They dug down to the third layer of underground springs and poured in bronze to make the outer coffin. Replicas of palaces, scenic towers, and the hundred officials, as well as rare utensils and wondrous objects, were brought to fill the tomb. Craftsmen were ordered to set up cross-bows and arrows, rigged so that they would immediately shoot down anyone attempting to break in. Mercury was used to fashion imitations of the hundred rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangzi, and the seas, constructed in such a way that they seemed to flow. Above were representations of all the heavenly bodies, below, the features of the earth. Whale oil was used for lamps, which were calculated to burn for a long time without going out.27
Until 1974, when some well-diggers chanced to shovel down into those chambers teeming with clay warriors whom Sima Qian had not even deemed worthy of mention, all this too was considered fanciful. No grave could possibly contain towers and palaces, seas of mercury, a cartographic model of the kingdom and a replica of the sky at night. The tomb had reportedly been ransacked and destroyed on several occasions, most immediately within five years of the emperor’s interment. The shattered condition of the terracotta troopers seemed to bear this out. Laboriously reconstituted and remustered, they, and not the tomb itself, whose location was still uncertain, became the stars of late-twentieth-century Chinese archaeology.
Yet since that 1974 discovery, barely a year has gone by without further revelations from the great necropolis outside Xianyang. More pits containing more warriors have been opened. Others have yielded skeletons, half-life-size carriages and life-size bronze replicas of geese and cranes. One is supposed the tomb of the First Emperor’s grandmother. Meanwhile the location of the main burial chamber has been pinpointed about a kilometre from the warrior pits beneath its now greatly eroded mountain.
At the time of writing (2008) the tomb remains unopened, its secrets unrevealed. Officially it awaits the development and approval of techniques and treatments that will ensure the preservation of its contents. Conflicting authorities – scientific and archaeological as well as party, provincial and central – may also be involved. As with the Tarim Mummies, national caution excites international impatience. But no one can accuse the authorities of not whetting archaeological appetites. Surveys, scans and probes have established that the great cavity of the burial chamber is still intact, neither choked with infill nor submerged in water. Traces of mercury, presumably from the seas and rivers that flowed so ingeniously across the emperor’s replica domain, have been detected; and their distribution has been scanned and charted to produce an almost recognisable map of China. The roof’s planetarium may still twinkle, the crossbows stand ready to fire, and among ‘the hundred officials’ a life-size Li Si could be waiting, bookless, by his patron’s nested coffins. Within the chamber, there may still reign that minutely regulated peace and order on which the First Emperor so prided himself in his inscriptions; but without, all semblance of decorum had been shattered almost before he was laid to rest.
210–141 BC
QIN IMPLODES
NEARLY ALL THAT IS KNOWN OF the First Emperor and his book-burning chancellor comes from a book. In a culture as literary and historically minded as China’s, biblioclasts needed to beware; books had a way of biting back, and sure enough, both emperor and chancellor would be badly bitten. Ostensibly Sima Qian’s Shiji, one of the most ambitious histories ever written, was a direct response to the First Emperor’s assault on scholarship. Sima Qian saw his task as salvaging what he calls ‘the remains of literature and ancient affairs scattered throughout the world’ as a result of the Qin proscription, and then organising and presenting them in a form that would edify and instruct future generations.1 Confucius had expressed the same idea at a time when the ‘warring states’ were going to war, and like him, Sima Qian considered his role to be that of ‘transmitter’, not creator. But since all the earlier annals and commentaries (‘Spring and Autumn’, Zuozhuan, Zhanguoce, etc.) stopped short of the Qin unification, and since later histories would start with the first Han emperor, the Shiji would be the only work to deal with the intervening Qin triumph and implosion. By happy coincidence, the most dramatic upheaval in early China’s history is covered exclusively by its foremost historian.
Written about a hundred years after the fall of Qin, the Shiji (usually translated as ‘Records of the [Grand] Historian’) is by no means limited to that period or to what might then have been regarded as the recent past. Its 130 chapters span some 3,000 years, a remarkable perspective in a work of the second-to-first centuries BC. When later enshrined as the first of the eventually twenty-four ‘Standard Histories’ (one for each ‘legitimate’ dynasty) it served as a sort of ‘Book of Genesis’, beginning the narrative of China’s history and carrying it forward from its myth-rich dawn and the Five Emperors, through the Three (royal) Dynasties of Xia, Shang and Zhou, including the ‘Spring and Autumn’ and ‘Warring States’ periods, and on to the Qin and Han. Although it set the pattern for all the later ‘Standard Histories’, it is in fact the only one that deals with more than a single dynasty.
Not simply a dynastic record, then, it is not simply a history either. Besides recording and organising the past – and introducing such still-useful graphic conventions as year-by-year timelines and state-by-state tabulations – the ‘Grand Historian’ had much else on his mind. There were lessons to be learned, mistakes to be corrected, reputations to be revised and wrongs to be righted. It was not just a question of dishing out praise and blame or of raiding the past for ammunition with which to take potshots at the present. The Shiji was to be more than just ‘a history of the world according to Sima Qian’, rather ‘a history of the world according to history’; and the ways of history being, like those of Heaven, intricate and often hard to discern, it required very special treatment.
To represent something so vast and complex, the well-flagged themes, long linear narratives and clanking chains of causation expected by the modern reader would have been inadequate. The language itself had to be exact; truth and accuracy were paramount. But latitude in the selection and ordering of the factual material still allowed Sima Qian to nudge the reader towards his desired conclusions. So did his decidedly creative use of dialogue and dramatisation; and so did the rather demanding structure of the book. Of those 130 chapters, only twelve comprise ‘Basic Annals’. Along with the chronological tables, they provide a useful framework yet make for unsatisfactory reading without the thirty subsequent chapters devoted to the ‘Hereditary Houses’ (or ‘states’) and the seventy to biographies of notable persons. To find out exactly what is happening at any given moment – and more especially why – the reader needs to familiarise himself with the entire text (four to six volumes in translation) and to command a good supply of bookmarks. It is like trying to piece together a play with, instead of the script, a sequence of the lines assigned to one actor and then those to another and so on. This fragmented approach in no way prejudices the Shiji’s veracity; but it does result in a lot of repetition and not a few inconsistencies, some no doubt unintentional but others apparently designed to hint at the mixed motives and conflicting viewpoints that beset all human endeavour.
In addition, recent studies have detected many of the devices noticed in earlier classics like the Shijing and Confucius’s Analects – an obsession with names and their ‘rectification’, meanings implied by allusion and the ‘correlation’ of apparently unrelated materials, and that emphasis on faithful transmission rather than innovation. But perhaps the most intriguing insight is that which interprets the Shiji as being a rival to the First Emperor’s tomb in that it too represents a model, or microcosm, of the world as then known.