that had been left unlocked, and he broke off and pocketed the thumb of one of the guys, no doubt after taking a few selfies. No one even noticed for ages. Imagine how much compensation that would have been worth!

A few notes on the Army for those interested. It is 2,000 years old and was made to stand guard over the tomb of China's first Emperor, Qin Shi Huang.

Archaeologists believe Qin Shi Huang expected his rule to continue in death as it had in life. To make sure this would happen, he needed his mausoleum to be defended. He was a ruthless despotic ruler who made many enemies. First Emperor was only 13 when he first came to the throne and it is believed that one of his first actions was to order the creation of an army that would protect him in the afterlife.

The tomb was built over a period of 40 years by an estimated 700,000 labourers. The warriors and their horses are clay figures but many real people were buried in the same area. Archaeologists have discovered mass graves with the remains of people who were probably craftsmen and laborers. Some of them seem to be convicted criminals who died in chains.

Many bronze items have also been unearthed around the tomb site. Geese, ducks, cranes, swans, horses and chariots have been found.

First Emperor waged wars that united many kingdoms into one vast empire. He brought in a single system of coinage, standardised writing and the system of weights and measures, and gathered enormous wealth. He is the one who ordered construction of the Great Wall for protection against attacks from the north.

All these wars, repression, massive taxes and construction projects brought misery and death on a massive scale. The Warring States had in about 40 million people at the end of the Zhou Dynasty period when Qin Shi Huang came to the throne, but at the end of the Qin Empire, there were only 18 million people left in the region.

The Qin Dynasty only lasted for 14 years, the shortest empire in China’s history. Such was First Emperor’s zeal for restricting access to knowledge from the past, that much of the literature and art works of previous reigns was destroyed. At one time he ordered that more than 460 Confucian scholars to be buried alive for possessing forbidden books. 

An afterlife surrounded by instruments of war, death and destruction doesn't seem like much to aspire to. Some remains of figures of acrobats, dancers and musicians have been uncovered nearby the warriors but I think I prefer the picture of heaven depicted in the Koran as gardens of pleasure fed by rivers, and couches adorned in silk. And yet, who knows what decadent luxuries mat come to light when the Emperor's tomb is eventually opened?