Terracotta Warriors: Exhibition fit for an Emperor could only happen in WA
Heads at the Western Australian Museum were negotiating to bring over the Terracotta Warriors when Australia-China relations turned glacial. Here’s how they got an exhibition of China’s most prized cultural asset over the line.
The barques were loaded. Food, tools and supplies to endure several years beyond the frontiers of the known world. Five thousand crew and six thousand children – reputedly all virgins, the purest emissaries of the mortal realm. The flotilla set out east towards the mythical islands where three sacred mountains, guarded by merciless sea creatures, were said to ascend towards the heavens. They had a solitary mission: to return with the elixir to eternal life. None was ever to be seen again.
Xu Fu’s futile expedition of 210BC would prove the crescendo of a lifetime in pursuit of the ultimate antidote to mortality. As the official court sorcerer to the Qin dynasty, Xu Fu was charged not only with keeping China’s most consequential emperor, Qin Shi Huang, of good physical and spiritual health but also for expunging the very spectre of death. His failure would augur turmoil, the collapse of the entire Qin dynasty and, ultimately, the yoke of death.
The Qin state had been five centuries in the making, surviving plunder and ruin as more than 100 rival states wrestled for power at its margins. In 246BCE King Zhuangxiang of Qin would die without warning just three years after taking power. The entire fate of the kingdom would now be placed in the untried clasp of his son, 13-year-old Ying Zheng.
The new king inherited a recalcitrant court, determined to exploit his perceived naivety and weakness. But Ying Zheng would prove a formidable statesman, purging his detractors and dissenters before turning his attention to the six remaining rival kingdoms of the ancient lands of China: Qi, Chu, Yan, Han, Zhao and Wei. By age 38 the boy king had conquered each one to become Qin Shi Huang, the first true emperor of China.
While he brought stability and uniformity – a common language, measurements and currency – one realm remained frustratingly illusive to Qin’s desire for omnipotent control: the afterlife. Xu Fu’s failure to return with the mercurial cure-all was a devastating blow to Qin’s ultimate ambition. However, Japanese folklore suggests Xi Fu’s armada did indeed survive, ultimately making landfall on its territory – the alchemist purportedly making significant contributions to Japanese farming practices and medicine.
In China, Qin now shifted to plan B. If he could not conquer death in life he would instead endeavour to conquer life in death. In the ultimate display of despotic hubris, construction on his mausoleum – commenced the very year he took power aged 13 – would be turbocharged. Seven hundred thousand labourers and slaves were conscripted throughout the 28-year construction at Mount Li, near present day Xi’an in Shaanxi Province. While true figures are unknown, some estimates believe tens of thousands may have died in Qin’s pursuit of the eternal.
The emperor, however, would never wholly forsake his perennial ambitions and continued to solicit the guidance of alchemists and mystics. While on an official tour throughout eastern China in 210BC Qin would be taken ill and die suddenly aged 49: reputedly a suspected poisoning from an administered potion containing native herbs and mercury.
The prophecy of his own immortality would seemingly remain unmanifest. Upheaval in the immediate wake of his death, expedited by scrappy succession planning, would see the Han dynasty seize power: a chaotic period that witnessed the riches of Qin’s mausoleum destroyed and looted, the remainder ransacked by tomb raiders over centuries until eventually the earth settled quietly above, entombing him away until time ultimately forgot.
More than two thousand years later, in 1974, a farmer struck something solid while digging a well in a field in Lintong County. Further excavation of the site revealed one of the most staggering archaeological discoveries of all time: a meticulously planned 56- square kilometre burial complex littered with treasures, all guarded by up to 8000 life-sized clay soldiers; what became known as the terracotta army. A legion of soldiers silently protecting Qin Shi Huang in death as they could not in life.
These handcrafted warriors – and other artefacts from the Qin and Han dynasties – are the subject of the West Australian Museum’s new exhibition, Terracotta Warriors: Legacy of the First Emperor.
“The Qin dynasty is a contradiction,” Tonia Eckfeld, the exhibition’s curator, begins. “Qin Shi Huang planned for a dynasty of many generations, but it was one of the shortest, lasting only 15 years. His authoritarian rule and the harsh labour he inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people led to his dynasty’s downfall. He sought immortality in the construction of his great tomb, yet it was almost destroyed by armies of rebels in the chaos of Qin’s fall. Eventually, Qin was largely forgotten except for a few records in the Han Histories.”
Terracotta Warriors: Legacy of the First Emperor attempts to not only speak to the pursuit of power but equally to the everyday lives of people during these nascent days of a unified China. Seemingly ordinary ephemera of life and work – mirrors, lamps, millstones and musical instruments – are contrasted with multimedia exhibits and the imposing warriors themselves, of which eight are on display alongside an attendant and an armoured horse.
As with the unwritten strictures governing the country’s tightly managed regime of “Panda diplomacy”, China reputedly only ever gifts a loan of the warriors to its closest international friends – and never more than 10 at a time. Chairman Deng Xiaoping would famously reward diplomatic interventions by both the Whitlam and Fraser governments in forging closer bonds with an emergent China with the warriors’ first-ever international tour, to the National Gallery of Victoria in 1982.
Conversely, negotiations between the WA Museum and Chinese government representatives commenced amid much less hospitable climes in 2018 – the year the Australian government tightened laws surrounding foreign political donations and later banned Chinese telecommunications company Huawei from taking on nation-building projects.
Tepid relations would rapidly turn glacial during the Covid pandemic, with China responding to calls from prime minister Scott Morrison for an inquiry into the origins of the pandemic with a punitive ban on non-essential Australian imports, including wine and crayfish.
Behind the scenes the WA Museum – and with it the state government under premier Mark McGowan, alongside the state’s captains of industry – continued to collectively sue for a détente throughout this turbulent period. No frontline player in the campaign to secure the warriors was oblivious to the fact that exports of the state’s mineral resources to China represented around 10 per cent of Australian GDP: not least the WA Museum’s most critical private sector backers at Minderoo, Rio Tinto, Wesfarmers and Woodside, as well as the Chinese-owned Tianqi Lithium. More than ancient history, there were many untold futures at stake.
Jason Fair, the WA Museum’s director of museums and exhibitions, was charged with navigating the often cryptic diplomatic terrain between the institution and the various Chinese governmental bodies guarding the country’s most valuable cultural asset, primarily the Shaanxi Provincial Cultural Heritage Administration.
Having grown up with a figurine of a terracotta warrior in his bedroom – gifted by his intrepid grandparents, who visited China in the 1980s – the situation took on an air of the prophetic, and Fair animatedly regales of a carousel of flights, meetings and official toasts in his attempt to secure a seat at the negotiating table.
With delegations from France and the US also furtively lobbying in the pursuit of their own terracotta warrior diplomacy in the wings, Fair says it became clear that he had finally sealed the deal on inspecting a table seating plan in 2023.
“In Chinese culture you very much know where you sit by where you are seated at the table,” he recounts with a knowing grin, walking Review through the cavernous exhibition space soon to host the exhibition. “And I was seated at the head of the table. And now you really know why you’re here. Working with Chinese culture and (their) museums is very different to others in that you really need to be face to face and having these conversations over many, many years.”
For WA Museum director Alec Coles, the political implications of securing the warriors, alongside the additional 230 artefacts travelling across for the exhibition – many never seen outside China, while others, among them Empress Dowager Bo’s gold heirloom pieces, on display for the very first time – are clearly secondary to its cultural significance.
Candidly describing the procurement of the exhibition as “green-lit” every step of the way by the state government, Terracotta Warriors: Legacy of the First Emperor affords a once-in-a-career opportunity for Coles to finally flex the full capabilities of the audacious $400m redevelopment of the museum he both commissioned and oversaw – what would reopen in 2020 under the Noongar name Boola Bardip, or “many stories”.
“This exhibition tells the story of the beginning of China as we know it,” Coles states, clearly still affected by the gravity of the coup in securing the show for WA. “It was, by all accounts, a brutal regime – oppressive and cruel – but it, with the Han dynasty after, was a kind of golden age of Chinese creativity.”
While Qin Shi Huang may have ultimately failed to attain eternal life, his newfound infamy has certified him as one of the world’s biggest cultural drawcards: his terracotta army leaving a dust trail of shattered attendance records in its wake across the globe, rivalled in popularity only by the treasures of ancient Egypt. Coles conservatively predicts attendance figures of 180,000 across the exhibition’s seven-month residency, of which he anticipates nearly 50 per cent to venture from beyond WA’s borders.
“People often talk of museums as neutral spaces,” Coles responds to the suggested implications in eulogising the hubristic fantasies of a political leader at such a tumultuous moment in political history as today, where authoritarianism appears to be on the march.
“But who wants to be neutral: to be bland and vanilla? That’s not what we are. We need to provide spaces where you can have real conversations.”
Indeed, even in China – a state wholly rewired by the ascetic doctrine of communism and where the vainglory of Qin was all but forgotten – the mausoleum has become a near-sacred symbol of historical endurance and regalvanised unity, with well over 10 million visitors annually.
Each warrior is sculpted with individualised heights and facial features (albeit modelled on a set of derivatives), representing the multifarity of ethnic groups from the far reaches of Qin’s unified empire – affording each an almost animated sense of the anthropomorphic that allows for a human connection that transcends idolatry. This increased national reverence was ostensively the motivation when a man hurdled the guardrail at Xi’an and dived headlong into the mausoleum earlier this month, damaging two clay warriors.
Despite this increased fascination, much of the burial grounds remains to be excavated, including Qin Shi Huang’s tomb itself: whose cabalistic myths are recalibrated more than 2000 years on, with some believing it to be guarded by sorcery, protected by rivers of mercury and – in the least, and very likely – heavily booby-trapped.
“The rediscovery of his colossal mausoleum, and those of the Han rulers, prove that Qin Shi Huang did indeed leave an unequalled legacy, which was sustained for two millennia,” curator Tonia Eckfeld concludes. “Laozi, the sixth century BCE philosopher, once said, ‘Those who die without being forgotten have longevity’. If that is the case, then, through this exhibition and his legacy, Qin Shi Huang has truly succeeded in his ultimate goal of immortality.”
Terracotta Warriors: Legacy of the First Emperor opens at the Western Australian Museum on Saturday June 28 and runs until February 22, 2026. museum.wa.gov.au
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