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An Army as a Cultural Relic
Wednesday 22 August 2007 "President Jacques Chirac stood where you now stand," said my ardent and scholarly archaeologist-guide, "and cried out that this was the Eighth Wonder of the world." That was the second time I agreed totally with the former French president. The first occasion was when he warned that the Bush war on Iraq had made the world "a more dangerous place." And Chirac's description of what I was gazing upon gave voice to the wonder-struck response of every foreign visitor to the vision that greeted him or her at the Emperor Qin's Terracotta Army. There was an obvious reason why the rows upon rows of terracotta warriors and horses, revealed to the world at an excavation site near history-laden X'ian in the province of Saanxi, appeared a wonder that equaled, if not excelled, the Great Wall of China. But the archaeological project, which will be in full swing at the site perhaps for years, deserved note also for a less-obvious reason. The ceramic soldiers presented an even more striking sight than all those walls, mausoleums and pagodas dotting the tourist map of China, because the terracotta army stood below the ground. Farmers' spades and shovels, followed by more sophisticated tools and technology, have unearthed the army from a pre-Christ past. The buried treasure came to light after peasants of the arid region, digging around for water in the drought year of 1974, discovered some of the figures and artifacts near Mount Lishan. The peasants informed authorities, but the magnitude of the discovery was not to be known for months. It has taken over three decades for less than one-eighth of the warriors with their horses and chariots to be brought to public view. At the height of the tourist season this June, I was one of 400,000 foreigners, some 20 percent of all the visitors, to behold the breathtaking spectacle every year. Before and below me stood, in rows of four, about 1,000 figures unearthed so far. The excavation was yet to begin seriously in two of the three pits that constituted a strange mausoleum of an ancient monarch. The Terracotta Army was ordered deployed there by Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi (247-210 B.C.). The emperor, who is said to have unified China first by eliminating petty rulers and standardizing the language and the currency, was an insecure individual at the end of all his conquests, by all accounts. He wanted his army to be buried with him, if only in kiln-fired replicas, in order to protect him against unknown enemies in the other world. Clearly, the original figures had been vividly painted, but the colors have mostly faded away. Heads and hands were missing from some of the soldiers. Still, protected from the elements and passing ages, the army was remarkably preserved. So "fighting fit," indeed, that the finer points were not lost on even the lay visitor. No two warriors were entirely alike, for example, with the variations in features and facial hairstyles, reinforcing the theory that the figures represented real members of the royal guard. The nether parts of the warriors, for another instance, were all solid while the upper portions were hollow, suggesting an assembly-line production of the entire army. The archaeologist-guide was proud of the ancient Chinese craftsmanship, but he was even prouder of a contemporary fact. "Like many foreigners, you may ask whether the first peasant to discover the warriors became a millionaire! The answer is: no. In China, cultural relics belong to the country, not whoever finds them." He also talked of the Terracotta Army as a World Heritage site as declared by the UNESCO. He dwelt in enthusiastic detail on the international cooperation that China was enlisting for better preservation of this site and all its beautifully sculpted contents. They were planning such cooperation, for example, to cope with the effects of humidity and the collective breath of multitudinous visitors. The present, this period of opening up, is being pressed into the service of China's unearthing and understanding of its past. If the excavation provides eloquent evidence about the China of millennia ago, the bustling site also speaks of the ancient land's break with a very recent and violent phase of its life. "Past as propaganda" is how American archaeologist Bettina Arnold described excavational expeditions undertaken by political authorities and official agencies in many instances. In one of her important papers, she talked, in particular, of the Nazi archaeologists' quest for the remains of an imagined temple of the Teutonic past in Externsteine, a natural sandstone formation in northern Germany. "The site was described in numerous publications as a monument to German unity and the glorious Germanic past, despite the fact that no convincing evidence of a temple or Germanic occupation of the site was ever found." Political authorities in China have not really used "the past as propaganda." Their predecessors, in fact, carried out propaganda against the past - and carried it to what official China would today consider ludicrous lengths. The Cultural Revolution, unleashed in 1966, declared a war on the past and its symbols. In state-backed hostilities against the country's heritage over the years, hundreds of temples, shrines and other monuments were razed to the ground, while the Terracotta Army survived in subterranean safety. It was lucky for the site that its discovery was delayed so long and made only toward the end of nearly a decade of the counterculture "revolution." Someday, all 8,099 warriors of the Terracotta Army will stand in their wonderful formations at the site. Let us hope that, by then, the world would have moved a little closer to an age when armies won't be needed to create an artificial sense of security, and they will survive only as cultural relics.
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