An Army On Parade For 2000 Years Part.V

Shi Huang Di knew that his regime was harsh. In 213 BC, to protect himself from unfavorable comparisons with earlier rulers, he ordered the burning of any books that might inspire dissent, including not only political treatises and histories, but also poetry and other fine literature. Only practical manuals on agriculture, medicine, and divination were to be spared.

 In the atmosphere of suspicion and fear that followed, Shi Huang Di came to distrust his scholars, and personally selected 460 of them for execution. They were buried alive. Indirectly, this barbarous act brought about the downfall of his dynasty, for his able eldest son, Prince Fu Sa, ventured to oppose him, and was banished. When the emperor died, he was succeeded by his indolent and self indulgent younger son Er-Shi.

And all this time, work had proceeded on the funerary on the funerary city the emperor was creating for himself, with more than 70000 laborers conscripted to this mammoth task alone. According to Chinese historian Sima Qian, Shi Huang Di’s tomb represented the Qin Empire in miniature. Through it ran shimmering trails of mercury symbolizing the Huang H and Chang Jiang, flowing into a silver ocean. The ceiling mimicked the heavens, recording the constellations of the night sky. When completed, a massive copper sarcophagus containing the emperor’s body lay at its heart, surmounted by a tumulus 115m high. To guard against robbers, Shi Huang Di ordered traps to be set, including cross bows ready to shoot anyone who entered the tomb. Nobody knows how effective these deterrents were, since the immense mound covering the burial chamber has not opened. The treasures described by Sima Qian, which include pine trees carved out of jade and birds crafted in silver and gold, may still be there, waiting to be discovered. 

An Army On Parade For 2000 Years Part.IV

Reliable water supplies were vital, and early in his reign Shi Huang Di commissioned the building of a 150 km canal that would carry water from Jing River, North West of his capital, to the Luo River to the north east. The completed canal irrigated 26680 squares Km of land. A modified version of the watercourse is still in use today. Rice was the main crop grown in ancient China, along with millet.  Peasants also kept chickens, dogs and pigs, which provided them with eggs, meat for special occasions, and leather. Fish and wildfowl could be caught in the rivers and lakes and in the country side.

Under Shi Huang Di, life for peasants was mostly prosperous but a dark undercurrent ran beneath the strict policy of reform. The legal system, while impartial and efficient, was complex and bewildering to its subject peoples. Penalties for violation could be exceedingly harsh. Even minor offences attracted heavy fines or floggings – among these was the crime of dropping litter in the capital city. For more serious transgressions the punishments included the loss of a hand or foot, castration, force labor or execution.

Many of the public works on which the peasants toiled as conscript labors ensured China’s future prosperity, and built strong defenses against foreign invasion. But at the time, removing the peasants from their land imposed an intolerable burden. It restricted food supplies, gradually bringing the country to the brink of economic disaster.

An Army On Parade For 2000 Years Part.VI

The terracotta army, meanwhile, was buried about 1.6 km away, drawn up in full battle order, ready to fight for the emperor in the afterlife as its flesh and blood counterpart had done  during his 40 years reign. Each clay soldier is believed to have been modeled from life- none is the same, their heads and torsos are hollow, but the legs are slid to carry the weight.

An unusual alloy was used to make their swords and spears elements, including copper, tin nickel, magnesium, and cobalt, and was treated with a preservative. This has proved so effective that even after 22 centuries the weapons have not corroded when they were dug up, the blades of some of the surviving weapons were still sharp enough to slice through a hair.

According to many historians, the revolt that destroyed the Qin Empire began when a group of peasants making their way to join the army as conscripts were delayed by heavy rain. Knowing that the penalty for their late arrival would be death, they chose instead to abscond. They became the nucleus of the rebel army that ransacked Shi Huang Di’s tomb in 206 BC.

Shi Huang Di has been both admired and execrated by posterity. His shortcomings are obvious, yet he also worked tirelessly to unify the disparate lands under his control; he claimed that he never went to bed without completing a daily quota of 500 Kg of documents. The imperial lineage he dreamed of founding extended to a mere three rulers- his father, himself, and his son Er- Shi. Nonetheless, it was Shi Huang Di who laid the foundations of the Chinese Empire that was to endure and prosper under the succeeding Han dynasty.

An Army On Parade For 2000 Years Part.III

But in exchange they faced heavy taxation and were forced into hard unpaid labor on large scale public works. Initially, these policies brought wealth and power, and when Zheng took the throne of Qin he continued his predecessors’ polices. By 221 BC he had conquered and absorbed all the warring states.  From his capital at Xianyang, he set about the task of universally imposing the reforms that had made Qin such a success.

Looking back to China’s past, he adopted an ancient title, “Huang Di”, or ‘August Lord”, and ordered the prefix ‘Shi”. Shi Huang Di saw himself as China’s first emperor, the founder of a new imperial line.  In a bid to unify the empire, he imposed many forms of standardization. A single axle width was set for wheeled transport, to ensure that ruts worn into the roads matched all vehicles.

The numerous styles of Chinese script were consolidated into a single, standard version, encouraging the exchange of knowledge, and the various coinage system were phased out in favor of a universal currency.  The emperor also created more than 6000 Km of new roads across the empire, branching out from the imperial capital. Internal and foreign trade prospered, and foundations were laid for the flourishing networks that would later carry Chinese silk across Central Asia to the West.

The peasants were the backbone of the Chinese state, and improving agricultural productivity was a major state concern. Shi Huang Di forcibly relocated large numbers of farming families from populous or troublesome regions into areas where he wished to promote agriculture and settlement.

                                                        (cont.)

An Army On Parade For 2000 Years Part.II

His army accompanied him in death, molded in terracotta and armed with real bows, spears, and ge- Chinese halberds. They were buried in three in three shallow pits, lined with timbers and floored with tiles. When the rebel army set fire to the pits, the timber chambers collapsed, imprisoning the warriors for more than 2000 years. In March 1974, peasants digging wells in the Linton district came upon fragments of the life size terracotta figures. Archaeologists went on to discover the ancient pits.

The author of this extraordinary city of the dead, Zheng, ruler of Qin, was born in 259 BC into a period of great change. Qin was a feudal state in which a hereditary aristocracy wielded local power. Since the 8^th century BC, neighboring powers had been fighting over land and shifting their allegiances. These territories became known as the Warring states.

In the 4^th century BC, an outstanding political theorist, Lord Shang, became chief minister of Qin. On his advice, the state was transformed into a bureaucracy in which officials were appointed by, and answerable to, the king. Shang was a leading exponent of Legalism, an ideology based on the belief that man is intrinsically selfish, and cannot be expected to respect his leaders, and live in harmony without firm state coercion. The philosophy was put into practice through a strict code of laws and well defined systems of reward and punishment

Agricultural productivity was rewarded and commerce encourage by state regulation and standardized weights and measures. Peasants were freed of their serf status and their obligation to the now abolished nobility.

(Cont.)

An Army On Parade For 2000 Years Part.I

The ruthless but efficient king of Qin conquered all the rival Warring States to unite China, becoming its first emperor, Shi Huang Di. His empire surrounds him even in death, guarded by an army of nearly 7500 terracotta warriors.

Drunk with success, reveling in their freedom after years of oppression, the peasant soldiers of the rebel army attacked. The emperor’s troops stood fast, their faces impassive as the rabble descended. Still they stood as the enemy soldiers, screaming abuse, stripped them of their weapons and set fire to the ground around them. The emperor’s men had no choice. They were not made of flesh and blood.

As the fires raged, the colorful paint on their terracotta bodies began to disintegrate. The green, purple, blue, and red of their garments – color schemes that identified the individual contingents – gradually took on the same shade of ashen Grey.

Yet, despite the fire that stripped them of their colors each of the pottery warriors remained unique, distinguished from his fellows by the arrangement of his hair and the finer details of his face. The range of different features bore witness to the ethnic diversity of the dominion that stretched from southern China to Mongolia - the empire of the Qin.

The rebels were looters, and the army they disturbed in 206 BC were the silent guardians of a tomb set in the plains around Mount Li 40 Km east of the imperial capital at Xian yang, near present day Xi’an.

Forty years earlier, in 246 BC, the new 13 year –old king of the state of Qin had commanded the construction of a funerary city to house his body after death. By the time he died in 210BC, King Zheng had extended his power over a vast number of territories, and had proclaimed himself the first Emperor of China, Shi Huang Di.

(Cont.)