As a kid I looked forwards to extracting plastic, free-gift Arthurian knight figures from our packets of breakfast cereals.
Later I was able to collect a few toy soldiers with reinforcements which included a centurion tank and transporter, a military ambulance, jeep, troops vehicle and howitzer.
These toys have long since vanished from my possession which is a little sad as they would certainly have considerable collectors’s value now.
The only soldier I actually managed to put together myself was the Black Prince, (modelled on his funerary statue in Canterbury cathedral), from an Airfix kit. I remember spending hours painting the heraldic symbols on this statuette. I wonder where that has gone to?
These thoughts came back to me as I gazed upon the the world’s largest model army, the terracotta soldiers and officials of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, dating back to the second century BC and only discovered by chance by a farmer, Yang Zhifa, in 1974.
It doesn’t matter how many pictures you’ve seen of this amazing archaeological discovery, certainly equal to that of king Tut. It doesn’t even matter if you return again and again (new discoveries are always happening): the terracotta army is one of the world’s most spectacular ancient sights. You feel as if the hundreds of individually crafted warriors around might, at any moment, take life and march once more after having stood to attention for over two millennia.
Of an estimated eight thousand figures around two thousand have been uncovered. Some are whole, others are in fragments, like that Airfix kit, waiting to be puzzled together. All were painted but, sadly, exposure to the climate has faded or completely discolored so many of them.
All army grades are represented: from privates to archers to battalion leaders and generals. In all cases the details are stunning, reaching even down to the threaded soles of their footwear.
In addition to the men (no women have as yet been found) there are horses and there were also wooden chariots but these have rotted away, separating riders from their steed.
In a separate building, however, two magnificent bronze chariots are on display and they are simply superb!
The most astonishing fact, however, is that what we see is just the tip of the iceberg. The huge hangar that protects the emperor’s army is merely an advance guard to Qin Shi Huang’s own mausoleum which has yet to be excavated! Archaeology is, in essence a destructive science and the Chinese have, rightly decided, to leave well alone for conservation purposes or, at least, until new techniques can uncover monuments without damage or decay.
What was China’s first emperor like? Accounts differ but one thing is sure: he was one of the powerful and ruthless persons who ever existed. Qin unified China, joined regional defences together to form the great wall, executed scolars he didn’t like and had their books burnt, built a national road network, excavated the Lingqu canal, had the workers who built his mausoleum buried alive so they could tell no secrets, survived several assassination attempts, standardised weights and measures, instituted a international philosophy denouncing Confucianism and went in for a mad quest for immortality, (don’t we all, perhaps?), involving the search for the elixir of life which, when he found it, poisoned him as it contained mercury.
Anyway the emperor’s terracotta army didn’t protect him against his (and our) greatest enemy, death but ensured him, instead, another kind of immortality for what I witnessed at the extraordinary site of Qin Shi Huang’s mausoleum will remain in my mind for ever as it will remain in the mind of anyone else who witnesses this extraordinary monument to mankind’s quest for eternity.
The emperor death
marches inexorably:
all crumbles to dust.