by Patrick Hunt
Local geography of China and historical background of “ the first true emperor”
China has a long history that dates back to the beginning of rice cultivation and the last stone tools of the Neolithic Age more than eight thousand years ago. Myth shrouds much of the early history of China. The first emperor was said to be Huangdi of the Shang dynasty somewhere around 2000-1800 BC in Western chronology, but before this discovery there was no compelling evidence for real imperial control of China’s vast territory before the Han dynasty around 200 BC, when warring clans were brought together to make China one nation.
Looking at a map of Asia shows clearly how China developed independently from the rest of Asia and the West. Geography offers credible evidence for the isolation of one culture from another, with natural barriers that allow only a trickle of change over millennia. China is set off on the north by deserts like the Gobi of Mongolia and in the east and south by seas around the Pacific Ocean. On its western edge, China has a wall of enormous mountain chains, including the Himalayas, hundreds of snow-glistening peaks, some reaching well over twenty-five thousand feet, and the Tibetan High Plateau, at an average of ten thousand feet, itself higher than many major mountain chains in the world. No wonder China has been unknown to the West for much of history, an exotic land where abundant mystery was kept secret by isolation.
To the east of these mountains, in China itself, great rivers flow west from the high ranges through many hills and along broadening valleys. Both the Yangtze and the Yellow River have been used as highways and conduits of human traffic for thousands of years. It is no accident that the Tomb of 10,000 Warriors—at Lintong near Xi’an in Shaanxi Province—is roughly in the center of ancient China between the two great communication chains of these rivers, since these waterways and control of them were vital to ruling China’s broad lands. Xi’an’s optimum location offered China’s first real emperor an opportunity to connect many regions into one land that would be an empire. Now the Xi’an area is home to the most important archaeological site in China. The site, actually about twenty-seven miles from Xi’an and adjacent to the Wei River, is called the Tomb of 10,000 Warriors, although this is a poetic exaggeration because there are actually only somewhere between seven and eight thousand warrior statues. “The first true emperor” of China wanted to make an unforgettable impression on his own people and on future generations.
Although not everyone agrees with some of these details, the owner of the great tomb was Zheng Qin (259-210 BC) and he began ruling at age thirteen around 246 BC. He was the first leader to unify China into an empire, forcibly connecting six different antagonistic states. This first real emperor’s name has several variations. Although in early life he was Zheng Qin (Zheng is also often spelled Xeng), or the “Tiger of Qin,” he is mostly later known as Qin Shihuangdi or just Shihuangdi. Huangdi can also be a generic word for “emperor,” styled after the name of the first mythical Shang dynasty ruler. Qin Shihuangdi ruled for about thirty-six years from 246 BC to when he was about fifty years old in 210 BC, and started the Qin (or Chi’in) dynasty, from which China’s name was probably first derived. From inscriptions at this site and others, Qin Shihuangdi appears to have been both very canny and ruthless as well as politically well advised, making many changes to Chinese society with autocratic laws. Most of these harsh new laws were completely necessary to form a centralized government and make his empire possible.
Thanks greatly to this immense tomb, historians can now make sense of China’s early imperial history and how this first empire was achieved. Some of Qin Shihuangdi’s decrees have been preserved and they show exactly how his sweeping changes were enacted. He surrounded himself with wise, capable scholars and canny administrators who offered effective advice on how to proceed with building an empire. Unifying China would not have been possible without much of the drastic and previously unthinkable changes Qin Shihuangdi enforced on the people. At least eighty thousand households were uprooted or even destroyed to achieve his ends.
The emperor Qin Shihuangdi first suppressed and then eliminated dissent, especially from the many Confucian scholars who pursued individualism. Most of the Confucian scholars were simply killed and others banished, and their books were burned to suppress their dangerous ideas about individualism. His ruthless ways—such as decreeing mass murder and destroying whole villages as well as anyone who displeased him—were cruel and unnecessary, and he became (or already was) a megalomaniac. What little education was permitted soon became just yet another method to force thought and philosophy only along certain pathways. Obedience to authority became a highly encouraged and rewarded virtue. Here is one very telling decree inscribed on a bronze tablet from 221 BC:In the 26th year [of Qin Shihuangdi’s reign], all the feudal states were merged by his majesty. Civilians are now in peace, the Huangdi title is claimed for the emperor’s great achievements. The ministers Zhuang and Wan are thus instructed to standardize and unify the measurements which cause confusion.
Standardizing all the laws and bureaucratic administration was one way to achieve the emperor’s central power, but even the Chinese writing system and measurements, including currency and weights, were changed throughout the land of China. Besides the obvious propaganda of why Qin Shihuangdi deserved the title of emperor—bestowing “peace on civilians”—we note from this decree how his ministers Zhuang and Wan assist the centralization. They removed the “confusion” that accompanied the variations in different regional sets of weights and measurements over hundreds of miles. Since China had many regions and dialects, traditional symbols and old ways of counting would have been obstacles to unification. But administering such an empire also had another goal. This was to eliminate “confusion” for bureaucrats who had to implement imperial census and taxation. Taxation, one of the single most important resources for an empire, had to derive from good records. Careful census based on detailed economic assessments needed to be made uniform before such taxes could be collected. Thus, if the empire were to succeed, economic confusion could not be tolerated. Emperor Qin Shihuangdi could achieve even greater power if one set of quantifying and linguistic tools were used throughout the old “Warring States” of China. Such massive changes would have been painful and not without resistance, but the new Qin dynasty brutally achieved this goal under the first real emperor, Qin Shihuangdi. His vast tomb underscores that power in ways never seen before and perhaps never again after his death in 210 BC.
The Xi’an site has the largest mausoleum in the world
The entire mausoleum site covers over twenty-one square miles, almost half the size of San Francisco. The emperor’s actual burial mound was a mortuary park enclosed by a wall three miles long. The tomb mound itself is easily more than the size of three football fields laid side by side and its central point is over 140 feet—or fourteen stories—high. Apparently it took years to create the mausoleum tomb with an estimated number of seven hundred thousand workers, many of whom must have been either prisoners or in forced labor, some of whom we are told were first castrated. Four great pits surround the as-yet unexcavated imperial tomb. The tomb was said by the historian Sima Qian to have been constructed with liquid mercury rivers flowing—as replicated rivers of China—from the center. This remnant mercury in the actual tomb has impeded full excavation, since it is toxic. Each of the four pits covers a large space, some many acres, roughly 640 feet long and almost 200 feet wide, and inside three of the pits were the thousands of ceramic warriors. In Pit 1 the warriors are lined up in arrangements that suggest eleven trenches running side by side, each mostly about ten feet wide, but the others are not as easy to define spatially. The floors of the trenches were paved in brick and a wooden roof covered each pit. The huge tomb was probably begun early in Qin Shihuangdi’s reign and may have taken forty years to fully build. Unfortunately, his offspring—his immediate successors—were unable to maintain his empire and it was broken up by 206 BC, after only half a century. The detailed records of Sima Qian (around
100 BC), whom later Chinese authorities call the Grand Historian, verify some of the tomb plans:He had over 700,000 men transported to the spot . . . when he began digging and shaping Mt. Li . . . Replicas of palaces, scenic towers . . . as well as rare utensils and wonderful objects were brought to fill up the tomb. Craftsmen were ordered to set up crossbows and arrows, rigged so they would immediately shoot anyone attempting to break in. Mercury was used to fashion imitations of the hundred rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangtze, and the seas, constructed in such a way that they seemed to flow.
For comparison, no complete ancient public cemetery—let alone a private tomb complex—from the Western world of comparable vintage has yielded a fraction of the funerary objects or materials this single great mausoleum has preserved so well. For sheer size, not even the great Mausoleum of Halicarnassus came close. Halicarnassus’s monument was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World when constructed around 350 BC in Caria as a monument glorifying Mausolos, satrap of a Persian province, but it barely achieved one-quarter of this Chinese tomb’s size.
This mausoleum contains the greatest single tomb artifact assemblage in the world
The number of buried artifacts in the great mausoleum—not yet even fully excavated—exceeds that of any other tomb assemblage in the world, already almost 20,000 individual objects, and the total number of artifacts may eventually be twice that, based on the volume of space still untouched. Pit 1 alone contains ranks of 3,210 ceramic infantrymen. Pit 2 contains more than 1,400 warriors and horses and about 1,400 bronze arrowheads along with at least 64 chariots and armored cavalry. Pit 3 is the smallest underground chamber and contains only about 70 warriors, apparently mostly officers, along with several bronze war chariots. The projected total of 7,000 to 8,000 ceramic warriors is complemented by hundreds of ceramic horses and almost 10,000 metal artifacts, many made of bronze and other alloyed metals.
The objects are in excellent condition
Although Xi’an has a temperate climate with regular rainfall and fairly high humidity, because most of the material found here is ceramic, it is in a remarkable state of preservation. This is partly because it was buried fairly deeply below surface moisture—around thirteen feet on average—in a landscape that was apparently altered for drainage purposes. Another reason the materials survived well is that the ceramic material was planned for a long existence. Even the bronze objects, including life-size imperial chariots with bronze horses and wheels, have been well preserved because of careful planning, so there is far less corrosion and oxidation than would be expected for a temperate climate with normal rainfall of fifty to seventy inches per year. Other metal objects have also survived well, and show much detail about remarkable Chinese metallurgy in the Qin dynasty. The ceramic (fired clay) figures themselves are largely intact although the painted colors have mostly faded away.
The ceramic—specifically, terra-cotta—statues of the thousands of warriors are made of the best possible material for mass production. Clay is used all over the world in sedentary, or agricultural, societies, and it is also usually found very close to where people have traditionally lived, near rivers where a volume of fresh water flowed. Clay itself is an erosional end product. The tiny clay particles start out as rock fragments, but after being driven along long rivers by water and gravity, the eroded material is worn down to fine grains after millions of years. The dual state of clay is also important here: before working, clay is malleable and can be formed into nearly any shape due to its water content, with water molecules surrounding the tiny clay particles. But after firing, when all the water is driven off, clay particles are fused together by vitrifying them in high temperature, making ceramic objects durable like stone. Because fired clay approaches the hardness of rock, vessels cannot easily disintegrate and are eventually in chemical equilibrium with the environment in which they are found. That is partly why the bulk of this gigantic tomb’s objects, the ceramic figures of the warriors, can tell the world so much about their individual features—along with the culture that made them so lifelike—because they are in nearly perfect state.
The bronze of the war chariots and arrowheads also shows little corrosion, partly because the massive roof over each warrior pit was originally matted in woven patterns of vegetal rattanlike fiber and covered with fired clay, since fired clay is fairly impermeable to water. The tomb was designed to keep the artifacts as perfectly stable as possible for the longest imaginable time. Considering the excellent state of preservation, this plan apparently worked.
This tomb shows early Chinese technology at an earlier stage than previously known
In addition to what the giant tomb records about Chinese culture in the early dynastic period of the Qin, the technology they achieved at this time is staggering, far in advance of cultures in the West. For example, besides normal bronze (an alloy of copper and tin), other metals and alloys preserved in the tomb include copper-nickel, cobalt and even chromium. This advanced metallurgy dovetails perfectly with a Han dynasty record book dated only slightly later than the tomb. Chinese records also noted exact ratios for six kinds of bronze objects in copper and tin alloys, depending on the desired color and even chosen ringing sound, among other criteria. If you wanted a silvery color without paying the price for silver (always a clever ruse), Qin high-tin bronze would fool the eyes of most people from even a foot away. These metallurgical achievements may be some of the “wonderful objects” the historian Sima Qian recorded as being in the tomb.
The Chinese were certainly not the first to use an alloy of copper and tin for making bronze, but they achieved high-tin bronzes that the West never accomplished. Bronze usually contains 85 percent copper and 15 percent tin, but early Chinese bronze often has a tin portion of up to 22 percent. Since the melting temperature of copper is around 1984°F and that of tin about 450°F, it is easy to see why so little tin would be left in this ratio as it would have long burned away at the high temperature required to melt copper. New studies of Chinese bronze making suggest the metalworkers first poured and enclosed the molten tin in a circular crucible with a long neck, then poured the molten copper over it without allowing the tin to completely vaporize into gas and escape out of the crucible. This alloy process, apparently unheard of in the West, allowed such a durable bronze to look like silver and yet be much stronger.
From the smaller officers’ pit of the mausoleum, seventeen completely intact swords, still sharp and shiny, were excavated. These were also very finely coated with a thin layer of chromium plating. Because this seems impossible, many metallurgists think this chromium plating was possibly accidental from the intense burning of some of the partly looted tomb pits, depositing chromium oxide on the bronze in a carbon-reducing atmosphere underground. Others are less sure, suggesting Chinese metallurgy was so advanced that this was a deliberate technology.
In addition, the melting temperatures of nickel, cobalt and chromium—needed for the Chinese alloys found in this tomb—are very high, higher than was commonly possible in the West until the Industrial Revolution. These very same metals weren’t even discovered in the West until the mid eighteenth century, although some of them can occur naturally, usually in very small increments, with copper ore. Regardless, such an array of metallic materials begin to demonstrate the remarkable technology of ancient China, now better understood from this great tomb complex than from any other archaeological context.
So far over ten thousand bronze weapons have been excavated from the mausoleum. It is likely that each ceramic soldier held or had these real weapons close at hand. These weapons alone could outfit an army, which may be why some of the tomb’s giant pits were robbed in 206 BC. They include spears, axes, pikes, daggers, swords, billhooks (long curved hooks used to snag, pierce and hold enemies for closer killing), crossbow triggers and arrowheads. Some of the arrowheads are chillingly deadly because they are alloyed with a toxic lead content. Their extra weight would give them stronger impact and greater killing power as projectiles from
a crossbow—itself an advanced weapon for the day and not known in the West—as they would pierce deeper through armor and tissue. Perhaps they were even meant to cause lead poisoning if the victims could not remove them, although it is unknown if Chinese medicine recognized the effects of lead poisoning. Nonetheless, these are extremely advanced war technologies for around 200 BC and show how serious the Qin dynasty was about establishing and keeping the empire under tight control.
The clay warriors are amazingly detailed with individual features
Many are still skeptical that the facial features of each ceramic warrior seem to represent a unique individual, but this is nearly the case. Ethnic characteristics of many Chinese regions seem combined in these terra-cotta warriors, and this is multiplied by the variations in hair shape, ear shape, mustache length and direction and martial uniform as well as original color patterns. On the one hand, the regional variations account for about ten ethnic types; on the other hand, combinations are also evident: the round faces of the south are sometimes mixed with the long faces of the north, just as the eye shapes vary widely from east to west. The clever arrangement of these varied types is so compelling that no group of any twenty to thirty ceramic soldiers has the same ethnic and hair variations twice. There is still some debate that each face is an individual portrait, and even many Chinese scholars maintain this, but the more sensible explanation is that the facial types and their variations were designed to represent the ten or so regional ethnic groups that made up China in the perceptions of its people of the time.