David Bowden
posted 26 September 2007

Make no mistake – Qin Shihuang’s tomb is an awe-inspiring wonder of the world. Covering 56km, containing an estimated 7,000 life-size terracotta figures and allegedly once flowing with rivers of mercury, it is a monument to one of the most powerful leaders the world has ever known. Everything about the site, as Hugo Rifkind recently suggested in The Times, resonates with the kind of magnificent egotistical barminess that is, surely, what we all find most fascinating about powerful men.

That Shihuang wanted his lasting legacy to be a man-made replication of the country which he created (by uniting the seven Warring States through imperial might) built underground and that over two millennia later no-one was able to remember where he put it, and still have only uncovered a small section of it, is staggeringly, delightfully, epically mad. Even proclaiming himself to be emperor of China and the Universe (times infinity plus one) has an endearingly childlike quality to it. No wonder everyone has gotten so excited by it coming to Britain – not least the British Museum, which is predicting interest not known since Tutankhamen came to town.

Of course, that’s not quite accurate. Despite the hype, the Terracotta Army hasn’t come to London: there can be no more than twenty figures present, which isn’t even a terracotta platoon actually, and a couple more of those are civil servants (oh, just make your own joke), which is hardly that exciting. What’s stunning about the Terracotta Army is its scale and, despite the highly impressive coup in holding the first major exhibition of these artefacts outside of China, you still have to largely use your imagination to be blown away.

Part of the problem lies in the material itself: terracotta is not pretty or timeless (like marble or granite), but economic and functional, with a dash of style. Although the draughtsmanship is still skilful and intricate, they are still not as impressive to look at as Greek marble or Egyptian gold. Unlike the Greek statues, however, they look much better when painted: unfortunately, despite the best attempts of the excavationists, the lacquer doesn’t survive when the figures are removed from their subterranean habitat. It is only from the last figure in the set – an archer repainted in the original style – that one gets a sense of why Qin believed he could take this army with him into the other realm. The truly beautiful exhibits on show – the cups and beakers – are made from jade, the shiny-rock world’s equivalent of a safe pair of hands.

Much is made of the fact that every figure is different in some way, which strikes me as a strange thing to emphasise. Qin derived much of his power by organisation and standardisation – not only bringing all seven states under his control, but also forcing everyone to speak the same language and use the same measurements, making the axles of carts the same size so they could travel more easily down the roads, demanding the military equipment (however complex) be cheap and easy to replace, and expanding the remit of the legal system. Given that the figures were assembled in parts by teams of slaves (using a material which is easily moulded and difficult to set) one would expect there to be subtle differences in each one – so used have we gotten to the notion of ‘mass-produced homogeneity’ we forget that before the latter half of the twentieth century it was something to aspire to, not disdain. One of the more poignant exhibits (for me at least) was a pile of tiles, broken after firing, which had been discarded in a corner of a workshop meaning to be thrown away, and yet survived longer than most of their immaculate counterparts: it reminds you of the craft involved in making 7,000 life-size figures. But I imagine that Qin would view the individuality of his chosen army as a failure, not as something to be celebrated.

I’m not sure I buy the claim of Jonathan Jones in the Guardian that the mausoleum is a testimony, not to the emperor, but to ‘what his people gave him; nothing but the passion of the artisan who cared enough to put every little ribbon on that suit of armour.’ It seems more like a testimony to what Qin got his people to do for him under pain of death, and no amount of looking into pottery eyes and going ‘Wow, you can nearly tell what he had for lunch’ is going to convince me otherwise. Then again, I was fascinated to discover that his army didn’t actually have a uniform and that soldiers were expected to wear whatever they could get their hands on, so he obviously didn’t let standardisation stand in the way of a good deal – only one of several similarities I noticed between the good emperor and Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary.

A large portion of the fairly sparse exhibition notes is also dedicated to highlighting Qin’s fear of death and the many wacky ways, involving pills, potions and magic herbs he used to avoid it. How much like us today, I thought! But then I thought, no, it isn’t really, and moved on to reading about his desperately quaint notion that human beings were naturally evil and needed to be ruthlessly dominated by the rule of government. The underlying message of these reminders seemed to be that absolute power drives people to such arrogance that they believe they shouldn’t be subject to the same rules as the rest of us (true), but it had an unnerving ‘know your place, mortal’ vibe, which ran contrary to the spirit of the exhibition. Qin may have died at the age of 49 without ever demonstrating the strategic effectiveness of an after-world army made out of pottery, but you don’t find yourself queuing for several hours to see John Calvin’s terracotta army, do you?

The queues aren’t really that bad, as it happens. Admittedly I saw it on a weekday, but it was the first day of an event which has been threatening to have people backing up towards Tottenham Court Road, and I was able to secure a ticket for a couple of hours after I arrived, at which point I was free to go off and roam as I wished. I can understand that the British Museum was keen to hype up what is seen as a real achievement in getting so many of these much-protected figures out of China, and with the backing of Morgan Stanley, trying to break down much of the mysteries of the formation of what we are promised will be the next economic superpower. But the excitement and awe we are supposed to be feeling seems very artificial, trying to recreate the heady days when we all grouped together to queue up to see Tutankhamen’s treasures. Wasn’t it wonderful that everyone could get together and bond to see a museum as opposed to an England sporting achievement (a definition which in itself has changed somewhat since 1972), or the death of a celebrity? There is already much clammy-handed excitement at the Tutankhamen exhibition to be staged from November (I’ll get my The Mummy Returns line in now, to avoid the tragic inevitability in twelve months).

The problem is that now low-cost air travel has made it nearly as cheap to pop over to Cairo as to trawl along the Central Line, that exhibition is not going to be as exciting to the general public as seeing them on your doorstep was in 1972, but at least the glitter, gold and lapis lazuli still visually entices on their own. Will we say the same of 2007’s ‘Terracotta Patrol’ in thirty five years? It’s easy to be cynical about these things, and I was very excited about being given a chance to go, but I walked away from ‘Terracotta Army’ feeling that sights like that really do need to be seen to be believed, and pretending that you can get anything other than a small glimpse of the wonder from a handful of figures – no matter how much you overstate the quality of individual ones - is simply misleading. What does whet the appetite is the prospect of what is yet to be uncovered, and the burning sense of frustration that Qin’s burial chamber is unlikely to be found in our lifetime, if at all, given the director of the Terra Cotta Museum Wu Yong Qi’s apparent reluctance to disturb his tomb. This exhibition doesn’t live up to the hype, but I left feeling that I still want to know if the rest of it does: and if this provides the impetus to make sure we do, rather than leaving it to our overactive imaginations, then it serves as a very effective teaser trailer.

Till 6 April 2008