The Terracotta Army

No historical records exist of the Terracotta Army, which was set to guard Qin Shi Huang’s tomb over two thousand years ago, and was only discovered accidentally by peasants sinking a well 28km east of Xi’an in 1974. Three rectangular vaults were found, constructed of earth with brick floors and timber supports. Today, hangars have been built over the excavated site so that the ranks of soldiers – designed never to be seen, but now one of the most popular tourist attractions in China – can be viewed in situ.

The army is probably the highlight of any trip to Xi’an, so don’t be discouraged by what greets arrivals: a vast car park and a tourist complex of industrial proportions whose main purpose seems to be to channel visitors through a kilometre-long gauntlet of overpriced, mediocre restaurants and souvenir stalls.

Qin Shi Huang

As a silkworm devours a mulberry leaf, so Qin swallowed up the kingdoms of the Empire.

The first-century BC historian Sima Qian

Though only 13 when he ascended the throne of the western state of Qin in 246 BC, within 25 years Qin Shi Huang had managed to subjugate all the quarrelsome eastern states, thus becoming the first emperor of a unified China. During his eleven years as the sole monarch of the Chinese world, Qin Shi Huang set out to transform it, hoping to create an empire that his descendants would continue to rule for “ten thousand years”. His reign was marked by centralized rule, and often ruthless tyranny. As well as standardizing weights and measures (even the width of cartwheels) and ordering a unified script to be used, the First Emperor decreed that all books, except those on the history of the Qin and on such practical matters as agriculture, be destroyed, along with the scholars who produced them. It was only thanks to a few Confucian scholars, who hid their books away, that any literature from before this period has survived.

As well as overseeing the construction of roads linking all parts of the empire, mainly to aid military operations, Qin Shi Huang began the construction of the Great Wall, a project that perhaps – more than any of his harsh laws and high taxes – turned the populace, drummed into constructing it, against him. Ambitious to the end, Qin Shi Huang died on a journey to the east coast seeking the legendary island of the immortals and the secret drug of longevity they held. His entourage concealed his death – easy to do as he lived in total seclusion from his subjects – and on their return installed an easily manipulated prince on the throne. The empire soon disintegrated into civil war, and within a few years Qin Shi Huang’s capital at Xianyang had been destroyed, his palace burnt and his tomb ransacked.

It is possible that Qin Shi Huang, seen as an archetypal tyrant, has been harshly judged by history, as the story of his reign was written in the Han dynasty, when an eastern people whom he subjugated became ascendant. They are unlikely to have been enamoured of him, and the fact that the Terracotta Army faces east, the direction from where Qin Shi Huang thought threats to his empire would come, indicates the animosity that existed. The outstanding artistry of the terracotta figures has revised the accepted view of the Qin dynasty as a time of unremitting philistinism, and his reign has been reassessed since their discovery. Mao Zedong, it is said, was an admirer of his predecessor in revolution.