Karen and I went to see the Terracotta Warriors exhibition last night.
It's an amazing spectacle, although only a small sample of a few figures is physically present at the British Museum. The scale of it can only be suggested by the maps and photographs. There are thousands of figures -- over 8000 actually -- a whole underground city, with not just warriors, but entertainers, animals, and (terracotta) administrators in an office. It dates from around 210 BC. And most of it is still unexcavated. One account says only 1% of the site has been dug up -- they are trying not to damage the rest while science develops non-invasive ways of looking inside. That's impressive self-restraint by the Chinese.
Another fascinating thing that the exhibition claimed was that they had, at that time, the technology of interchangeable parts. For example, they made crossbows, and it was not that each one was uniquely crafted to work: the trigger mechanism from one crossbow would work in another crossbow. It wasn't hand-adjusted to fit its own particular bow.
I'm under the impression that this technology also arose in the West for military applications (guns) and pretty recently too. It was only in the 1700s that bolts could be uniformly made, so that any nut would fit any bolt reliably, and only in world war 2 that threads were really standardised. So if they were making interchangeable triggers in 200 BC that's quite something.
The terracotta figures were mass produced on a production line, but then individually hand finished so that each one looks like a different person with a different face, physique, pose, and so on.
I'm not sure whether the Emperor of Qin (Qin Shi Huangdi) would have believed in an afterlife, or what religion they had. Buddhism didn't reach China until about 300 years after this, and didn't become big in China for another 300 years after that. Confucianism has many different interpretations, but is generally less of a religion and more a set of moral and political precepts and rituals to be followed. In any case, apparently the emperor was against it: he is said to have banned it, burned the books and buried many Confucian scholars alive. Different Wikipedia articles suggest different reasons for this. One says it was "after being deceived by two alchemists while seeking prolonged life". And then "the quick fall of the Qin Dynasty was attributed to this proscription. Confucianism was revived in the Han Dynasty that followed, and became the official ideology of the Chinese imperial state".
Another article makes it more of a political reason, which I find more convincing: "in 223 BC when the Qin state conquered all of China, Li Ssu, Prime Minister of the Qin Dynasty convinced the emperor to abandon the Confucians' recommendation of awarding fiefs akin to the Zhou Dynasty [...]. When the Confucian advisers pressed their point, Li Ssu had many Confucian scholars killed and their books burned - considered a huge blow to the philosophy and Chinese scholarship."
Confucius himself was a couple of hundred years earlier. I though I'd remembered reading about the Duke of Qin (who became the emperor) in the Analects, but it must have been a different other Duke.
So I do wonder whether the mausoleum was really part of a religious system, and the emperor really believed in an afterlife . . . or whether it was just an ostentatious display of power and wealth.
