Secrets from Ancient China
The story behind the famous Terracotta Army
In the 1970s, five men digging a well made a startling discovery that transformed our understanding of China’s history and the brutal events of 2,000 years ago…
March, 1974. Orchards and fields near Xian, north-central China. In the background is a conical hill. We’re in an orchard, but the trees are bare and the grass is dusty. There’s a drought. Five peasants, the Yang brothers, are digging a well. They are two metres down, taking turns to dig while the others haul out soil in baskets. Suddenly the one in the pit, Yang Zhefa, shouts: “An earth-god!”
Sticking out of the soil is a head made of clay – it has two eyes, long hair tied in a bun and a moustache. This is bad luck, because it’s underground, where the dead live. The men toss the head aside and keep digging, but some local kids see it and throw stones at it. A few adults arrive. An old woman picks up the head, takes it home and puts it on her table. Meanwhile, the Yang brothers make other finds: bricks, bits of bronze and some arrowheads.
A month later, a 24-year-old archaeologist named Zhao Kangmin, who’s working in a local museum, hears about the finds. He gets on his bike, rides to the orchard and finds the Yangs, still busy on their well. By now there are more clay bits on their heap of rubbish: legs, arms, two more heads. He takes charge of matters and has the finds brought to his museum in nearby Lintong. He guesses they are important, as he knows the historical background.
Over 2,000 years ago, this was the heartland of the state known as Qin (pronounced Chin). That hill in the background, a massive pyramid of earth, was the tomb of the emperor who united China’s warring states into a single nation. Kangmin, like most educated people, knew all about the First Emperor, because the story of his rise to power was told in dramatic terms by Sima Qian, one of China’s greatest historians, who was writing a century after the events that he describes.
Qin had been one of seven warring states, all with their own armies and systems of government, rivalling each other. But Qin had made itself the most powerful by becoming a military
dictatorship, a police state in which the ruler had total control. For example, as one chronicler recorded, “Anyone who failed to report criminal activity would be chopped in two at the waist.” The system worked. By 238 BCE, Qin was a rich, self-confident kingdom under the control of a new 22-year-old ruler, King Zheng.
Zheng was fanatical about security. He thought he could make Qin even safer by using his tough, mobile army to extend his control over the other six states. To ensure victory, he turned his nation into a war machine fuelled by good food supplies, ruthless tax gatherers, military service for almost all men, and highly trained soldiers.
We have no details of his conquests, which started in 230 BCE, but in nine years he defeated all the other six kingdoms. In 221 BCE, he was master of a unified China, which gets its name from his kingdom. This was not China as it is today, just the central and northern bits, but ever since then, the idea of unity has been at the heart of Chinese history. Zheng gave himself a suitably grand title: Qin Shi Huang Di, meaning Qin (or China) First August Emperor. Non-chinese usually call him the First Emperor.
Now he needed to weld his conquests together with a revolution in government and vast building projects that would control his people and keep enemies out. First, he ordered a revolution in administration, setting up a government of 36 regions, each divided into counties, and each with both civil and military governors, overseeing tax collectors and judges. All the different systems of law, money, weights, measures and even styles of clothing were standardised.
Dissent of any kind was crushed. According to Sima Qian, when a scholar dared criticise the emperor for breaking with tradition, Prime Minister Li Si pointed out that the roots of rebellion lay with scholars and books: “Those who use the past to criticise the present should be put to death!” So the royal archives “were all destroyed. How regrettable!” – burned, said Sima Qian. This episode, known as the Burning of the Books, is generally accepted as true, as is another claiming that “over 460” scholars were buried alive. But Sima Qian, writing during the next dynasty, was keen to discredit his predecessors, and experts question the true meaning of the words widely translated as “burned” and “buried”. Anyway, countless Qin books survived. These record cruel punishments, including being torn apart by carriages and being boiled to death.
But there are no records of the execution of scholars. It seems the emperor’s new legal system actually prevented gross abuses of power.
Peace had one startling result: the king’s vast army – millions of soldiers from all seven nations – was no longer needed. Something had to be done with them, or risk rebellion. So the soldiers were set to work on huge projects: over 6,000km of paved roads,
"THERE ARE RECORDS OF CRUEL PUNISHMENT, INCLUDING BEING TORN APRT BY CARRIAGES
half a dozen royal palaces, military bases, and – most famously – the first Great Wall.
One the First Emperor’s grandest projects was his tomb, built near the ancient capital, Xian, at the foot of a sacred mountain, Mount Li. Records claim that 700,000 worked on it, although 40,000 is a more accurate figure, and they spent a year digging out a pit for the tomb itself. Later, after his death, the tomb would be covered with the hill that is still there today – 50 metres high, 350 metres per side; the size of the Great Pyramid, though made of earth, not stone.
"THE EMPEROR, LIKE HIS WHOLE SOCIETY, WAS OBSESSED WITH LIFE AFTER DEATH"
What was it all for? The answer is: to live forever in the spirit world. The emperor, like his whole society, was obsessed with life after death. He believed the next world mirrored this one, and that a dead person needed familiar objects in the grave to recreate life. The rich and powerful needed big tombs, filled with grave goods like chariots, weapons, animals and servants, both real ones, killed and buried with their lord, and models, for a life-like image could in some magical way become ‘real’ in the spirit world. Everything was designed to remake the emperor’s life on Earth – government, banquets, entertainments, hunting, fighting.
The tomb itself was perhaps devoted to government. Sima Qian says it contains a model of the empire, with the rivers picked out in flowing mercury, the night sky portrayed in the ceiling, and all defended by crossbows ready to fire on intruders. It sounds unlikely, but in 1982 archaeologists probed the tomb with 560 drillings that revealed the outlines of a building and slight traces of mercury vapour. The truth will only be known if and when the tomb is opened.
But the emperor would also need an army, and so he commissioned something that was totally original and unique. He had his artisans, hundreds of them, make thousands of full-size warriors out of clay, all painted in vivid colours and carrying real bronze weapons (which was why they had to be full–size).
Much of this work must have been done before his death, which was of some unspecified cause at the age of 50 in
210 BCE. However, for his burial, tens of thousands of workers rushed to finish the tomb and its many outlying graves. The terracotta warriors were placed in three pits 1.5km to the east of the tomb. Well armed with spears, lances, swords and crossbows, they were lined up on a tiled floor as if on a parade ground, ready to help their lord fight off any spirit armies coming to take over his empire. The pits, nine metres deep, were roofed with wooden beams, twice as thick as telegraph poles, weighing 500kg each, over 6,000 in all. The beams were covered with matting, on top of which workers piled three metres of earth.
Then they vanished. There were no records. Sima Qian makes no mention of them. After a generation or two, they were forgotten, the memory of them erased by the chaos and civil war that destroyed the Qin Empire.
So when the warriors were found in 1974, they were a total surprise. And when archaeologists got to work there was another surprise: not a single soldier was found intact. All had been shattered. Today’s display is the result of painstaking reconstruction. So far, 1,000 have been
restored, though all their bright colours vanished into the earth that buried them. The rest are still buried, awaiting techniques that can ensure better preservation. No one knows exactly how many there are: the 7,000-8,000 is an estimate, as is the number of 670 horses. But this is not enough for an army. The emperor’s real army numbered in the tens of thousands. Perhaps there are more to be discovered. After all, there have been many other finds over the years, including horse skeletons, tombs of officials, other types of terracotta statues, bronze birds, and two astonishing half-sized chariots, complete with horses and drivers.
But the star turn is the army, now partly restored from jigsaw puzzles of bits and pieces. Not a single one in the main pit has been found complete. All were shattered – but how? Fire was somehow responsible, for the earth above them was baked solid. But how did the fire start, and how could it break every single statue?
To answer, we must become detectives. It must have had something to do with the rebels who rose against the Qin dynasty
after the First Emperor’s death in 210
BCE, beginning eight years of civil war before the Han Dynasty took over in 202 BCE. In a film shown to tourists in the Terracotta Army museum, rebel soldiers break through doors and torch the place. But there were no doors, no mass breakin. There is no evidence of the roof being dug up. So there was no oxygen to sustain a fire. That’s the mystery: a fire, but no means to keep it burning.
This might have happened: as the empire fell apart, a rebel army approached the tomb, with no army to stop them. Historian Ban Gu, writing 200 years later, says the Qin generals advised: “There are forced labourers at the Mount Li grave complex. Grant them amnesty and supply them with arms.” This was done, which temporarily blocked the rebel army, and also stopped work on the First Emperor’s tomb. This explains why there are three pits full of soldiers – but a fourth pit is completely empty, awaiting more warriors, which never arrived.
In Lintong, rebels knew about the Terracotta Army from the hastily recruited labourers. So in early 206 BCE, with the Qin palaces ablaze, rebels arrived at the tomb-site, eager for more booty. The vast tomb itself was too much of a challenge. But they knew of the buried army, knew also that it contained real weapons.
There was no time to dig up the earth and beams. The best way in was to dig straight down. The evidence is there. In
Pit No 2, a hole like a small mineshaft bypasses the roof and enters the pit. It’s a metre or so wide – big enough for one person at a time to enter, big enough to hand weapons to the surface.
Imagine the first rebel soldier breaking through, seeing nothing, calling for a blazing torch. Its flickering light reveals the front lines of clay soldiers in their original painted finery, with pink faces and brightly coloured coats. In cavernous corridors, the soldiers range backward into darkness and – most importantly – they’re all armed. For fighting men, it’s a treasure-trove.
Others slither down the hole, holding more torches. The intruders begin to weave and shove their way through, grabbing weapons, passing them back to the tunnel. “There is no evidence of organised destruction,” says the army’s senior archaeologist, Yuan Zhongyi. “We found remains of warriors which seem to have fallen in a zig-zag pattern, which suggests they were pushed over as people forced their way through.”
Then, in the chaos, something cut the break-in short. Fire. A torch smouldering beside a wooden pillar or one of the wooden chariots. For what happened next, we must rely on modern fireprotection engineers, like Joe Lally, an archaeologist with the US Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In his computerised scenario, there is no exit for the smoke. The corridors fill with smoke in about four minutes, forcing the thieves to crawl to the exit, toppling more warriors and horses. They have only a few precious minutes to escape, and there is only room for one at a time up the exit shaft. They all made it because no charred skeletons were found with the smashed soldiers.
There is something odd about this fire. It takes a powerful hold, but it needs a flow of oxygen to keep it going. There’s not enough coming in through the small entrance, so the flames go out.
"IN THE CHAOS, SOMETHING CUT THE TOMB BREAK-IN SHORT"
Yet we know that fire completely destroyed the pit. How? This was a special sort of fire, like those that spread underground along seams of coal. Coalseam fires are started by bush fires or lightning and there are thousands of them around the world, burning very slowly, for a very long time. There’s one under the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, that has been smouldering for half a century, and it may go on doing so for another 250 or so years.
Imagine the scene: in the main pit, the flames are dead, the pit dark again, smoke drifting along the corridors. But the fire has found a home in the ceiling, where the earth keeps a lid on it. Traces of oxygen seep in, just enough to keep the ceiling smouldering. Slowly, the slow fire eats away at the beams. At some point, charred timbers fall, breaking a piece off a warrior or two. A section of earth follows.
And so it goes, for years, the warriors, chariots and crossbow-men crushed by the falling beams, the surface subsiding bit by bit, filled again by water-borne mud, until not a trace remains of what lies beneath – until the five Yang brothers find an earth-god while digging a well.
Why was the introduction of the Mark I tank to World War I in 1916 so important?
The war on the Western Front was at a virtual stalemate. Trench warfare was characterised by sudden offensives, one side tried to break through the other’s lines with massive artillery bombardments followed by tens of thousands of men attacking via no-man’s land. The cost of these advances in human lives was vast. Machine guns would cut down man after man from hundreds of yards away, and all this while advancing on a dug in and well-protected enemy.
A handful of inventors and visionary engineers all arrived at the same idea – build some kind of armed and armoured vehicle that could create gaps in the barbed wire, knock out machine gun posts and bunkers, and protect infantry long enough for the trench networks to be captured. A vehicle that could ultimately, and oddly, ‘save lives’.
What was the legacy of the Mark I’s design on later tanks?
The Mark I certainly had its limitations. Their slow speed made them easy targets for artillery, and while they were armed with machine guns and cannons (depending on whether it was a ‘male’ or a ‘female’) these were arranged on their sides, meaning the whole vehicle had to be moved to bring them to bear on the enemy. What’s more, crew comfort was nonexistent: the Mark I tanks were dark, noisy, incredibly hot and full of engine fumes.
However, the British saw the potential of this basic design and constantly updated it. An improved version, the Mark IV, came into service in 1917. Ultimately, these machines were the ‘loose blueprint’ for the tank to come in the future, not only in terms of design but also the change in tactical doctrine.
How did the introduction of the Mark I change battlefield tactics in WWI?
Military technology of the time favoured the defence. Even if an attack did succeed, it was almost impossible to exploit the breach before the enemy rushed in reinforcements to stabilise the front. The first 50 tanks were sent to France in August 1916 to join the British push that summer along the River Somme. They were thrown into the attack on 15 September with little preparation, and almost half of them broke down before coming into contact with the enemy. They managed to advance a couple of miles through two of the three German lines, inflicting heavy casualties, but lack of communication (they had no radios) and lack of coordination with infantry and artillery stalled the attack. Hard lessons were learnt that became the basis of armoured warfare doctrine going forward.
What lengths does Wargaming go to for authenticity and accuracy in its recreations of these incredible machines?
First, the design team, along with the historical consultants and a multitude of other people, begins work on preparing the potential vehicles. Then the next stage is documentation. This involves archives, blueprints, sketches, military photographs, news reels, and 3D scans where possible.
We then get designers to build what we call a ‘historical description’. We detail tactical and technical characteristics all about the weaponry, including the elevation and depression angles, and armour thickness is obviously incredibly important.
We also get data on maximum speeds, but not just maximum speeds as you would find on a source like Wikipedia. They’re the maximum speeds on various terrains.
Only after all that provisional work is done do we then move onto the next stage, which is the ‘tech tree’ stage. Then it gets a bit more game-orientated. Balance is, of course, a challenge because we are talking about a game that has tanks which very possibly never fought against each other on the battlefield.
So to make sure that nothing is overpowered, or alternatively underwhelming, we test heavily to ensure its playability.
This process can vary wildly in terms of how long it takes. The easiest tanks might be able to be completed and dropped into the game in as few as four weeks, or it could take upwards of six months if the details on the tank are scarce. To assist in its research, Wargaming maintains partnerships with tank museums across the globe, and this process involves the multiple teams across the organisation, from the dedicated researchers that Wargaming keeps on staff right through to the programmers and testers.
What can players look forward to learning about tank mechanics and tactics from playing World Of Tanks?
The peculiarities of each vehicle, what is good or less so in its abilities, from firepower to protection to mobility. In terms of playing, the value of preparation and knowing the terrain
– as with real tank warfare the use of terrain is critical both in terms of movement and the selection of fire positions. In addition, teamwork and the basics of communication are a key to winning on the virtual battlefield.
World Of Tanks is known as the world’s largest virtual tank museum and appeals to history lovers globally. Learn about the tank then take it into battle.