Terracotta warriors’ mystery

Their accidental discovery was significant, their creation masterful so why is there no history of it?

Armoured general, Qin dynasty 221—207 BCE, left; kneeling archer, Qin dynasty 221—207 BCE; and unarmoured general, Qin dynasty 221—207 BCE

The Bronze Age, in the third and second millennia BC, was a relatively stable period in which civilisation first developed on a large scale across the Eurasian continent, from Sumeria and Egypt to India and China. Large cities and monuments of stone or brick were erected for the first time. Bronze, an alloy of copper and the much rarer metal tin, was not easy to produce, and this made it easier for central governments to control the supply of armaments.

In the West, the last great event of the Bronze Age was the Trojan War, around 1250BC. Then, around 1200, the Bronze Age and its stable empires came to an end, succeeded by centuries of endemic warfare, migrations and invasions, and in Greece by 400 years of dark ages before the revival of the eighth century, the time when Homer composed his epics about events that, by then, belonged to a legendary past.

The causes of the collapse of the Bronze Age seem to be complex, including as we now increasingly realise, drought, famine and other climate-related events, as well as damage to the environment caused by deforestation (including to produce charcoal for bronze smelting), landclearing, over-farming and the silting up of rivers.

Another important factor, of course, was the rise of the metal that gave its name to the following period: the Iron Age. Iron was far more common, so that once the production of steel had been mastered, weapons became much easier to obtain as well as being superior to bronze, and empires were subject to destructive attacks by bands of highly armed barbarians.

A similar pattern seems to have occurred in China, although generally somewhat later than in the West. The great period of the Bronze Age there is the Shang dynasty, from the 16th to the 11th century BC; it was followed by the Zhou dynasty, which nominally ruled for the next eight or nine centuries, but whose power declined from about 800BC. The Spring and Autumn period lasted from the eighth to the fifth century, followed by the self-explanatory Warring States until 221. It seems that iron weapons became dominant in China only during this last period.

One of the most interesting aspects of these complex and often turbulent centuries — which in China in particular saw terrible losses in warfare — is the cultural and religious explosion that took place at the same time. In Greece, there were Homer and Hesiod in the eighth century, lyric poets in the seventh and sixth, philosophers in the sixth, fifth and fourth, historians and dramatists in the fifth, and much more; in India there were the Upanishads in or before the sixth century, and Buddha shortly afterwards; in China, Confucius and Lao Tzu were both approximate contemporaries of the historical Buddha.

One may recall the observation of Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles in The Third Man (1949), that Italy had lived through centuries of turmoil and produced the Renaissance, while Switzerland’s centuries of peace had produced the cuckoo clock. Similarly the greatest poets of the Persian tradition, Sa’di, Hafez, Rumi and Omar Khayyam among others, lived through the unimaginable butchery of the Mongol invasions. Perhaps it is the experience of violence and horror that turns our minds to beauty, wisdom and spirituality, while in times of prosperity we stagnate in complacency.

At any rate, the murderous period of the Warring States was brought to an end in 221 when the ruler of the Western kingdom of Qin finally conquered the last of the other rival kingdoms and was able to claim the Mandate of Heaven as legitimate ruler of China. Qin Shihuang was not, however, himself a model of enlightenment: he ordered the burning of the traditional classics of Chinese literature and persecuted Confucian scholars, reputedly burying 460 scholars alive. He was also obsessed with alchemy as a way to become immortal and his premature death in 210 is fittingly attributed to poisoning with mercurial compounds that were meant to help him live forever. Having died on an imperial tour, his attendants and ministers, to forestall uprisings, travelled back to the capital, Xianyang, with the decaying cadaver, carrying on the elaborate pretence that the emperor was still alive.

Terracotta Warriors. Courtesy National Gallery of Victoria

In the brief period of his reign Qin Shihuang devoted immense resources to the building of his own mausoleum, which was to be guarded by an army of life-size imperial soldiers, made of terracotta and standing forever in underground chambers. This extraordinary guard corps — one of the great archaeological finds of the 20th century — was only discovered by chance in 1974, by a peasant digging a well. So far some 2000 of the so-called Terracotta warriors have been excavated and restored, and it is thought that there are another 6000 waiting to be uncovered.

The monumental project was completed in the years following the emperor’s death, as the newly unified empire inexorably crumbled under the less able rule of his son. In 206BC the empire fell to the Han, who were to rule China for four centuries, until AD220, coinciding approximately with the height of Roman power in the late Republic and early Empire, and with the Parthian Empire in Persia (247BC-AD224).

The Han were of course hostile to the regime they had overthrown, and it is thought that they entered the underground chambers where the terracotta soldiers were arrayed, deliberately smashed them and set fire to the complex.

So the impression given by well-known photographs of serried ranks of soldiers standing in a pit, as though they had come to light in this way, is misleading: not one of the 2000 figures so far found has been intact, and those that we see have been through a painstaking process of restoration.

The exhibition, which also includes fine bronzes from the period and the centuries preceding the time of the first emperor, is centred on a selection of eight of the warriors, although the installation with mirrors gives the impression that there are many more. The sample is adequate, however, to give an idea of the quality and also the variety of these remarkable figures.

They include two generals, one of them in armour, who are taller than the other figures, with bigger heads and more striking, detailed and assertive features. They also have a distinctive headdress that is said to emulate the tail feathers of the male pheasant. Next are two officers, a little shorter, slighter in build, with less defined and rather more diffident features.

After this are a light infantryman, without armour, and a civilian official — his hands are tucked into his sleeves, while the soldier’s are ready for action — and finally two archers, one standing and one kneeling, the former of whom was equipped with a longbow, the latter with a crossbow. Some of their equipment may have been made of wood, which is why it would have perished.

Colour too has been lost with time, for apparently these statues were painted and lacquered (not glazed, clearly, or the colour would have survived), so the spectacle that greeted the Han soldiers who came to destroy the terracotta army would have been, especially by torchlight, even more impressive. It must have been uncanny and even terrifying too, since this was not a mere expression of vainglory but a magical legion that was meant to defend the dead emperor in the afterlife.

The process by which the statues were made is particularly interesting. To produce so many figures on such a scale, there had to be an element of mass production. So while the bases and legs were coil-built, the torso, heads and limbs were cast in the same way that many small votive figures were cast in the West, using a mould, or rather a variety of moulds. Further variation was made possible by adding bits of clay to the facial features or costumes while it was still soft enough to do so, and hands and arms could be moved and bent into different positions.

The puzzling thing is that these statues are so masterfully executed, and yet there is no evidence of any previous tradition of this art in China. It is natural, therefore, to speculate about foreign craftsmen, and recently it has been suggested that Greek sculptors may have been involved. Certainly the freehand carving back of draperies in the unarmoured general is the work of someone highly experienced in monumental sculpture.

But if we ask ourselves where we have ever seen anything like these figures, it is probably the magnificent Parthian warrior in the National Museum of Tehran that comes to mind. The Parthians were Hellenised Iranians who had reclaimed Persia from the Hellenistic Seleucid empire in the middle of the third century BC and became the eastern neighbours of the Roman empire until they were replaced by the ethnically Persian Sassanians in AD224, as already mentioned.

The Parthian connection is particularly plausible because the Qin dynasty came from the west of China and were originally nomadic horsemen whose homeland was at the eastern end of the great central Asian region that was shared between Iranian, Turkish and western Chinese peoples. Persia, or Parthia, was thus not as far away culturally as it may seem on the map. And the Parthian empire had been in existence for almost a generation before the unification of China by Qin Shihuang.

As a sort of coda, the exhibition also includes sets of much smaller terracotta soldiers made by the Han in their turn, including some horsemen who anticipate the mounted figures famous from the art of the Tang dynasty (AD618-907).

There is a fascinating set of standing soldiers in terracotta, naked-like little dolls and armless; each was once equipped with wooden arms, and dressed in uniforms of cloth and armour of leather. Interestingly, they all have overly large heads, which makes them look slightly out of proportion (the midpoint of our height is normally around the pubic bone); but if we imagine the heads as a normal size, the bodies are in proportion, although with little or no aesthetic interest in the anatomical structure of the torso and limbs.

This exhibition is shown against the background of a contemporary Chinese artist, Cai Guo-Qiang, who likes to make pictures with gunpowder; the process is more interesting than the product. His most memorable piece is a flock, or “murmuration” of starlings, which leads us from the Qin to the Han works. In the video exhibited at the end of the exhibition we can see that Cai is the master of a skill crucial to contemporary artists, that of keeping a straight face, and his features are accordingly reproduced on all the gallery’s publicity material, more imperturbable than any of the ancient warriors.

Terracotta warriors

NGV to October 13