It is now more than 30 years since a peasant digging a well in northwestern
China unexpectedly came across some fragments of fired clay, triggering the
greatest archeological discovery of the 20th century – the terracotta army
guarding the tomb of China’s First Emperor. The soldiers quickly became
international celebrities, travelling in twos and threes to exhibitions
across the world. Since 1974, excavation of the tomb has continued steadily.
Slowly – infuriatingly slowly for an impatient world – a huge underground
complex began to emerge. This was not just an army for the afterlife, but a
parallel kingdom. While the work will carry on for decades, every few years
to date have yielded major discoveries. And at each step, our assumptions
about the scale of the emperor’s ambitions have had to be revised, as the
warriors have been joined by more and more departments of the vast
subterranean imperial household.
And so, as well as the original foot soldiers, we can now see emerging other
key parts of an effective fighting army: generals in full dress uniform,
standing and kneeling archers, chariots and charioteers, horses, stableboys
and cavalrymen. In a fascinating mix of reality and fantasy, we have found
an arsenal of impractical stone armour, yet also bales of real hay. Armies,
of course, require administration, and a whole pit of bureaucrats was
unearthed in 2000 – perhaps not surprising in the country that invented the
idea of an official civil service. Less expected were the acrobats
discovered a year earlier, presumably to perform at posthumous imperial
variety shows. Andin 2001, excavators came across a group of terracotta
musicians in a pit, seated by an underground stream completewith
magnificent, life-size bronze birds who were perhapsdancing to their music
for the perpetual delight of theemperor. The afterlife was to be just as
beguiling as this one.
Examples of all these new discoveries are included in the First Emperor
exhibition, which opens at the British Museum next month. The objects are so
important that they travelled to Britain in four planes to minimise risk.
Along with more than 100 other loans, there are more than 20 full-scale
figures, the greatest number the Chinese authorities have ever allowed to
travel to an exhibition overseas, and an act of outstanding generosity to
the UK.
It is the measured, decades-long campaign of excavation and the steady flow of
important new material that make this find so entirely different from the
two other archeological sensations of the last century – Tutankhamun and
Sutton Hoo. Tutankhamun’s tomb, once discovered, was swiftly emptied, and
its contents were removed to Cairo. Sutton Hoo’s Anglo-Saxon ship burial had
to be unearthed in one go, in a frantic race against the onset of war in
1939. In each case, we knew almost at once what had been found. But with the
First Emperor’s tomb, we are still only at the beginning of excavating a
site the size of the city of Cambridge, and each discovery inflects the
interpretation both of what has already been unearthed and of the man who
still lies buried at its heart. With leading international scholars
proposing their interpretations of the new discoveries, this exhibition
presents not so much conclusions but research, a continuing process of
revelation. History in the process of being written.
It is a history the world needs to know. This tomb complex is the richest
source of evidence about a man who unquestionably changed the world, and in
a way that still materially affects us today. Between the years 240BC and
220BC, as king of Qin, a small, warlike state in northwestern China, he
conquered the neighbouring kingdoms to the east and south, combining them
into a single empire and taking the title Qin Shihuangdi, the First August
Divine Emperor. To hold his new state together and make it an economic unit,
he unified laws, standardised weights and measures, and introduced a single
currency. These reforms were astonishingly long-lived. His new coin type,
round with a square hole, remained in use until the 1950s and is still the
logo of the Bank of China. Above all, to overcome the huge linguistic
differences in his new empire, he imposed the universal use of a standard
script – essentially the characters still in use now. It is hardly an
exaggeration to say that this is the man who made China – the oldest
surviving political entity in the world. To understand how modern China came
to be what it is, the First Emperor, and his tomb, are a key part of the
story.
How did he do it? How did he unify the warring states and build the largest,
most complex tomb yet discovered on earth? Generalship and high political
skills, certainly. Administrative brilliance, without doubt. And the brutal
coercion of thousands. But if you were to suggest one practical element that
made possible both his military triumph in life and the enormous parallel
empire built underground for the afterlife, it would have to be a phenomenon
widely associated with modern China: mass production.
In the exhibition, we will show some of the standardised crossbows, produced
in huge numbers – the Maxim guns of their day – that helped give Qin archers
their victories. And we can show that the terracotta figures were the result
of a honed system of production lines, organised initially to produce roof
tiles and drainpipes for the emperor’s new palaces. Quality-control stamps
can still be seen on the backs of some of the standing figures, with certain
foremen’s names also occurring on the royal roof tiles. The terracotta
figures are, in fact, mix-and-match assemblages of moulded parts made in
huge numbers.
But they are finished individually and carefully turned into self-standing
sculptures, minutely differentiated in costume and facial type, so that
role, rank and place of origin can be clearly read. As you look closely at
the warriors, you see that, far from being a homogeneous group of men, they
are soldiers from different regions, with very different facial features.
This army clearly comprises many diverse peoples held together for a common
end. We are looking at the portrait of a whole empire.
It is this kind of close-up examination that we hope the exhibition will make
possible. Obviously, we cannot hope to replicate the experience of the
massed ranks of the excavated pits. But the visitor to Xi’an cannot easily
engage closely with the sculptures, look them in the eye (some stand a
startling 1.95m tall), admire the skill with which each one has been
finished or spot the traces of pigment which reveal that this entire army
was once riotously coloured, decked in purple and green, orange and white.
An exhibition like this lies, I believe, at the heart of the British Museum’s
purpose. Set up in 1753, when the world was experiencing the first wave of
economic globalisation, it was designed to allow the public (even then
defined as a world public) to make sense of a new world order. Today,
London is once again at the centre of a transformed – and transforming –
global economy; and now, as then, we need new histories to make sense of our
new present. Very few of us were taught the history we need to understand
modern Asia – or, indeed, most of the world beyond Europe. An exhibition
like this allows us to think about China in the only way that might let us
understand one of its central elements: its immensely long and complex
history. It is part of what the British Museum is for.
And so I feel it is appropriate it should be displayed at the very heart of
the Museum’s buildings. We have transformed the Round Reading Room. Because
all the desks and chairs are listed, we have built a vast steel platform
over them. The great domed cylinder provides, I believe, a worthy setting
for an emperor’s tomb. Visitors will form their own view of the
evocative power of the space, but I do hope some will think of the desks
below, where 150 years ago Karl Marx pondered the fate of empires and of the
world economy, the mysteries of shifting power.
This exhibition is part of a five-year programme of exchanges between the
British Museum and museums in China. Earlier this year, we organised, along
with Chinese curators, an exhibition in the Forbidden City. Here, a
selection of objects from the British Museum addressed a very particular
historical issue – Britain’s rise from regional to world power during the
18th century. It was a topic requested by our Beijing colleagues, and one
that stimulated lively public discussion, most notably on television, of the
parallels between Britain then and China now. What lessons should China
learn from Britain’s economic history?
These are the kind of exchanges to which the Chinese attach great importance.
It allows their public to explore other cultures – Chinese museums
essentially hold only Chinese material – and London visitors can discover
aspects of Chinese history not represented in any European collection. So
the British Museum/China exchange programme was endorsed at the highest
level, signed with pomp in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People in the
presence of both countries’ prime ministers.
But political support, although invaluable, would not be enough to produce
exhibitions of this sort. For decades, the curators and conservators of the
British Museum have been working with their Chinese colleagues, researching
together both the history and the conservation of the objects in their
charge. It is this sort of long-running friendship, and the building of an
international community of inquiry, that makes such scholarly, and popular,
exhibitions possible. They are, I believe, a modern version of the
Enlightenment dream – a global conversation in which millions of citizens
can take part. We hope hundreds of thousands of them will come to the
exhibition.
The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army is at the British Museum, WC1, from
Sept 13 until April 6, 2008; sponsored by Morgan Stanley. Bookings on 020
7323 8181 or at www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/firstemperor
To view pictures of the terracotta warriors, visit timesonline.co.uk/visualarts
