Pod Insights You're Dead to Me The Terracotta Army (Radio Edit) About this episode Greg Jenner is joined in Ancient China by Professor Julia Lovell and special guest Phil Wang for a close look at The Terracotta Army.
In 1974, a family of farmers made arguably the greatest archaeological discovery of all time when they uncovered arrowheads and fragments of terracotta whilst digging a well. Join us as we examine one of the most astounding mausoleum sites in the world - one so large that much of it still remains to be explored.
This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.
Research by Jon Mason
Written by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner with Jon Mason
Produced by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner
Assistant Producer: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow
Project Management: Isla Matthews
Audio Producer: Abi Paterson
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:15 Greg Jenner? Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster, and former chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. And today we are off to ancient China to dig deep into one of the most astonishing archaeological discoveries of all time, the first emperor of China's tomb guarded by his famous terracotta warriors. And to help me do that, I am joined by two very special guests. In history corner, she's professor of modern Chinese history and literature at Birkbeck, University of London, and specializes in the relationship between culture and modern Chinese nation building. She's written countless academic publications and several books, including two prize-winning books on the Opium War and Maoism. It's the fantastic Professor Julia Lovell.
2:00 Greg Jenner? Welcome, Julia. Thrilled to have you here.
2:02 Speaker 03 It's great to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me.
2:04 Greg Jenner? And in comedy corner, not only has he previously bossed it on Taskmaster, Live at the Apollo, and Have I Got News For You, but he's got a hilarious stand-up special on Netflix. It's Philly Philly Wang Wang. Welcome back, Phil.
2:15 Speaker 04 Hi, great thanks for having me back. Yes, don't forget the last wang. It is very important. I'm so happy to be back on You're Dead to Me.
2:22 Greg Jenner? And last time out, we talked a bit about your education, the Malaysian school system. You hadn't done that much global history. But I'm curious as to whether the first emperor of China, the Terracotta Warriors, may be something you do know about.
2:33 Speaker 04 Only sort of culturally speaking, because my father's Chinese Malaysian. And so there is an awareness of China and Chinese histories as sort of a kind of motherland. But we still don't know the history all that well, actually. So what Chinese Malaysians know about Chinese history is usually what they pick up in like the period dramas, the Chinese period dramas.
2:52 Greg Jenner? Oh, okay.
2:53 Speaker 04 Of which there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. They're always besieging a fortress. And there's so many of those shows and they're very popular in Malaysia. But aside from that, no, I don't really know very much.
3:06 Greg Jenner? So what do you know?
3:12 Greg Jenner? This is the So What Do You Know, where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, knows about our subject. And while the Terracotta Warriors have a pretty good name recognition, I think. But in terms of pop culture, if you're a Terry Pratchett fan, you may remember that in one of his Discworld novels, the protagonist Rinswind not only discovers a terracotta army in an imperial tomb, but also uses some VR technology to go and control it, which is very nifty. Less nifty would be the Hollywood representation of the first emperor in the film The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which is frankly, a bit dodgy. But the big question, of course, is who made the Terracotta Warriors and when and why and how and who found them? Well, let's find out, shall we? Julia, when we're talking about the Terracotta Army,
3:54 Greg Jenner? we're talking about elements of the funeral complex belonging to Qingxi Huangdi, who's the first emperor of China. Who's this guy? How far ago are we talking?
4:05 Speaker 03 Well, the first emperor of China was born Yingzheng in two fifty nine BCE in the kingdom of Qin in what is now Gansu and Shanxi provinces. The northern half of what's now China was divided between a number of smaller states, which fought each other for control of land and resources. Now, by two hundred and fifty nine B C, there were only seven of those states left on the field, of which Qin was the largest and the most successful. And it's thought that over the next forty years, Qin wins out because it has the most thorough, the most controlling and ruthless state apparatus. And Yingzheng succeeded to this throne in two four six B C E at the age of only thirteen.
4:49 Speaker 03 By the time he was thirty eight, he'd conquered each of the other states and unified them for the first time into a single empire in two two one B C E. And at that point, he took the name Qin Shi Huangdi, or Great August First Emperor of Qin, as goes the literal translation.
5:06 Greg Jenner? At thirteen, he comes to the throne. By thirty eight, he's conquered all of China. It's quite an achievement. I mean, I'm thirty nine and he's a, you know, I feel like I've maybe not done anything with my life.
5:15 Speaker 04 Yeah, which what kingdoms have you unified, Greg? I've been meaning to ask this. It's interesting hearing Qin Shi Huangdi because my, that that name has suddenly reignited all these memories of my father just being obsessed with Qin Shi Huangdi for a long time.
5:29 Greg Jenner? He unifies China through constant war, then consolidates power by introducing law codes, new coinage, standardized measurements, building roads, introducing writing uniform across the country, all sensible policies. And then he also forcibly relocates seven hundred thousand people to be forced labourers to build his pet projects. He also burns books. He murders Confucian scholars by burying them alive. So he's quite a ruthless character. All the while doing this, he's also busy juggling another huge engineering project in China. Do you want to guess what it is, Phil?
6:00 Speaker 04 Might it be a wall?
6:03 Greg Jenner? Not just any wall.
6:04 Speaker 04 A pretty good wall, a very good wall. It's always called the very excellent wall of China. Something like that. It's on the tip of my tongue.
6:12 Greg Jenner? Absolutely. Although it's known as the Great Wall of China. Yeah, that's one of his. So clearly, we have an emperor who wants to make a big splash in life. He's building these huge monuments. He's introducing huge new policies, but he's also really wanting a glorious death. And this funerary complex, they start planning it when he's a teenager. And it's built in Shanxi Province in sort of central China, but at the time, slightly off centre, I suppose. And it ends up as being the biggest mausoleum in the history of the world. But actually, Changxi Huangdi also is planning to live forever, Julia. How do you plan to live forever whilst simultaneously building your enormous tomb?
6:48 Speaker 03 With the first emperor, you have this strange combination of huge self-confidence and paranoid frailty. So on the one hand, he proclaims himself first emperor of this unprecedentedly vast state. He is super controlling. He builds a government to micromanage ordinary people's daily lives. But on the other, from this surprisingly young age, he seems terrified of death by human or supernatural forces. So he was desperate to find an elixir to eternal life. And he believed this might be contained in Cinnabar, an ore of mercury, which he ate a good deal of.
7:30 Greg Jenner? Right.
7:30 Speaker 03 He died in 210 BCE, aged only 49, ironically, probably partly due to mercury poisoning. So the first emperor died while touring the eastern part of his empire. And his advisers initially decided to cover this up, perhaps so they could manoeuvre the succession to suit themselves. So they pretended that the emperor was refusing to leave his carriage. And to mask the stink of his corpse, which was busily rotting, while they transported it back to his mausoleum. The Qin's former advisers filled his carriage with fish to cover up the smell.
8:08 Speaker 04 You know you smell bad when people are like, we've got to cover this up. Put a load of fish on him. That'll be better.
8:14 Greg Jenner? Let's talk about the discovery of the terracotta warriors. Fragments were discovered along with some bronze arrowheads in a field by a family in 1974. And then archaeologists went, hang on a second. And so they showed up and they were astonished by the terracotta warriors because they were not expecting them at all.
8:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's right. The existence of the tomb itself is described by Samachi, who's arguably the most famous of ancient Chinese historians, writing in about 100 BCE. But his history doesn't mention the warriors. So, modern archaeologists were amazed by what these farmers found. It's arguably the most extraordinary archaeological discovery of the 20th century.
8:59 Speaker 04 It's also fitting that the mausoleum of an emperor obsessed with living forever came out around the same time as the Bee Gees staying alive. Do you think that's nice?
9:12 Greg Jenner? Okay, so we've already heard, Phil, that the first emperor was pretty extra in his own life. How big do you think this mausoleum complex is?
9:20 Speaker 04 People usually go by football fields, don't they? I'm going to say it's two football fields.
9:26 Speaker 03 The area that the mausoleum complex occupies below the ground is about 56 square kilometres. So, the pits containing the famous terracotta warriors are only a small part of this complex. There's an artificial mound covering the emperor's tomb. So nowadays, it looks like a forested pyramid, about 65 metres high, 350 square metres at the base. And below ground, the tomb cavity was also surrounded by walls and by hundreds of other burial pits containing incredible things, of which the terracotta warrior pits are just a few.
10:10 Greg Jenner? Yeah, Phil, you've said two football pitches. Well, a football pitch is 0.005 kilometres squared.
10:16 Speaker 04 Right.
10:17 Greg Jenner? This is 56 kilometres squared, which is bigger than Oxford.
10:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's quite a, yeah, that's quite a good bit bigger. Okay, fair enough.
10:24 Greg Jenner? So we have the ancient Qin historian Sima Qian writing about 100 years after the tomb was built, and he described the complex like this: "The tomb was filled with models of palaces and pavilions and offices, as well as fine vessels, precious stones and rarities. Artisans were ordered to fix up crossbows so that any thief breaking in would be shot. All the country's streams, the Yellow River and the Yangtze, were reproduced in quicksilver, and by some mechanical means were made to flow into a miniature ocean. The candles were made of whale oil to ensure they're burning for the longest possible time." This is pure Hollywood stuff. This is booby traps and everything. Do you know what quicksilver is?
11:05 Speaker 04 Quicksilver? I'm not sure, but I bet Chung Chiu Huangdi loved a pint or two of it. It sounds right up his street.
11:11 Greg Jenner? You're absolutely right. He was drinking it because quicksilver is basically mercury. It's rivers of mercury.
11:16 Speaker 04 There you go.
11:18 Greg Jenner? Guarding this enormous complex was, of course, these extraordinary terracotta warriors. How many soldiers were in there? How many terracotta soldiers, Phil, do you think, were in this army?
11:28 Speaker 04 Is it like 2,000 or something?
11:30 Greg Jenner? Hey, that's a good guess. That is how many have been excavated so far.
11:34 Speaker 04 Ah, yes, okay.
11:36 Greg Jenner? But we think there are 7,000 down there, Julia. Is that right?
11:41 Speaker 03 Yes, that is a working estimate. But there are also many other things down in the tomb complex. So through much of Chinese history, people want to be buried with items they think will guarantee them comfort and status in the afterlife, which could include servants and dependents like wives, as well as handy, desirable objects. So I guess underpinning this idea is the belief that the afterlife will be very similar to the mortal world. Now, like several ancient states, early Chinese societies practised human sacrifice. Here, the theory is that if servants and wives are killed and placed in the tomb, they'll
12:24 Speaker 03 go on the journey to the afterlife with the deceased and serve him there. But by the Qin, you also have the idea that you don't always have to have real human corpses down there to revivify in the tomb. You can have high quality replicas and models. Although the Qin mausoleum also has evidence of some burial of humans, whether they were alive or dead at the time. But there's a huge range and richness of objects found in the emperor's burial complex. And these objects give us a good idea of what he himself saw as important. There's his army of bodyguards, plus hundreds of sets of armour made of stone tiles.
13:06 Speaker 03 There are statues of stable boys, charioteers, chariots, horses, plus real life hay and straw and skeletons of actual horses. There's a pit of terracotta officials. So you'll have bureaucrats to run your state in the afterlife. So there is still tax after death, I'm afraid.
13:25 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's fine. We hear a lot about terracotta warriors, but not enough about the terracotta accountants, the real heroes.
13:32 Speaker 03 The afterlife isn't there. There's also an entertainment pit, which contains terracotta acrobats, strongmen, musicians and life-sized bronze birds. So an incredible cornucopia of things.
13:47 Speaker 04 It's interesting, the Chinese tradition of transferring objects into the afterlife. It still goes on now. So you're growing up in Malaysia with every year, you go to sweep your sort of ancestors' graves. We tidy up, you clean the graves and you burn offerings, you burn gifts, fake cash. You burn that and the idea is that when things burn, they go up to heaven and they go to your grandparents and they can use them. But it it updates as time goes by. So now you can buy paper cars and burn those and the idea is that they go to heaven, your grandfather's got a new Mercedes. And now you can buy paper iPhones and iPads.
14:25 Greg Jenner? Oh, wow. Julia, can you tell us a bit more about the three main pits where they've been discovered and what's in them?
14:30 Speaker 03 These three main pits are about a mile to the east of the tomb. So they represent the eastern frontier of the burial complex. So Pit One, which is, which is the biggest, has the main army. Perhaps around six thousand soldiers, one hundred and sixty chariots. And the soldiers were all originally set out in almost forty single file lines. In front of them, there's an advance guard of archers. And I should point out that they were all armed to the teeth with battle-ready bronze weapons.
15:11 Speaker 03 Then pit two has a mix of cavalry, archers and war chariots. Pit three contains high-ranking officers, so it seems to be a command post. And as you say, there's also a fourth empty pit. And the fact that it was empty might be a sign that the site was unfinished. When Qin Shi Huangdi suddenly died and had to be buried.
15:32 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
15:32 Speaker 04 It reminds me of a military parade, like, but some, by, that someone like Kim Jong-un or Vladimir Putin might hold just to show how powerful he is. It's the same thing, it really isn't.
15:43 Greg Jenner? That's interesting, yeah.
15:44 Speaker 04 It's holding a military parade in the afterlife to show everyone what a big dog you are.
15:49 Greg Jenner? Exactly that. I mean, Julia, what can we learn from the actual weaponry and, and stuff they're wearing?
15:54 Speaker 03 Well, the first thing it tells us is exactly as Phil surmised, that the Qin state, then empire, was an intensely militarised society. And that's why the Qin succeeded in destroying all the other states to found its unified empire. Every household had to supply an able-bodied male to the state's conscript army. And then stripped army discipline made them ruthless fighters. The terracotta figures enable us to visualise what this extraordinary army would have looked like. You've got the unarmoured rank and file at the front, then you've got armoured fighters and archers distributed down the flanks. And yeah, they were armed with literally cutting-edge bronze weapons.
16:40 Speaker 03 Finds in pit one included crossbow triggers, swords, lances, spears and over forty thousand arrowheads. So these weapons were clearly meant to be used. Analysis has shown that blades were sharpened and many are so well preserved that they'd still be lethal today.
16:59 Speaker 04 It also goes to show just how much he believed this was real, right? It's how much he believed in the afterlife and that these things would transfer over. Because you don't commit something like this if it's just a hunch.
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18:54 Greg Jenner? This enormous army, is he expecting to have to fight his way into the afterlife?
18:59 Speaker 03 So the first emperor was profoundly paranoid and controlling. On his journey to conquering China, he and his armies had killed hundreds of thousands of people from other states to the east of Qin. As you'll remember, the pits containing the Terracotta Warriors are on the eastern side of the tomb complex.
19:22 Speaker 03 And one interpretation is that Qin Shi Huangdi feared that his enemies in the afterlife, as in this world, would attack him from this direction. So this monumental army of bodyguards would protect him from the vengeance of all the many people he killed in this world.
19:40 Greg Jenner? So Phil, we've already touched on this slightly, but what do you think archaeologists have found in the personal burial chamber, the pyramid of the first emperor himself?
19:49 Speaker 04 A cooler full of bottles of mercury for the big guy. I imagine sort of creature comforts, food and wine and things like that, maybe a rug, a nice rug.
20:03 Greg Jenner? Mm hmm. Quite sort of homely.
20:05 Speaker 04 Yeah, if this is like his private chambers.
20:07 Greg Jenner? We've actually sort of lured you into a trap there because actually we don't know what is in his private chambers. It hasn't been opened. Julia, they found it in 1974. It's clearly the most exciting bit of the site, surely. Why haven't we thrown a drone in there with a camera on it to have a little look? Why can't we open it?
20:27 Speaker 03 There are a few reasons. So one, there are concerns for the safety of excavators. A survey discovered very high levels of, surprise, mercury in the tomb. There are underground walls with a void in the centre of the site, probably for the tomb of the emperor himself. So all that that survey information tantalizingly validates Sima Chen's remarkable description, but it also generates concerns about the stability of the site. But I think the biggest concern is for conservation. When the terracotta warriors were first brought out of the ground, they were brightly painted,
21:10 Speaker 03 but within minutes the colours faded after they were exposed to the air.
21:15 Speaker 04 I imagine how special it must have felt to see the terracotta warriors in colour, live in colour. Amazing. I didn't, I didn't, I didn't realise they were, they had colour on them. I guess they would have done.
21:24 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
21:25 Speaker 04 And so is the idea that in this chamber would be the actual remains of Qin Shi Huangdi himself?
21:30 Speaker 03 That's exactly right.
21:31 Speaker 04 Right, right, wow.
21:32 Greg Jenner? So we have this extraordinary mausoleum complex, it's enormous, but we want to now turn to who made all this stuff? How on earth did they build this 2,000 years ago? Who's building it?
21:44 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's a genuinely monumental undertaking. So we know from early written histories, more than 700,000 conscripts from all over the empire are supposed to have been moved over to work on the mausoleum and also on the emperor's new capital nearby. You would have needed access ramps, you would have needed to divert watercourses, you need to build a huge perimeter wall, put loads of burial goods inside, then of course, cover it all over with a pyramid about 80 metres tall with yet more buildings on top of that. Then you need to add to this the manufacture and transport of all the goods involved.
22:26 Speaker 03 And it seems plausible that only a state like the Qin, which extracted conscript labour so rashly but also so ruthlessly, could have seen this project through.
22:36 Speaker 04 Gosh, yeah, incredible.
22:38 Greg Jenner? Phil, you studied engineering at Cambridge. If we needed a replica made, would you be willing to project manage that for us?
22:43 Speaker 04 Oh, happily, yeah. A replica made of the whole complex or?
22:47 Greg Jenner? Yeah, ideally. I mean, what are your rates? I mean, let's talk budgets.
22:50 Speaker 04 I'll do, I'll do for the exposure, to be honest, I'll just do for the exposure.
22:55 Speaker 03 It's always good to have a plan, BA, Phil.
22:58 Greg Jenner? Julia, this is astonishingly enormous project. 700,000 conscripted labourers. And we have the pit in which they are buried too, the workers. Can you give us some sobering insights into the working conditions for this labour force?
23:15 Speaker 03 Sure. There are mass graves about 300 metres to the west of the first emperor's tomb. Alongside the skeletons, archaeologists have found fragments of pottery, which tell us where they came from, if they were serving out a penal sentence, what their crime had been. The bones? Which were discovered in the graves, some of them were thickened with evidence of arthritis, others had fractures or showed bone adaptation to intense use of muscles. So this suggests that these people were engaged in heavy labour before death. And a sinister aspect to this, I think, is the secrecy surrounding the site.
24:00 Speaker 03 The fact that the memory of the terracotta warriors never appeared on the historical record. So this suggests that the workers may simply have been killed at the end of the work when the emperor was interred to keep the site secret and sacrosanct.
24:16 Speaker 04 And would a large portion of this workforce been taken from the peoples of the conquered kingdoms? Or was it just everyone in the kingdom, whether they were Chin or conquered?
24:27 Speaker 03 So the DNA analysis of these bones suggests that they came from many different parts of the territory. So I think they could have been prisoners of war. But the Chin legal system was very tough, very ruthless. So it didn't matter what status you were, what ethnicity you were within the original Chin state too.
24:56 Greg Jenner? Okay, so the labourers building the site are having a horrible time and there's an enormous number of them. But can we now move on to the skilled artisans and talk more about the kind of the sculpture, the craft that goes into making these? Phil, we're going to show you another photo. What do you see when we show you some of the faces of the terracotta warriors?
25:13 Speaker 04 So this photograph, a close up of about 12 soldiers or so. And they've all got the same uniform, they're all wearing the same armour, but they are all distinct. They have all got their own face, they've even got their own sort of posture and they seem to be of different ages.
25:29 Greg Jenner? So Julia, Phil has identified that their faces look unique. Is their composition completely unique? Are they coming out of moulds? How are they made? Is it a mix and match approach? How do you make a terracotta warrior?
25:40 Speaker 03 It seems that the larger parts of the figures were done by less skilled labourers. So local clay from the soil was pressed into moulds to make torsos, limbs, hands, heads and so on.
25:54 Greg Jenner? There are moulds for the heads, aren't there? Was it eight moulds?
25:57 Speaker 03 Yes, but the individuality of the faces suggests that they were completed by skilled artisans who'd shaped by hand facial details such as eyebrows, ears, beards and hairstyles like plats and topknots and chignons and so on.
26:12 Greg Jenner? Phil, how do you think overseers could identify and punish any craftsmen who wasn't hitting the standards?
26:19 Speaker 04 A bad review on Yelp.
26:23 Greg Jenner? We know a huge amount about the process because of inscriptions on the actual sculptures themselves that tell us who made them and who was their overseer, right?
26:32 Speaker 03 Most of the weapons in the tomb were inscribed with date of manufacture plus the name of the craftsmen who made them and then the official responsible for that craftsman and so on and so forth in a long line of accountability that in some cases went all the way up to the Prime Minister of the Empire.
26:52 Speaker 04 If I knew I'd done a bad job, I'd be quite tempted to write someone else's name on it. You know what I mean? Especially if it didn't like them. I made someone like, I made one of them with three thumbs. I'd be like, this one was Jeff. Jeff did this.
27:08 Greg Jenner? The nuance window!
27:15 Greg Jenner? Well, that leads us really on to the nuance window. The nuance window is where Phil and I take a break and we play with our terracotta warriors. And instead we listen to Professor Julia as she takes two uninterrupted minutes to tell us something we need to know about the terracotta warriors, the tomb, the mausoleum and the wider archaeology. So I get my stopwatch up now and without much further ado, Professor Julia, do you want to give us the nuance window, please?
27:37 Speaker 03 The First Emperor's Tomb complex seems to tell us a very clear, confident story of a man who proclaimed himself the first emperor of everything, who felt entitled to disrupt and often end the lives of millions of people to fulfil his own plans.
27:57 Speaker 03 If we view this site out of its broader historical, cultural context, we might see it as a swaggering endorsement of the power of the ancient Chinese state under a centralised autocrat. But we're missing a big part of this cultural and political story if we don't say something about how ambivalent and even negative perceptions of the first emperor and his massive building projects have often been through Chinese history since. Although the first emperor undertook monumental building projects during his lifetime and proclaimed himself the first of a dynasty that would last 10,000 emperors, the Qin Empire actually collapsed only a few years after his death in 206 B.C.
28:42 Speaker 03 And some historians argue the stresses that building the emperor's mausoleum and border wall placed on ordinary people led directly to the eruption of civil war so soon after the first emperor exited the scene. There are certainly many folk songs and tales complaining about the terrible sufferings of ordinary people from the state's demands. The Qin successors, the Han dynasty, very much wanted to put distance between their regime and his. They claimed the moral high ground, they said that they, by contrast, would be humane, virtuous rulers, that they'd win hearts and minds. And that critical view of the first emperor is very persistent through Chinese history,
29:24 Speaker 03 even though for the Han and other successor dynasties, this is a little hypocritical, because they actually end up adopting the centralising policies of the Qin. They inherit the Qin's government structures, and of course, they subscribe to the Qin's vision of a unified Chinese empire. So in the two millennia that have passed since the Qin, the first emperor is something of an awkward origin story for China. He's a founder, an innovator, but also a ruthless tyrant.
29:50 Greg Jenner? Wow, thank you very much. It's time now for me to say a huge thank you to my guests. In history corner, we had the wonderful Professor Julia Lovell from Birkbeck University of London. Thank you, Julia.
30:02 Speaker 03 Thanks so much.
30:03 Greg Jenner? And in comedy corner, we had the fantastic Phil Wang. Cheers, Phil.
30:07 Speaker 04 Thank you for having me, such a good time.
30:09 Greg Jenner? And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we unearth another treasure trove of trivia from a different chunk of global history. But for now, I'm off to go and start building my own mausoleum. Bye.
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