This month's World Heritage Site

Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor

By Marian Totty Posted on History

When the explorer Howard Carter finally dug his way into the inner chamber of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1923, he was prepared for the worst. All of the previously discovered tombs of ancient Egyptian monarchs had been looted. Carter feared he would suffer the same disappointment.

As he pushed his head into the royal burial chamber and illuminated it with a torch, his colleagues implored, “Can you see anything?” He replied, “Yes, wonderful things!”

Those “wonderful things” – a fully intact, untouched royal tomb more than 3,000 years old – were subsequently hailed as the greatest archaeological find of the 20^th century. Thirty centuries after his death, the boy-king, Tut, became a far greater legend than he had been in his own time.

Now go forward five decades to Shaanxi Province, China in the 1970s. For years, Chinese archaeologists have been digging around the province pursuing the works of Qin Shi Huangdi (259-210 B.C.), the legendary first emperor of China, the man who united seven warring kingdoms, once and for all, into one nation. Because Shi Huangdi was from the province of Qin, pronounced “chin,” his dynasty was named the Qin, after which China itself came to be called.

Shi Huangdi was a ruthless man, utterly devoted to his vision of a unified China, and his success at unification carried enormous costs. On one hand, he standardized Chinese writing and laws, and consolidated the idea of a central government through the construction of roads and fortifications, including the Great Wall of China. On the other hand, he attempted to wipe out the pre-Qin Dynasty past by burning all writings from that period and banning discussions of the past. He killed or exiled dissidents, setting an unfortunate future pattern for China’s sovereigns.

By any measure, Shi Huangdi was one of history’s most formidable rulers. However, like many great and charismatic rulers, such as Alexander, his dynasty could not survive his death. Within four years after his passing in 210 B.C., the Han Dynasty had arisen and begun a brilliant, stable 400-year reign. From its start in 221 B.C. to its extinction in 206 B.C., the Shi Huangdi's Qin Dynasty had lasted a mere 15 years.

In death, Shi Huangdi was as remarkable as he was in life. Striving to make sure that he would as honored and protected in the afterlife as he was on earth, he commanded the creation of 8,000 life-sized terracotta soldiers to stand guard in three underground chambers surrounding his mausoleum. Given the incredible detail on each of the statues, including individualized faces and enormous attention to the texture of uniforms – even down to the bottoms of their ceramic boots – their construction involved a massive effort and marshalling of resources. It’s likely that work on the army began as soon as Shi Huangdi founded his dynasty in 221 B.C.

For all the archaeologists’ efforts to unearth Shi Huangdi’s works, it was farmers digging a well in 1974, almost 2,200 tears after his death, who first discovered Shi Huangdi’s ceramic warriors. Chinese archaeologists soon swarmed to the site. Alas, they soon determined that many of the warrior statues had been broken soon after Shi Huangdi’s death by agents of the Han Dynasty seeking to denigrate his legacy. In the years since, China has patiently and painstakingly restored thousands of the soldiers, who stand smartly in long rows and files along the trenches dug by the archaeologists’ spades. Ironically, Shi Huangdi’s mausoleum, which lies at the center of his necropolis, has yet to be unearthed and opened.

In some ways, the find at Shaanxi is more momentous than Carter’s discovery at Giza. King Tut was a minor pharaoh who greatest contribution to history was his uncorrupted tomb. His empire, though it lasted long, was eventually pushed to the margin of human events and then swept away by Rome, and later, Islam.

But Qin Shi Huangdi was the organizer and instigator of the Chinese nation. Once he united those seven kingdoms and forced them into a national consciousness, the Chinese embarked on a role in world history that has never been matched by any other nation. Even the rise of the formidable European  imperial powers – Spain, France, Britain and the Soviet Union – and the United States’ emergence as the greatest political and economic power in history have only served to underscore China’s longevity.