You're Dead to Me - The Terracotta Army

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

Greg Jenner is joined in Ancient China by Professor Julia Lovell and special guest Phil Wang as they take a closer 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. 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 PatersonThe Athletic production for BBC Radio 4

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. All day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. 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 Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, and specialises 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. Welcome, Julia. Thrilled to have you here. It's great to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me. And in Comedy Corner, returning for his third tour of duty on You're Dead to Me, he's a fantastic comedian and actor who's gone global since last we had him on the show.

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. He's in Amy Schumer's new sitcom, Life and Beth. He's even written a funny book,

Sidesplitter, and he's been on Letterman recently. What a busy guy. But most importantly, you'll remember him from our chingis khan and borges episodes it's philly philly wang wang welcome back phil hi great thanks 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 thank you it's um it's always a thrill always a highlight all right and last time out we talked a bit about your education at 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. 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, 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. All right, well, by the end of today, you will know plenty more because we have an expert with us. So, what do you know? 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, well, the Terracotta Warriors have a pretty good name recognition, I think, not least because a few of them have gone on tour recently. Indeed, they were hanging out in Liverpool. 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 Rincewind 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. You may also have heard a few tidbits about the Terracotta Warriors on our spin-off children's podcast, Homeschool History, which you can listen to on BBC Sound. 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, can we begin with the very basics?

When we're talking about the terracotta army, we're talking about elements of the funeral complex belonging to Qin Shi Huangdi, who's the first emperor of China. Who's this guy? How far ago are we talking? Well, the first emperor of China was born Yingzheng in 259 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 259 BC, 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 40 years, Qin wins out because it has the most thorough,

the most controlling and ruthless state apparatus. And Ying Zheng succeeded to this throne in 246 BCE at the age of only 13. By the time he was 38, he'd conquered each of the other states and unified them for the first time into a single empire in 221 BCE. And at that point, he took the name Qin Shi Huangdi, or Great August, First Emperor of Qin, as goes the literal translation. So at 13, he comes to the throne. By 38, he's conquered all of China. It's quite an achievement. I mean, I'm 39. And he's, you know, I feel like I've maybe not done anything with my life. Yeah. What kingdoms have you unified, Greg? I've been meaning to ask you this.

I have unified the world of history and comedy into one perfect podcast synergy. I mean, what have you unified, Phil? What's your best unification story? What is my best unification story? The other day I had fried rice with leftover barbecue. South African Bodowurst and fried rice. I don't think it should happen. Some of these unifications are not right.

But I'm a boy king, and a boy king needs his empire. It's interesting hearing Zheng Shi Huang Di, because that name suddenly reignited all these memories of my father just being obsessed with Zheng Shi Huang Di for a long time. We'd read a lot about him and uh and watch a lot of tv shows about him he's quite a character and we talk about him more in the in the spin-off podcast we did so homeschool history it's only 13 minutes it's on bbc sounds but the sort of the too long didn't read version is that he unifies china through constant war then consolidates power by introducing

law codes new coinage standardized building roads, introducing writing uniform across the country. All sensible policies. And then he also forcibly relocates 700,000 people to be forced labourers to build his pet projects. He also burns books. He murders Confucian scholars by burying them alive. So less good policies. So he's quite a ruthless character. But 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? Oh, might it be a wall? Not just any wall. A pretty good wall? A very good wall. Is that what it's called? The very excellent wall of China? Something like that. It's on the tip of my tongue. Absolutely. The very competently built wall of china otherwise 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 so how old do you think he was phil when he started planning his own funeral? Oh, wow. Well, I mean, he became a king at 13. He's obviously an early starter. I'm going to say he started planning his own death at 14. You are. I mean, you did a really good idea there of going 13, give it one year to plan. No, literally 13. He starts planning at 13.

He's like, I'm the emperor and I'm going to die one day and I'm going to have the best death. That's foresight. Isn't it? I mean, I can't think of any plans I planning at 13 he's like i'm the emperor and i'm gonna die one day and i'm gonna have the best death that's foresight isn't it i mean i can't think of any plans i had at 13 what were your i still feel i feel invincible now i'm 32 i can't imagine being 13 and having the the presence of mind to go all right you've had a good 13 years but i started time to start thinking about a will well i just wanted a 13 what were your long-term goals at 13 actually to be a professional wrestler i really wanted to be a professional wrestler when i was 13 that was my equivalent of the great wall of china was to become a professional lycra clad man what would your wrestling name be are you a bad guy or a good? I think I wanted to be called like the tyrant or something like that. So actually not completely dissimilar from Qin Shi Huangdi, you know? All right. So

you and Cheng Shi Huangdi are very similar in your outlook, but he's thinking about 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 china but at the time slightly off center i suppose and it ends up as being the biggest mausoleum in the history of the world as far as i know and may never even be eclipsed because um presumably elon musk just plans to live forever well his mausoleum will be in space so oh that's true that is true still hold on to the earth title probably right yeah he'll be buried in a floating Tesla just orbiting around the moon or something. But actually, Chung Chiu-Wan Di also is planning to live forever, Julia.

How do you plan to live forever while simultaneously building your enormous tomb? 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. He died in 210 BCE, aged only 49.

Ironically, probably partly due to mercury poisoning. But we can see his tomb, this burial complex that he spends almost 40 years building as an insurance policy in case the whole elixir thing didn't work out. out. So the first emperor died while touring the eastern part of his empire and his advisors 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 advisors filled his carriage with fish to cover up the smell. Wow, you know you smell bad when people are like, we've got to cover this up. Put a load of fish on him. That'd be better. I mean, he's died and they're telling everyone he's fine. He's fine.

He just doesn't want to come out of his carriage. Also, he loves fish. I mean, it's such a weird plan. I don't understand it. But 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, Phil. They were family farmers. They were digging a well, and they stumbled on these little bits of broken terracotta and some arrowheads made of bronze and they thought oh that's that's nice and they sold it to a local trader and you know they

didn't think anything more of it 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 there is absolutely there's no evidence in any of the historical records there would be any terracotta warriors julie they thought maybe there would be a tomb, but not the warriors. Can you tell us more? Yeah, that's right. The existence of the tomb itself is described by Sima Qian, who's arguably the most famous of ancient Chinese historians, writing in about 100 BCE. But his history doesn't mention the warriors. I think that locals knew that the large mound nearby was an important tomb, but particularly in a pre-mechanical age, it was hard to break into the site, as well, of course, seeming a deeply inauspicious thing to do, to break into

somebody's tomb. So modern archaeologists were amazed by what these farmers found. It's arguably the most extraordinary archaeological discovery of the 20th century. I didn't realise it was so recent, the discovery. I thought it had been around longer than the 70s. Yeah, it's 1974. So I suppose that's part of the reason it's so iconic, is that it happened in the media age. So everyone could kind of go, oh, wow, look at these gorgeous images. 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? I think that everything is connected, Phil. It is. All cosmically connected. I think he must have heard Staying Alive and thought, this is my time to emerge. He was just waiting for disco to reach its peak,

and then he was like, I'm here, I'm ready. 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 when they started surveying it? And they're still working on it. Okay, people usually go by football fields, don't they? This is the SI unit for large spaces, is football fields. I'm going to say it's two football fields.

Two football fields. Julia, is it bigger than two football fields. I'm going to say it's two football fields. Two football fields. Julia, is it bigger than two football fields? 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. 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 at the time of the emperor's death, this pyramid would have been surrounded by walls and covered with buildings where rituals and sacrifices would be performed for the well-being of the emperor after his death 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 yeah phil you've said uh two football pitches well a football pitch is 0.005 kilometers squared right this is 56 kilometers squared uh which is bigger than oxford that's quite a yeah that's quite a good bit bigger okay fair enough when you're wrong you're wrong so we have the ancient chin historian sema tien 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. 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 heavenly constellations were shown above and the regions of the earth were shown below. 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 know what Quicksilver is? Quicksilver, I'm not sure, but I bet Cheng Shih-Huang-Ti loved a pint or two of it.

It sounds right up his street. You're absolutely right. He was drinking it because Quicksilver is basically mercury. It's rivers of mercury. Right, yeah, there you go. This guy. He's built rivers of mercury that mirror the rivers in China. And then he's got automatic crossbows and candles that burn forever.

So it really is Indiana Jones. It's amazing. Were these things actually realised? Are there actually booby-trapped crossbows in the complex? Well, we will get to that later. That is a good question. And we'll leave that dangling for now. Guarding this enormous complex and this particular pyramid tomb

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? Well, if it's more than two foot by field, so it's more than 22, more than 44 people. Is it like 2,000 or something or something hey that's a good guess that is how many have been excavated so far ah yes okay but we think there are 7 000 down there julia is that right yes that is a working estimate but there are also many other things down in the tomb complex.

And it might be a good moment to explain a couple of ancient Chinese ideas about the afterlife. 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. So whatever you wanted or needed here, you'll want and need in the next life too. Now like several ancient states, early Chinese societies practiced human sacrifice. Here the theory is that if servants and wives are killed and placed in the tomb, they'll 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 chin 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. 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. Yes, fine. We hear a lot about the terracotta warriors, but not enough about the terracotta accountants, the real heroes. The afterlife isn't there. There's also an entertainment pit which contains terracotta acrobats, strongmen, musicians and life-size bronze birds. So an incredible cornucopia of things.

It's interesting, the Chinese tradition of transferring objects into the afterlife, it still goes on now. So 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 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. Oh, wow.

Which is a nice idea, but it also kind of raises a question, what is heaven like? It doesn't sound much better. And the presumption is sort of you end up in heaven with sort of naked and with nothing. It doesn't sound particularly pleasant. But also, I can't imagine my grandparents being sent an iPad and knowing how to work it. You have to burn the instructions as well.

So we have this idea of the terracotta warriors being, as you said, Phil, they can sort of transform into soldiers in the afterlife. Also, potentially princes and concubines and maybe rivals to the throne who were killed and chucked in there to get them out the way there is real straw and real hay for the real horses which suggests perhaps humans and animals perhaps dying in this tomb which is is rather rather dark but um that's first emperors for you but let's not dwell on the sad stuff the macabre ends let's focus on these extraordinary terracotta people instead so phil we're going to show you an image from pit one oh my favorite pit everyone loves pit one this is the first of four excavated zones can you describe what you can see for us basically a long hanger structure filled with the terracotta warriors and they're laid out very neatly in rows and each row

separated by a low wall and yes there are many of them and i can now see that two football fields was a wild underestimation quite embarrassing really but there are lots of them and and they're sort of in a sort of maze-like structure. Yeah. Julia, these are some of the 2,000 terracotta warriors excavated so far. Can you tell us a bit more about the three main pits where they've been discovered and what's in them? Sure. So 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 the biggest, has the main army, perhaps around 6,000 soldiers, 160 chariots, and the soldiers were all

originally set out in almost 40 single file lines. In front of them, there's an advanced guard of archers. And I should point out that they were all armed to the teeth with battle-ready bronze weapons, so ready for combat. So real weapons? Yes, real bronze sharpened weapons. bronze sharpened weapons. 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 Chin Chih-Huang-Di suddenly died and had to be buried. Yeah. So maybe he was planning an even bigger army and he sort of unfortunately keeled over from his mercury lemonade drink. But the extraordinary thing about this, Phil, is it's incredible, but it also shows us battle formations. It shows us the kind of weapons and

armour that these soldiers would have worn. I know you love Total War like I do, the video game. Is this immediately conjuring up sort of strong feelings for you of of commanding and controlling a little army it really does i i actually got the impulse there to drag and select a whole box of them and tell them to go somewhere it also conjures up sort of the image and this is i guess this goes to speak of how little really changes over history. It reminds me of a military parade that someone like Kim Jong-un or Vladimir Putin might hold just to show how powerful he is. It's the same thing, really, isn't it?

That's interesting, yeah. It's holding a military parade in the afterlife to show everyone what a big dog you are. Exactly that. I mean, Julia, what can we learn from the actual weaponry and stuff they're wearing? Yeah, quite a lot. 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 strict army discipline made them ruthless fighters. So the army was divided into squads of five. If one man was lost from a squad, the others had to capture the head of an enemy. The terracotta figures enable us to visualize what this extraordinary army would have looked like. You've got the unarmored rank and file at the front. Then you've got armored fighters and archers distributed down the flanks. And yeah, they were armed with literally cutting edge bronze weapons.

Finds in pit one included crossbow triggers, swords, lances, spears and over 40,000 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. Wow. Over 2,000 years ago. That's good craftsmanship. Isn't it? and also that 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 you know chung shu wang di clearly is a religious man he's planning for the

afterlife he's fearful perhaps he's got this vast bodyguard which is perhaps about showing off but there must also be an element of him getting ready to transfer into a different religious state I mean the afterlife is presumably as you said it's continuation of life in some ways you take everything you need but what is the religious cosmology of the Qin system at this time? The first emperor was indeed a deeply religious man in his way, even though he also boasted about boiling people alive. You can see this religiousness in the literal translation of the title he gave himself. So Shi Huangdi, the first august thearch. So he literally sees himself as a monarch of the gods emperor and

pope rolled into one and when he found his empire in 221 bce he immediately situates his dynasty within the magic cosmological belief system of the time which is the five powers, and he declares that the Qin is ruling under the power of water. He builds himself a new palace, he names it after a heavenly pole to show how celestial and religious his power was. He went on tours across his new empire, he made sacrifices to spirits, he put up self-praising inscriptions on China's holy mountains. So in sum, you can see in religious terms, as in political terms, he had a robust sense of self-worth and he wanted to ensure that his next life would be every bit as grand as his first life would be. But this enormous army, is he expecting to have to fight his way into the afterlife? Or is this an army for defending himself in the afterlife?

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. 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. But I think we do need also to keep in mind that this site is so much more than the terracotta warriors. So if we go back to that incredible quotation from Samartien that you read earlier, we can surmise that the tomb itself contains palaces, contains wonderful objects, officials. It recreates out of Mercury, the empire's rivers and seas, the features of Earth below and the stars above. So this is a whole universe being built underground. And the first emperor thinks he's going to be in charge forever. Do we have any idea of how much of this was part of his 13-year-old death plan? And how much was just the ramblings of a mercury-poisoned madman in the latest ages of his life?

I think on the one hand, you can already see in his ancestors a kind of tendency towards gigantomania in tomb building, ever greater, more lavish mausoleums. But at the same time, there's nothing in previous Qin tombs which really serves as a precedent for the scale, the vastness, the complexity of the first emperor's tomb, it is assumed that there was a massive uptick in the ambition of his plans after he actually succeeded in unifying China in 221 BCE. So yeah, planning ahead when you're 13, get going on the mausoleum. But after he becomes emperor a it's on a different

scale so he becomes emperor at 38 he dies at 49 so but maybe the last 11 years of his life he's really ramping it up and going okay what i want now is rivers of mercury yeah also as you enter into middle age you become more obsessed with sort of small building projects don't you? You build conservatory you add an extension and so for Chen Shi Huang it was another battalion I'll just get another battalion I'll put another battalion in the summer It's a midlife crisis

Yeah that's the question, did he have to get planning permission for this complex? That must have been a nightmare I think luckily for him he was the planning all right so phil we've already touched on this slightly but um what do you think archaeologists have found in the personal burial chamber the pyramid of the first emperor himself a cooler full of bottles of mercury for the big guy. I imagine some creature comforts. Food and wine and things like that.

Maybe a rug. A nice rug. Quite sort of homely. Yeah, if this is like his private chambers, you know, maybe a couple of friends, a couple of pals. Oh, concubines. Do we have like, yeah? Well, I mean... mean kind of thing we've actually sort of lured you into a trap there because actually oh 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 the site

surely why haven't we thrown a drone in there with a camera on it to have a little look why why can't we open it there are a few reasons for 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 center of the site, probably for the tomb of the emperor himself. So all that survey information tantalisingly validates Sima Qian'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.

But within minutes, the colours faded after they were exposed to the air. And I think archaeologists' main worry is that they've already waited this long and no one wants to have it on their head that they said, yep, let's open this remarkable site and then the contents just go to hell they're ruined in minutes it's a lot of pressure phil isn't it can you imagine being the person who opens that tomb and within minutes everything just fades it would be pretty awkward you'd have to take a photo real quick so i mentioned how special it must have felt to see the the terracotta warriors in color live in color

that's amazing i didn't i didn't i didn't realize they were they had color on them i guess they would have done yeah so that oxidization process happens so fast so the idea of opening the tomb sounds a dangerous because i mean there's booby traps too right sima tian tells us there's there's crossbows that fire at you are there are there no modern tools that can be used to sort of map or have have a peek in a non-intrusive look into into the chamber with sonar or something like that lidar yeah i mean i think they're trying aren't they julia but yeah i think the surveys which i just mentioned are the most extensive that they have done i think also it's just a very well fortified complex underground, these very, very thick, deep, tall walls.

So there's a limit to the depth and the distance that these surveys can travel, given what seems to be the obstacles underground. And so is the idea that in this chamber would be the actual remains of Qin Shi Huang himself? That's exactly right. Right, right. Wow. Plus the recreation of the empire, you know, the rivers in Mercury and the stars and the landmarks and so on and so forth. So we have this extraordinary mausoleum complex. It's enormous. So we've got the 6,000 soldiers, another 1,000 different objects as well. So 7,000, we think, terracotta things, including, I mean, grooms, stable boys,

painted bronze chariots with silver fittings, terracotta charioteers, terracotta horses, real-life hay and straw, scribes, bureaucrats, acrobats, strongmen, bronze. I mean, it's extraordinary. You've got birds in there, animals in clay coffins. Incredible. But we want to now turn to who made all this stuff, Phil. That's the next bit of the podcast.

Because you can't buy this stuff on eBay. This has to be crafted by someone. They don't have Alibaba yet. Not yet. But if it's taken that many years to excavate only 2,000 of the warriors and there's still maybe another 4,000 warriors or 5,000 objects still in there, how on earth did they build this 2,000 years ago? Who's building it? Yeah, it's a genuinely monumental undertaking.

that 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. So from what we know, the main burial chamber would have involved digging down to about 30 or 40 meters. You would have needed access ramps, you would have needed to divert water courses, 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 meters 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. So creating pit one alone would have required the removal of over 70,000 cubic metres of earth. So that would fill around five and a half thousand lorries today. And it seems plausible that only a state like the Chin, which extracted conscript labour so rationally, but also so

ruthlessly, could have seen this project through. Gosh, yeah, incredible. I imagine like not even believing in it, being the one guy who didn't believe in any of the afterlifes, just going, this is bullshit. As he's carving his 500th statue, it's like, no one's even going to see this. I mean, Phil, you studied engineering at Cambridge. If we needed a replica made, would you be willing to project manage that for us?

Oh, happily, yeah. A replica made of the whole complex? Yeah, ideally. I mean, what are your rates? I mean, let's talk budgets. I'll do it for the exposure, to be honest. I'll just do it for the exposure.

It's always good to have a plan B, eh, Phil? Yeah, okay, fine. Well, that's very kind of you. So it always good to have a plan b a film yeah okay fine well that's very kind of you so it's good to have you aboard but i mean julia this is an astonishingly enormous project 700 000 conscripted laborers and we have the pit in which they are buried to the workers and you know this is where we get into some of the sort of the sadder aspects is, you know, scientifically DNA analysis, skeletal analysis allows us to sort of see the kind of lives they led and the kind of pressures they were put under to make this incredible site. Can you give us some sobering insights into the working conditions for this labour force? to the working conditions for this labour force? 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 perhaps a surprising amount about these unfortunate people, searches, things like where they came from, if they were serving out a penal sentence, what their crime had been. But as you say, these graves are a very eerie,

grim aspect to the site. 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. Workers don't seem to have been buried formally. They seem to have been thrown into a deep mass grave. So the evidence strongly suggests that these workers were ill-treated and little valued in life. As I say, a fair number were probably doing forced labour as part of criminal sentences for relatively minor crimes. And a sinister aspect to this, I think, is the secrecy surrounding the site. 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. And the final kicker to all this is that as the emperor seemed to have believed that if he buried people in his tomb they would serve him in the afterlife, perhaps he also him in the afterlife. Perhaps he also assumed that the remains of these poor people would just reanimate to be his workmen for eternity. It's pretty brutal. And there's even evidence potentially of instruments of torture found in some of these pits as well. Yes, irons which are thought to have been leg manacles and so on.

Yeah. OK, so they're being crudely treated. 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? 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. 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? So this photograph, a closeup of about 12 soldiers or so and they've all got the same uniform they're all wearing the same armor but they are all distinct they've all got they have all got their own face they've even got their own sort of posture and

they seem to be of different ages there's a couple guys look about in the middle age some of them look like they're in their 20s i mean everyone's complexion is fantastic i have to say um but yeah they all do seem to be unique they all seem to be unique very alive people so julia phil has identified that their faces look unique is their composition completely unique are they coming out of molds how are they made is it a mix and match approach how do you make a terracotta warrior? 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. There are moulds for the heads aren't there? Was it eight

moulds? 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 plaits and top knots and chignons and so on. Yeah, it's a bit like when you get to invent a video game character. I was just thinking that. I was just thinking, I'm playing Skyrim and I pick a head and I pick a... I always make them so ugly. I always turn up so ugly in the end. I'm really impressed by these guys

because they're quite good looking, actually, the soldiers. If you don't mind me saying, do we know if they were maybe based on real people or were these faces just made up? That's a great question. Were they inspired by real people around the place? We don't know. I think we can surmise that.

But yeah, one of the challenges of making sense of these statues is that there is so relatively little human figurative sculpture before. So they're a really fascinating milestone, almost out of the blue. When you think of Chinese art, you don't really, yeah, you don't really think of sculpture. Do you think of the sort of paintings

and scrolls and manuscripts? And there's very little statue and very little statue of normal people. If there is a statue, it's of some god or a mythical creature or something. And Julia, you mentioned quality control. Phil, how do you think overseers could identify

and punish any craftsman who wasn't hitting the standards? A bad review on Yelp? One star. One star for Xiaoming. How would they judge? Would they give a little knock? Every time my dad enters a building, he starts knocking the walls walls and nodding i don't know what he's checking for but i imagine something like that tap tap tap they all look pretty good to me let's be honest they do look pretty

impressive i can't imagine seeing one of those going not good enough julia we know 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? Yeah, so quality control was a little bit more systematic than Phil's dad, I think. No offence to Phil's dad. Yeah, production seems to be very tightly monitored. So just about every item owned by or made for the Chin State had to have a mark stamped on it and it would be archived in a register which clerks would double check against the contents of warehouses so it's another emblem of how controlling how disciplined the state is.

Most of the weapons in the tomb were inscribed with date of manufacture, plus the name of the craftsman 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. So if something was judged subpar, the person or persons responsible could be nabbed. This doubtless led to extraordinary standardisation. So all the arrows had to be exactly 70 centimetres long, or if a trigger broke in a crossbow, it could be easily replaced with another because all the mechanisms were identical.

So we have this sort of really really regulated workforce with this sort of chain of command going up the ladder so that you can you can chase down any imperfections phil and i mean julie you said you said the arrows are all exactly the same there are 40 000 arrowheads that were found in there all of them identical so it's kind of extraordinary if i knew i'd done a bad job i'd be quite tempted to write someone else's name on it you know i mean especially if i 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 i'm learning a lot about filling this program look it's, it's a chin error.

You've got to survive, you know? Maybe we shouldn't give you this project management job, Phil, because it sounds like you're going to cut some corners and throw other people under the bus. Although, to be honest, by the sound of it, a lot of people died on this project, regardless of how incredible the work is. I mean, there's some really grim elements to it,

as well as this extraordinary craft and artistic achievement. On the one hand, you want to celebrate it and go, wow. And on the other hand... Every one of the ancient world has behind it this huge death toll. Because, I mean, there's a reason these things didn't abound, that they were rare. It's just that the amount of human sacrifice are required, right? I think also the human personality required to devise this project to have the ego to push it through

is hopefully also relatively seldom seen in human history it's a form of egotism so destructive of human life yeah i mean classic 13 year old boy saying right when i'm king i'm gonna make everyone build me a tomb and then he follows through on it. You know, oh, no. Is it still being excavated now, just ongoing? Every day or two, there's another terracotta warrior emerging? Exactly. There's still so much, even from those peripheral pits to be reconstructed.

Relatively few of the terracotta warriors emerged still complete and whole. Many of them were in fragments. So this is very, very painstaking work. And the fact that there's still so much to do, not just in terms of putting artefacts together, but analysing them for what they tell us about life in the Chin, you know, 2,200 years ago, the fact there's still so much work to do, I think that really supports conservative archaeologists

who don't want to take the risk of opening the main emperor's tomb. They say, you know, we've got enough to keep us busy here. You know, we don't need to do the fireworks of opening the tomb itself. Lovely stuff. The nuance window! We don't need to do the fireworks of opening the tomb itself. Lovely stuff. The Nuance Window! 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, of everything, who felt entitled to disrupt and often end the lives of millions of people to fulfil his own plans. 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 BC. 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's 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 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. Wow, thank you very much. Phil, what do you think of that? Yeah, lovely. Great. And as you say, at the end, there are a lot of echoes of Qin Shi Huangdi in, I would say, 20th century Chinese history. You know, especially with the People's Revolution, the unification at great cost. So Phil, can you guess of 20th century Chinese rulers, who was a paid up admirer of Qin Shi Huang Di? I'm going to guess the big man himself Mao. Correct. Yeah. I have to ask this question, Julia, and I'm wincing in advance of it because this is one of my dread questions. But there is a very strange thing in the modern world where people think ancient monuments were built by aliens.

And with the pyramids, we get it. We get it with Indiana Jones movies and all sorts of things. Do we get it with Chinese archaeology? Is there any sense that some crazy conspiracy theory that the tomb of the first emperor is too complicated to have been built by humans? Ergo, aliens did it a few months ago i watched a tv presentation by a chinese archaeologist who reassured his audiences with regard to the whole archaeological monuments made by aliens theory that this definitely didn't happen in china ever because as anyone who's watched any Hollywood films know, aliens only ever land in the United States. Nonetheless, I'm afraid that alien conspiracy theories

about the first emperor's tomb and about a few other archaeological sites besides do circulate on the Chinese internet. They mainly relate to archaeologists' refusal to excavate the mound. So they're asking, what's the real reason for this? So parts of cyberspace respond that it's nothing to do with safety or conservation. It's a deep state conspiracy. So the theory goes that the Chinese government knows that only aliens could have built a site like this, and that the extraterrestrials

are buried deep inside the tomb, maybe or maybe not in the form of poisonously smelly monster bats. And the government just doesn't want the story to get out. But I must underline here, reporting this theory does not imply endorsement or credulity. Yes, it's the bloody internet again, isn't it? Honestly, monster bats. Jesus. Okay. I guess it would be bats if it's underground and dark. There's a method to this madness. Yeah. Smelly. As long as they're listening to the Bee Gees. That's the only thing I'm clinging to, Phil, is your idea that in there, Chung Si-Hwang-Dee and his monster bats are listening to Night Fever.

So what do you know now? So time now for the So What Do You Know Now? This is our quickfire quiz for our comedian, Phil, to see how much he has learned. I always forget that this is coming up. And I get to this point and go, oh, why didn't I pay more attention? I don't know how I always forget this is coming up and and i get to this point and go oh why didn't i just pay why didn't i pay more attention oh i don't know how i always forget this is a quiz at the end okay you say that but you have an impressive average score of 9.5 out of 10 that is your average okay you've got 10 questions uh i'm gonna start the clock now here we go question

one the terracotta army was buried with which ruler who unified China? Qin Shi Huangdi. Very good. Question two. Who discovered the terracotta army in 1974? Oh, it was some family of farmers. It was. They were digging a well and they stumbled on some terracotta shards and some bronze arrowheads. Question three. How many of the terracotta figures have been excavated so far?

2,000 so far. But there may be as many as 7,000. God, you're good at this. Question four. Name three of the things found in the funeral complex of Chen Shi Huang Di. Horses. Yep. Weapons that are still usable now.

And acrobats. Yes, very good. Question five. In the First Emperor's funerary complex, there are also rivers originally made with what dangerous liquid? Mercury, aka quicksilver. Both? Very good.

Both barrels. Both barrels. Fantastic options. Question six. The warriors are equipped with sharpened weapons made from which metal? Copper. Brass. Bronze.

Bronze! Copper is in bronze. I'm just trying to think. Should I give you that? What I had was BR. I had BR in my head. I'm going to give you half a mark because copper is in bronze. So, okay.

Half a mark for that. Question seven. Roughly how many arrowheads were found on the site in pit one? Oh, Lord. Was this... Oh, no. 600. It was 40,000.

Oh, no. Question eight. Each terracotta warrior bears an inscription of what? The name of the person who made it and their overseer. Yeah, absolutely. Question nine. There were eight moulds. There were, yeah, absolutely.

And this for eight and a half out of ten, which is a very strong score. Why haven't archaeologists entered the actual private resting tomb of ching shih huang di for safety concerns and mercury and booby traps and aliens and a big cavity under the in the wall or floor cavities it's bad for your teeth i will give you that eight and a half out of ten. Very strong score. Well done, Phil. I'm so sorry about the arrowhead answer. When I said 600, Julia audibly winced. So I feel like I really hurt her feelings there. Eight and a half out of ten is very good. And listener, if you fancy more of Phil,

you can check out our episodes on the bodacious Borgia family from Renaissance Rome. Or if you want more Chinese history, you can sail on over to our episode on Chung Yi-Sau, the pirate queen. She was quite the lady. Our whole back catalogue is available on BBC Sounds. And remember, if you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review, share the show with your friends, make sure to subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. It's time now for me to say a huge thank you to my guests. In History Corner, we have the wonderful Professor Julia Lovell from Birkbeck, University of London. Thank you, Julia.

Thanks so much. And in Comedy Corner, we had the fantastic Phil Wang. Cheers, Phil. Thank you for having me. Such a good time. 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! You're Dead to Me was a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4. This episode was written and produced by M.N. Lagousse and me,

with additional writing by John Mason. The research was by John Mason. The assistant producer was Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow. The project managers were Saifah Mio and Isla Matthews. And the audio producer was Abby Patterson. Hello, fans of You're Dead to Me. I'm Lucy Worsley, and I'd like to tell you about my Radio 4 series, Lady Killers.

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