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The spring of 1974 was hot and dry in Shaanxi province, north central China. As rivers dried up and the water table dropped, those who lived off the land were growing increasingly desperate for new sources of water, and farmers set to work digging new wells. In late March one of them noticed something strange: as he dug down, the colour of the soil was changing. Five metres below the surface he uncovered a terracotta face. Word spread fast, and by July a team from Beijing had begun a thorough investigation. They soon found a vast number of shattered, life-sized terracotta figures. The news spread across the world in a flash: the farmer had stumbled across one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century.
One mile to the west loomed the man-made mound housing the tomb of Qin Shihuangdi, called the First Emperor. Within a few months of digging it became clear that this collection of terracotta figures was linked with his tomb. In fact, it was an entire army created “to guard Qin Shihuangdi’s tomb,” says Jane Portal, keeper of Asia collections at the British Museum. Jane was a student when she first visited the site in 1979; at that time, “only a fraction” of what is now on display had been uncovered.“His tomb was created so that he could go on ruling for ever in the afterlife,” Jane explains. “It consists of an underground
governmental system. The army is just part of the exercise which, as we dig, we realise is larger than we ever thought.”
Incredible as it seems, the magnificent terracotta figures are by no means the main focus of the tomb. They’re merely the gatekeepers to a vast necropolis. After 36 years and thousands of hours of excavation since Jane’s first visit, the scope and scale of the First Emperor’s tomb complex is still unclear. Though the earth has yielded a vast array of finds,
spread out over 56 square kilometres, there will be a lot more to come. In 221 BC Ying Zheng, the king of Qin, emerged victorious from a war that for 250 years had torn apart much of the area now known as China. A decade of conquest saw him
annex competing states such as Chu and the once-mighty Zhao. In 221 BC the last state, Qi,surrendered without a fight. The title king of Qin no longer did justice to a man who had achieved the unthinkable: uniting all of the warring states together in one empire. He coined a new title, Qin Shihuangdi, which roughly translates as ‘Divine August Emperor of Qin’. It was a statement of intent. He was planning to be merely the first of 10,000 generations of divine emperors who would rule this vast new empire. Qin Shihuangdi is one of the most important political figures in history. He took a divided collection of states and welded them into an entity that would survive to the present day. Though China would suffer periods of upheaval and division, the idea of a united China has not been seriously challenged since. Today, China is rapidly becoming a true
superpower. Its far-flung provinces and different ethnic groups are brought together by a powerful cultural and linguistic
centrifugal force that owes much to Qin Shihuangdi’s reign. The First Emperor mobilised his bureaucracy as effectively in peacetime as in war. Conscript armies of hundreds of thousands worked on roads and canals. The various walls that
protected the warring states from the fierce nomadic tribesmen of the northern steppe were joined together in the construction of the first Great Wall of China, 1,500 years before the Ming wall that attracts floods of tourists today. He standardised weights and measures, established a currency that lasted to the 20th century and even insisted on a universal length of axles for carts so that ruts would be the same distance apart on each of the country’s roads. Perhaps most importantly of all he unified the Chinese script, suppressing regional variations – and making certain that from then on the people of his new empire would all speak the same language.
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