Which Chinese emperor had the Terracotta Army?

Qin Shi Huang: The Eastern Emperor Who Conquered Eternity with Legions of Pottery and Clay

I. The Emperor’s Mystery Unearthed by a Farmer’s Hoe
In March 1974, Shaanxi farmer Yang Zhifa was searching for water in the arid land when his shovel suddenly hit a hard object. As pottery shards, bronze arrowheads and broken ceramic limbs were gradually revealed, a shocking secret that had been buried for 2,200 years was unveiled – it was none other than the legion of companions of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. This dramatic discovery process, like a mix of Raiders of the Lost Ark and National Treasure, instantly triggered a global sensation. The New York Times followed the story on the front page for three days, calling it “an epic version of the tomb of Tutankhamun in the East.

Archaeologists quickly confirmed that these life-size terracotta soldiers were guarding the legendary emperor who unified China in the 3rd century BC. The discovery has rewritten the world’s perception of ancient Chinese civilization: whereas the tombs of Chinese emperors were considered by Western scholars to be mainly “rammed earth and sealed trees,” Qin Shi Huang interpreted immortality in terms of an entire legion of people in a miniature universe. Nowadays, this 56 square kilometers underground empire (equivalent to 78 Central Parks in New York) continues to refresh the boundaries of mankind’s imagination of ancient civilization.

From Proton to Emperor of the Ancient World
Qin Shi Huang, whose real name was Ying Zheng, was born in 259 B.C. in Handan, the State of Zhao. His father was a prince of Qin and his mother was a courtesan of Zhao, a “transnational” background that was an Achilles’ heel in the Warring States period, and when he succeeded to the throne at the age of 9, he was under the control of the powerful courtier Lu Buwei, and the young monarch was under constant threat of death. But it was this upbringing that forged his iron will and far-reaching strategic vision.

After taking power at the age of 22, Ying Zheng showed amazing political talent: he swept away the six kingdoms in 10 years, ending 550 years of chaos in the Warring States period, establishing China’s first centralized empire with a territory covering 1/3 of modern China, implementing standardization reforms to unify writing, currency, weights and measures, and constructing the Great Wall defense system and the nationwide network of roads, of which the Qin Straight Road was known as the “Ancient Highway”, and the Qin Highway, which was the most important road in the world. highway”.

These pioneering initiatives made him known as the “First Emperor of the Ancient World”. But this reformer was always plagued by death anxiety – according to the Records of the Grand Historian, he was assassinated at least three times, sent thousands of boys and girls to the East China Sea to search for immortality, and even swallowed the “elixir of immortality” made from mercury. This obsession with immortality, ultimately gave birth to the Terracotta Warriors, the most spectacular “immortality project” in human history.

Third, 8000 terracotta warriors behind the code of eternal life
The construction of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses of the Mausoleum of the First Emperor of Qin can be called a miracle of ancient systems engineering:
Scale shock: the excavated three burial pits unearthed a total of more than 8,000 pieces of terracotta warriors, archaeological remote sensing shows that there are at least 600 uncharted relics under the ground.
Military realism: from 1.6 meters crossbow soldiers to 1.9 meters general figurines (more than 15% of the average height of men at that time), a complete reproduction of the Qin army’s “millions of armors, thousands of vehicles, riding ten thousand horses”.
Technology code: Bronze weapon surface chrome salt rust prevention technology is 2000 years ahead of the West, crossbow parts error does not exceed 0.02 millimeters.
Artistic breakthrough: each terracotta figurine has a unique face, hair bun weaving method hidden military rank code, robe folds accurately present the fabric draping sense.

This underground army is essentially the “eternal guard” of Qin Shi Huang. According to the Qin Dynasty’s belief that “death is like life”, the terracotta warriors were armed with real weapons, deployed in real battle formations, and even equipped with figurines of civil officials and music and dance figurines, constituting a complete universe of souls. Modern archaeology has revealed that terracotta figurines were initially coated with vibrant colors extracted from cinnabar and malachite, and this attempt to combat the erosion of time with mineral pigments forms an interesting civilizational dialogue with ancient Egyptian mummy technology.

IV. Tyrant or Reformer? The Faces of Emperors Contested for Thousands of Years
In the Western context, Qin Shi Huang is often analogized as a mixture of Caesar and Napoleon – both a genius commander-in-chief and a despotic tyrant. His burning of a hundred books was denounced by Voltaire in his Treatise on Customs as “the originator of ideological repression”; but the engineering wonders of the Great Wall and the Terracotta Warriors made Joseph Lee praise his “advanced systems engineering thinking” in his History of Science and Technology in China.

This contradiction is especially obvious in the Terracotta Warriors project, where 700,000 laborers (3% of the country’s population) completed the main body of the mausoleum in 38 years, with a death rate comparable to that of the Egyptian pyramids. Fingerprints of craftsmen found on the terracotta warriors confirm the existence of a “quality traceability system”-each part is inscribed with a workshop number, and those who made defective products were subjected to corporal punishment, and those who made the pits with foreign faces are also subject to corporal punishment. Terracotta figurines with foreign faces have been found, suggesting that there were multinational teams of craftsmen in the Qin Empire.

Harvard University sinologist Yu Wen Shoan points out: “Qin Shi Huang used clay to solidify the paradox of civilization – the pursuit of eternal order, but also full of human warmth; the emphasis on collectivism, but also to retain individual characteristics. This paradoxical nature is the very code for the continuity of Chinese civilization.”

V. From Xi’an to Hollywood: The Modern Rebirth of an Immortal Empire
Today, the legacy of Emperor Qin Shi Huang continues to fester:
Technological revelation: NASA’s study of the mineral composition of painted terracotta figurines has improved the thermal insulation coating of the Mars rover
Cultural symbols: Hollywood reimagines Emperor Qin Shi Huang in The Mummy 3 and Kung Fu Panda, giving him the dramatic flavor of an “Oriental super-villain”.
Dialogue of Civilizations: The British Museum’s Terracotta Warriors special exhibition attracted 1.8 million visitors, more than the Picasso exhibition at the same time Genetic Legacy: DNA tests show that 3% of modern Shaanxiites carry the same Y-chromosome markers as terracotta warriors.

When visitors stand in front of Pit 1, what they see is not only a 2,200-year-old terracotta legion, but also a declaration of life written by an emperor in an extreme way – as he inscribed in a stone carved on Taishan Mountain: “Having leveled the world, I will not be relentless in governing.” This never-ending underground legion is both an icy symbol of authoritarian imperial power and a spiritual monument to mankind’s fight against death. It reminds us that the casting of a great civilization never moves forward in the interweaving of light and shadow.