Dan Snow's History Hit - The First Emperor of China

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

Dan heads to China to discover the incredible story of Qin Shi Haungdi, the man who built the mysterious Terracotta Warriors, the Great Wall and founded China. Dan travels to the First Emperor's magnificent mausoleum complex in Xian, once the Ancient capital, to trace his rise to total power, conquering the neighbouring states to create one mighty Chinese Empire. Qin Shi Huangdi was as visionary as he was tyrannical, often remembered for his brutal punishment methods that enabled him to centralise power. He's also remembered for his obsession with immortality and the astonishing lengths he went to try and secure it...This is the first episode in a two-part mini-series. Part Two was released on Friday 23rd.This episode was produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore. The translator was Ellen Xu and the fixer was Chao.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Spring 1974. The people around Xi'an were in a desperate situation, as the drought showed no signs of letting up. It was March in Shaanxi province, around 600 miles from Beijing in northwest China. Local farmers decided to look for water in the pomegranate fields and persimmon orchards near the base of the nearby Li Mountain. They knew beneath the earth lay a spider's web of natural canals and waterways. But unbeknownst to them, in these fields lay something else. Yang Zifar and his five brothers began to dig a well. With picks they hacked at the ground until they hit something unfamiliar. Hard red earth, then pottery fragments. They continued to dig.

Yang described what happened next. First a shoulder appeared, then a chest. Suddenly I hit the stone man's neck. I turned to my friend and said, I think we've found a hidden temple. What the men had found would become one of the most astonishing archaeological discoveries the world had ever seen. An 8,000 strong army of soldiers standing proud, to attention, entirely made from clay. The men had just discovered the terracotta warriors, what some called the eighth wonder of the world. You'll listen to Dan Snow's history hit.

And for this miniseries, I'm heading to China to unravel the mysteries of these stone soldiers, who make up just a tiny part of the enormous mausoleum complex of Chen Chih-Wan Di, the man who founded modern China. As China becomes ever more rich and powerful, these terracotta warriors can help us better understand the origins of this behemoth of a nation, and the dynasty that set the course for the country we recognise today.

This is Episode 1, The First Emperor of China. I'm right here at the beginning of the adventure, everybody. I'm walking through Beijing Station. And like every other documentary or podcast you've ever heard, I'm afraid I have to repeat the cliche, because it's true. This country is enormous. Cities whose names are unknown in the West, yet whose populations dwarf those

in some of the most famous and celebrated cities. And now I'm battling my way through Beijing Station. It is absolutely rammed with people. It's a busy rush hour as you'd expect because this is this is a city of 22 million people its footprint is 11 times that of new york city more people live here than live in australia i've been to china for a few years and things have changed so dramatically obviously the scale of the building is intensified. It's bigger and shinier and brighter and newer than ever.

I'm walking now past LED screens built into the columns of this station, advertising all sorts of glamorous products. Everything now seems to have been done by app, a legacy of the COVID period. You cannot live, eat, move or breathe in this city without it being done through the ubiquitous mobile phone. But this time we're not actually in Beijing to explore the city. I'm going back to the beginning. I'm about to get on a train in this station to be blasted across the countryside 600 miles to the south and west to the city of Xi'an. Xi'an is the cradle of China.

It is on the site of the first imperial capital of this mighty country. As a result, it's something of a living museum. It became the richest, most populous and dynamic city on earth under the Tang Dynasty when it was the terminus of the famous Silk Road. But I'm heading there because it was also home of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, the man who built the terracotta army. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to take this train. The next stop is Luoyang Longmen Railway Station.

I'm just relaxing into my reclining seat on this train. The landscape is whizzing by. The scrolling speedometer up in the roof is telling us we're going 350 kilometers an hour. This journey is 600 miles. That is like going from London to Geneva on the continent. And it's going to take us only four hours because I'm on this extraordinary bullet train, which is obviously very exciting to us Brits because we have our own struggles with ultra speedy rail at the moment. And so to pass the time on this journey, I'm just reading about

ancient Chinese history. I thought it'd be good to share with you all what the world looked like in the 3rd century BC when Qin Shiwan or Qin Shiwan, which translates literally as the first emperor, forged his Chinese empire. It was certainly an era of great empires rising, falling, fighting and transforming the globe over in the west following the astonishing conquests rising, falling, fighting and transforming the globe. Over in the West, following the astonishing conquest of Alexander the Great at the end of the 4th century BCE, his empire was divided between his generals.

The Hellenistic world came into being. You've got the Ptolemies ruling in Egypt, the Seleucid Empire that spreads across much of modern-day Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and up into the Caucasus. You've got the Antigod dynasty in Macedonia and Greece, and the Atalid dynasty in Pergamon in modern-day Turkey. These were successor states to the massive Persian Empire that Alexander the Great had conquered, And they were a fascinating blend of Greek, Persian, of local cultures. And they were perpetually at war with each other. To the west of them, you have the rise of the Roman Republic.

Little old Rome was slowly expanding its influence throughout the Italian peninsula and beyond. That brought it into contact with the Carthaginians, and the Romans fought a series of wars against them. So round about the same time that Rome is defeating Carthage, you get the emergence of the Qin dynasty here in China, this seemingly unstoppable military march that sees them unify China, creating a powerful empire, a vast empire,

really about 150 years before the Romans sort of complete their domination of the Mediterranean world. And the amazing thing about that Qin empire is that in various forms and with some pretty catastrophic interludes, it endures until the present, over 2,000 years later. And it's thought the modern name of China is actually a derivation of that word, Qin. the modern name of China is actually a derivation of that word, Qin. In the centuries before Qin Shi Huang became emperor, before he was even born, the area that we now recognise as China was divided up into different states, with different languages, politics, currencies, some more powerful, some more advanced than others. From 475 BCE, the states were engaged in constant conflict with one another

It was an age of huge political, social and economic turmoil known as the Warring States Period And the Qin, located in the western part of what is now China lagged behind some of the others But what it did have was fertile land and a strong military tradition And its leaders, Huangdi's predecessors But what it did have was fertile land and a strong military tradition. And its leaders, Huang Di's predecessors, had some pretty smart ideas on how to turn this also-ran state into an efficient military powerhouse. To chart the rise of the Qin, I spoke with Jeremiah Jenny,

professor in Chinese history who spent 20 years living and working in China. And so this Warring States period, how many polities, how many states are involved here? It's like a tapestry of countries like medieval Europe. So we have one very large state, if you think of a civilization called the Zhou, that beginning in the 8th century begins kind of a gradual process of fragmentation, that by the time we get to the 5th century, the 4th century begins kind of a gradual process of fragmentation that by the time we get to the 5th century the 4th century BCE we now have states breaking apart into many different statelets and then when you get statelets well eventually some of the bigger states will start to say well

gobble them up until by the time you get to the 3rd century or BCE, you're left with seven contending kingdoms. And the Chin State is the one that's been a little bit looked down upon, is it the one way out to the west? Yeah, I mean this is the, I guess, warring states equivalent of Montana. They're in the western part of the Joe civilization. They're seen as kind of maybe a little bit frontier. You know, it's where the horses come from. That's one of the ways they were useful to the Zhou kings.

And so if you're from one of those more, quote unquote, civilized states downriver, they don't really think of the Qin state as being exactly like them in all the different artistic and cultural ways. So they're kind of half barbarian, maybe. Well, if you ask a lot of their neighbors, that would be more than a half. But by the third century BCE, they're looking like a pretty good bet.

You know, they are. And a lot of that is because they'd had centuries to kind of organize themselves. They have talented advisors. Some of these advisors are talented, but brutal. But one of the things these advisors encourage the different Qin nobles and eventually Qin kings to do is you've got to organize your state, you've got to marshal economic resources. How do you do this? Through a system of

laws that requires of your subjects that they give what they have to making the state powerful. And these laws enforce that throughout the land. So the Qin state rises to the challenge of constant warfare by making itself very good at war. So one of the things, when you go to a system where you want to mobilize your people, two things you need to do. You need to field an army, you need to feed an army.

So you need to increase agriculture, you need to make your military stronger, make your military bigger. One of the best ways to do that is combine these two things together. So first of all, you take the lands that used to belong to all these noble lords that maybe weren't worked as efficiently as possible, or maybe you, the king, weren't getting everything you deserve. Well, you redistribute to these farmers. You tell them, grow stuff. And whatever you grow, we're going to take a part of that.

And we're going to make sure that you give us the part of that because if we don't get it, the penalties are going to be severe. We're going to take away your land. We're going to give that land to somebody who's actually growing stuff. We're going to make you their slave. Now, part of that taxation too is not only are we going to be taking some of your grain, some of your produce, we're going to need some labor. So we're going to need at least somebody there to provide us with an adult male from each household. Probably it's going to be marching into a neighboring state and expanding our reach. Now you may think, okay, well, what happens if you've got a big family? You've got a father, many adult sons. All they need is one adult male. Not a problem. I've got

a couple of other kids that are going to work the farm. But we're going to make sure to penalize anyone who has more than one adult male living in the household or more than one adult son. So therefore, we must divide up these households into many households. Since we're taxing the units of households, this is going to increase our base for both labor and produce. The idea that you can mobilize resources, and even if your resources maybe aren't as great, at least on the map, as some of the rival states, but if you can get the most out of what you have, that's going to be the advantage. In this period, it becomes less about champions racing across the plain or the battlefield in chariots.

And now it becomes who has the best economic base? Who has the best administrative base? And that's a very different kind of warfare. It's a very different kind of competition. And over time, those farmers become soldiers. Those soldiers become warriors. And those warriors take over the other warring kingdoms. Those soldiers become warriors and those warriors take over the other warring kingdoms.

Slowly, the Qin begin to take over their neighbouring states, growing ever more powerful. The warring states period rages for 257 years as the Qin take new lands, relocate people and consolidate their power. relocate people and consolidate their power. 228 years into this terrible conflict, a young Qin prince ascends the throne in 246 BCE, taking over from his father, aged just 13. His name is Ying Zheng, but it won't be long until he changes it to Qin Shiwangdi, the first emperor of China.

And the weird thing is, the minute he comes to the throne, he's even king of Qin before he's even the emperor. He's already building this mausoleum. That's what you do. I mean, you know, if in the future you ever decide to become the hegemon slash king of a small to mid-sized warring dynasty, you have a few things to do. You gotta do a palace, you gotta make sure you've got enough eunuchs on the staff.

And you start building a tomb. So if you're a young Chinese man who gets the call, you could be asked to fight on a distant battlefield. Or now you could be asked to work on the first emperor's mausoleum complex in Xi'an. An astonishingly ambitious burial site, with chambers beneath the ground and tunnels filled with thousands of statues, including the terracotta warriors,

warriors that give us an idea what it would have been like to face the Qin state on the battlefield. And one imagines that in real life, there are probably a lot more of them them and it was a pretty terrifying sight. So we're just entering pit one now. This is the famous, famous view of the terracotta warriors as you will have seen them if you've visited yourself or if you've watched a documentary about them. You walk into this vast space that is really the only comparison to an aircraft hangar. A huge single span arch. It's about 250 metres long and a good 60 metres wide. They are lined up now facing me. They were

in 11 underground parallel tunnels. In each of the trenches you've got four terracotta warriors, a breast stretching way off into the horizon right at the other end of this massive space. They've recovered about 2,000 warriors here. Now down to my left I can just see the site of that well where those farmers dug the well and found those first terracotta shards and who could have imagined as they started excavating around that well that the site would expand to cover not only this vast hangar I'm in now but several other pits and graves all around this area. I'm just being barged out the way here by a particularly fierce grandma with her family

so I'll step back a bit because I've been lucky enough to see this for a few times. It's pretty wild, we're going to sign her up for the rugby team when we get back. So it's thought these warriors could be guarding the tomb complex and they certainly look ready for battle. You've got right up at the front here, right next to me now, you've got three ranks of lightly armed troops, not wearing armour. They're archers, so the archers all arrayed at the front. Then after the archers, you've got armed infantrymen.

They would have been holding spears and halberds. Some would have had swords. All those bronze weapons have been taken away for display and conservation separately. And then in amongst those warriors, you have chariots. You can see four horses pulling chariots. It's an incredibly imposing display of military discipline and might and if this had been an army arrayed battle, you can imagine if I was fighting for the state of Chu or Wei,

this would probably be the last thing I would ever have seen. It is an overwhelming show of strength. I'm going to head over to the storerooms to look at some of the extraordinary objects that were found with these terracotta warriors and I'm joining Jeremiah who's over there now and he's going to take me all through it. So Jeremiah we're down here in the storage rooms we've been given a great opportunity to look at some of the bronze weapons that were found with these warriors. I mean, first things first, before we get to them, huge scale, right? I mean, thousands of weapons recovered.

Right, absolutely. You think about all the different warriors in the pit, and you figure they've got to be armed. They've kindly laid out some weapons in front of us here. We've got two nasty-looking things. They're like a kind of scythe. But with this, how would you describe this? Well, one of instrumental to the Chin's rise to power was the increasing use of infantry and infantrymen. They needed weapons that could be able to hold off cavalry charges, chariot charges. And so if you can't go after the guys on the horse,

go after the horse. And so long spears, long weapons that we would think of as halberds, right? These are exactly the kind of weapons you might want to use to be able to hold your enemy at bay while still inflicting some damage. Yeah, very, very nasty edge on these bronze. I mean, they still look like they could do damage after more than 2,000 years. And the fact they're bronze, is that important? Well, this is an era when iron weapons are supplanting bronze weapons in the field. So why are these weapons bronze? It's a real mystery. Some people theorize that maybe this is another indication that the terracotta warriors are ceremonial in nature and not

necessarily to represent an actual army. Either way, I don't think I'd want to get stabbed with one of them. No, exactly. And these weapons, bronze weapons, have been used on the battlefields. They're certainly lethal. What are these markings on them? Can you make out these? Sure. So each of the different weapons or the weapons before us have a small inscription.

And this inscription contains information about the manufacturer of the particular weapon and incredibly detailed information, including the prime minister who was in charge at the time, and in this particular case, the very famous official Lu Buwei, who is central to the story of the rise of the Qin. But not only that, we get the information about the supervisor of the workshop and even the worker who was responsible for crafting this particular blade. So you can trace the chain of command from one of the highest officials in the land

down to the actual worker who forged this blade. And think about what this means. We're going from a system where you have feudal lords who maybe have like a blacksmith on staff to now an army that requires weapons created in workshops. We might not necessarily call them factories, but the idea of mass production, and with mass production requires quality control. With quality control, you can't manage what you

can't measure. You got to know who is responsible if this weapon breaks in the field or while you're trying to install it in a mausoleum. Do we think some of these weapons used, recycled, brought out of imperial armories, or do you think they were made specially for these warriors? You know, a lot of people think so. There's been some interesting dating techniques used on the weapons, and so some of the weapons seem to be from an earlier date. It's really hard to tell with weapons of this nature, but it would suggest that in the rush to perhaps finish the mausoleum, maybe some of the weapons were like,

well, we don't have these weapons, but we've got some in the storeroom, maybe we'll bring these out and hand them out, if you will. We can be really confident that as the first emperor or the king of chin as he was when he marched across the frontier to stamp out the opposing states his men would have been carrying weapons exactly like this yeah it's a pretty good indication of the kind of weapons that they would have used on the battlefield and the idea that you would be marching again these rows of soldiers, conscript soldiers, holding weapons made by either conscript or convict labor. Think about the kind of bureaucracy or government or state that sends that kind of army into the field.

Get a little sense of the person behind that state. In a way, these weapons are just as informative, and they might be slightly less eye-catching than the warriors themselves but they are a critical part of the story here at this mausoleum, an indication of that money and ambition that's gone into this place. Absolutely I think you know tombs in general around the world tell us as much about the living sometimes as the dead and that is no less true here at Jin Shi Huang Di's mausoleum and these weapons that we're looking at on this table, very much a part of that story. Is there anything else about these weapons that maybe give

us a hint of why the Qin was so successful? Well, we think about innovations in military technology. Usually when you have a rise to power, there's some kind of great leap in technology behind it. With the state of Qin, it's interesting because some of the most important innovations, we think, probably came originally from some of the other states, like the state of Chu, other states in the Warring Kingdoms period. But the Chin were able to systematize them,

to utilize them, things like the crossbow, for example. We kind of theorize it may have come from another place, but the Chin really used the crossbow effectively in the field. And hopefully we can see some of those crossbows and bolts in a little while. States that struggle to hold back the Qin armies with their deadly weapons on the battlefield change their approach.

They turn their sights on the Qin king, believing if they destroy the head, the rest will follow. So assassins are sent to the royal court. Well, it becomes one of the most famous stories in Chinese history. It's the subject that has been made into movies, two relatively recent movies, both quite good. Both of these movies center on a figure known as Jing Ke. Jing Ke was sent by the King of Yan

to go to the court of the King of Qin at that point, before he was Qin Shi Huang, to assassinate him. And the plan was this. Qin Shi Huang wanted the head of a traitorous general. That traitorous general just happened to live in the state of Yan. The king said, you know what, we're going to need your head. So they took his head and they took a scroll and they rolled up inside the scroll a poison dagger. And Jingo and his associate traveled to the state of Qin and they came into the throne room and they presented the gifts to the king of Qin.

There's a story too that his associate got kind of cold feet, nervous, freaked out, panic attack, which put everyone a little bit on edge. And when he unrolled the scroll or the painting or whatever it was and pulled out the poison dagger, he swung and missed. And in the words of the immortal American philosopher Omar from the TV show The Wire, if you come at the king, you best not miss.

He missed. Now here's the problem, though. They're in the throne room. You've got this assassin with a poison dagger. You have the emperor. He's a fighter, but he's got his ceremonial sword, which is one of these long, clumsy things. So he's reaching around, trying to pull a ceremonial sword out of his scabbard. And of course, now it becomes a complete bedlam because there are no soldiers in the throne room. You're not allowed to have weapons in the throne room unless you're the emperor. So you have like some

courtiers and the court physician who's there who manages to distract Jing Ke by throwing his medicine bag or something at the guy, hits him, giving the emperor just time to pull out his sword, stab Jing Ke, wounding him. And by then the soldiers were in like, hey, we heard a noise, can we hear something happening here? They subdued Jing Ke and the emperor then finished him off with his sword.

So did he become paranoid? He was already paranoid, but now he was paranoid and vengeful. He was not somebody who suffered insults and attacks very well. And so he thought, OK, well, if the state of Yan, which was considerable distance away from the state of Qin, if Yan is actually going to try to kill me, I had on my to-do list other states nearby, but let's just go wipe out the state of Yan. And that's exactly what he did. He sent his armies against Yan.

Again, Yan is up in the northeast. That's sort of where present-day Beijing is. The armies move into the state of Yan. They basically wipe the Yan state off the map and force the Yan king to flee almost to the Korean border. Wow. Another warring state down. With their state-of-the-art technology, formidable armies and plentiful resources,

the Qin state completes its conquest and takes control of the seven states by 221 BCE. Ying Zheng changes his name to Qin Shi Huangdi, the first emperor of China, and sets about unifying the disjointed states. In many ways, it's the start of China as we know it. You listen to Dan Snow's History Hit. There's more coming. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes who were rarely the best of friends,

murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. How big a job was it to unify China?

You know, you think about all the challenges over the years or over the centuries to try to unify Europe under a common market or a common union. And then you have to apply that now to the 3rd century BCE. And of course you do have different scripts, different spoken languages, different systems of weights and measures, different currencies. You've got to bring that together under one system. The technology may be different, but the demands of building a state are remarkably the same then as they are now.

You start with infrastructure. If you're going to be able to feed a lot of people, if you're gonna mobilize a lot of resources, you need the infrastructure to do that. And one of the things that Chin State did even before they started their path of conquest, and especially after they unified China, was developing systems of roads, canals, irrigation works,

all the things you need to truly harness the power of the people to enrich your state. These were enormous projects of engineering that even in the modern age we look at and we're like, wow, I mean, how did you do that? The canal systems, these roads, some of them clinging to the mountains, barely clinging on to rock. We think roads, but actually we'd probably look at it and go, that feels more like I'm walking the plank across a very high ravine. Nevertheless, it completely transformed the connections

between all these disparate parts of what became China. I mean, we think about the Qin emperor unifying China by force, sure. But you can make an equally good argument that he unified or created an idea of a unified empire through infrastructure as much as he did through his military. What about another famous infrastructure project, one that people will be familiar with, the start of the so-called Great Wall of China? You know, when you go to China today, you go to Beijing, you go to some of these places,

you see the Great Wall, and the tour guides always say, this was built by the Qin Emperor 2,000 years ago, and we have this idea of this, like, structure that we're standing on existing for centuries and centuries going back to the time you know of these warriors here but the reality is a little bit more complicated wall building has been a part of building states in China for as long as it's been states in China during the warring states period the states would build walls between them they especially build walls along the northern frontier of Chinese civilization against those people from Central Asia and Inner Asia who may be coming down from the steppe.

Once the Qin unify all of China together, now wall building takes on an additional significance. The walls inside their empire, they get taken down. But on the northern frontier, now that you really have an empire, you want to hold on to it, they start linking up what really were fairly crude barrier walls and border markers you know this was often pressed earth these aren't the bricks and towers of the postcards we see from china today and it took tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of people possibly to build the mausoleum to fight the wars to build the roads you know honestly an uncountable number of people

were involved building the wall. There are stories, I want to say myths, that the bodies of the workers are embedded in the wall. Now, that's a myth because obviously a wall that has bodies embedded in it is not a structurally sound wall. But the myth comes from a story in which a farmer was taken away to work on the wall. He never came back. His wife went through all these adventures to find him. She goes up to the wall and she finds out that her husband is dead. She lets out a heart-rending cry, or at least a wall-rending cry. The wall breaks and there is his body. And so from there comes the myth. Now, think about myths, as we all know. Just because

it's a myth doesn't mean it's not true. While there may not be bodies buried in the wall, literally, the idea that thousands and thousands and thousands of people likely gave their lives in the service of these major building projects, walls, roads, canals, is certainly a part of the legacy of the Qin. The Qin state became more bureaucratic, sort of less feudal, less aristocratic. Do they roll those reforms out across China? They do. And I think that one of the challenges they faced once they unified the state and they had all these different kingdoms now part of their own entity, how do you impose your systems on places that maybe just recently came into the fold, had very different economic and cultural systems or different topography.

I think the emperor and his ministers, particularly people like Li Si, they felt, you know, in order to effectively administer an empire, everyone's got to be literally on the same page. One of the things that the emperor and his ministers are credited with is at least simplifying or creating one standard that then was imposed outwardly on the conquered kingdoms.

He standardizes the money. outwardly on the conquered kingdoms. He standardizes the money. He standardizes the system of writing, or at least he's credited with doing so. He standardizes everything, and it sets a template by which the power is in the center. The local has no power. Center appoints the officials. They go to the local. Center makes the laws. The local follows.

It's like you're describing kind of an autocratic, bureaucratic system. And I'm tempted to sort of say, is this in the genome of the Chinese state that develops? Well, you know, the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, once he conquers the known world or the known lands, he wants to centralize all the power in his hands. That's never a good thing. So without getting too political about it, what you see today is a part of a long tradition of highly centralized authoritarianism, but with a thin coating of Leninism painted over it. You're using the word like imposed a lot. Is it pretty brutal? Is it pretty top down? Is there buy-in from local elites? The way that they were able to spread their systems throughout the recently warring kingdoms and now pacified states was

not well received necessarily by the people there. A lot of that comes from historians of the subsequent Han dynasty and they tell stories of books being burned, scholars buried alive, whole families wiped out for the infractions of just one member of the clan. And some of the punishments and some of the execution methods, they were, well, let's just say irregular, being sawn in half, drawn and quartered. You know, punishments that often were inflicted in a way that would be publicly humiliating. So cutting off your nose, tattooing your face, cutting off limbs for, you know, offenses that didn't require capital punishment, but still

needed to have some kind of response. You want people to be on edge. You want people to realize that every action has consequence. If you fight well in the field, you get more land. If you grow more food, you get more land. You know, these are incentives, powerful incentives. The idea, the philosophy of legalism. Some people say it's based on this notion that people are evil or human nature is evil. That's often how it's interpreted in English from Chinese philosophy. But a better translation might be human nature is relentlessly self-interested. How do we tap into that powerful self-interest? So again, you do good, you turn in

a criminal, you get rewarded. All these things are rewards that you can get, but you always know if you screw up, if you are a coward in the field, that's going to cost you. If you commit a crime, and again, the infractions could be small with severe punishments. Sometimes in the case of the death penalty, it wasn't so much a matter of whether you were going to die, it was how you were going to die and how many members of your family would you have to watch die before you were finally executed. And the irony of this, as has been pointed out by many historians in China for centuries, is that many of these legalist officials who came up with this system died by being caught up in this web of rewards and punishments. Li Si, the prime minister who assisted the emperor Qin Shi Huang himself, would also become the victim of trumped up charges and was executed.

also become the victim of trumped-up charges and was executed. Imposing legalism, standardising systems, building infrastructure, Qin Shi Huang's vision for a mighty China takes shape in an astonishingly short amount of time. But the emperor is also preoccupied with something else. Building a Chinese empire is just one of his obsessions. The other is eternal life chasing immortality. Ching Shiuang is determined to find a way to cheat death. He regularly consults alchemists and magicians, travels across China searching for herbs and plants he thinks may hold the secret ingredient for immortality. He's also doing other things, he's looking for an elixir of life.

I was reading that every time he stopped one of his imperial progresses, he's doing things like meeting centenarians, people who've reached 100 and just kind of trying to find out their secrets, which I love. Right, and part of it too is he hears rumors of, well, not quite fountains of youth,

but masters or mountains or areas where there's some key ingredient formula or something that would unlock the secret to an eternal life. And so he travels far and wide looking for these things or visiting some of these places. And he also sends out his court alchemists on special missions, you know, all the way up to high mountains, out to the sea. There's one story of some alchemists who were sent to a land beyond the sea that had obviously figured this out. And when they got to Japan,

the people who were living in Japan at the time were like, yeah, no, we're still looking for that ourselves. We can't go back and tell them we failed. So what's real estate like in Japan these days? Because we're thinking of moving. He sounds like a tech bro, a modern tech bro looking for the elixir of life. One of the concoctions the emperor insists on consuming during his pursuit

of immortality is mercury. Ironically, it's what kills him in the end, just 13 years into his emperorship. Given that the elixir of life had remained elusive, the emperor turned his attention to another way of securing eternal life. As a cosmic ruler, his grand mausoleum complex that reflected his real life at court in terracotta and bronze. His burial tomb was at the centre, protected by an army of terracotta warriors. This is Dr Janice Lee, who's been a senior archaeologist at the Qingshuang Mausoleum Complex Museum for many years. What does it tell us about how the first emperor thought he was going to rule forever? I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research

from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades.

Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. hit wherever you get your podcasts. The Muslim is another way to pursue immortality. His insurance policy. Yeah, for the afterlife. And also this afterlife is parallel with the daily life.

So he don't think he died. He just lived in other worlds and they're parallel with the Chin Empire. Yeah, so that's, I think, think he died. He just lived in other worlds and parallel with the Qing Empire. So that's, I think, what he believes. And what do you think the terracotta warriors, in particular, are for? The terracotta warriors, I think people are always thinking about this, really the emperor is built to protect in his afterlife. They are functional. Because you're thinking about this life-size target warriors, and also they're equipped with lethal, functional weapons.

So this light means these real troops of the Qin Dynasty. And if other enemies come, these military troops can fight with other enemies. Ghostly battles in the afterlife. Yeah, so I think this, yeah. Necropolis of Shinshuandi is believed to be over 50 square kilometers.

That is the size of Manhattan Island. And people were brought from all over the newly established Chinese empire. They were drafted in to construct this behemoth. I've come up to Mount Li. It towers over Lintong. Over there in the wettest city of Xi'an. Now that was the ancient Chinese capital of Xianyang, it's Qin Shiwandi's capital. And there's people hiking up here, people selling tea, an extraordinary mixture of soft drinks,

which I couldn't even guess at their flavour. And down there, as I look down to the east, I can see the tree-covered mound. Qin Shiwandi is buried in there. To this day, I still can't quite believe that fact. And when I first came here, me and many other people just used to sort of stroll up and look out at the view and wonder what lay beneath our feet. It's been a feature of this landscape, obviously, for so long, that for centuries, no one really thought much about it.

There were references to the first emperor's burial mound. People were sort of roughly aware that it was there but there was very little detail and there was certainly no mention of anything else beyond the mound. So for example no idea that the vast terracotta army existed. In the 1960s some archaeologists decided to take a closer look at the mound. They took some surveys and they realised that the area surrounding the mound was crisscrossed with the foundations of old walls and gateways and also chambers, tunnels under the ground as well, which all makes it quite difficult to say why no excavations took place at the time. It wasn't until 1974 when the first terracotta warriors were unearthed that the world realised

just how important, just how remarkable the things that lay beneath the ground here were. From that first terracotta warrior more and more of the area down there was excavated. First of all revealing vast numbers of other warriors, weapons and a host of other statues, people that would have inhabited the emperor's court, scholars and clerks and entertainers and animals. But don't forget, all of this is just the area surrounding the holiest of holies itself, the mound.

And in 2005, attention was turned to that mound and a research team used ground penetrating radar, they used electrical resistance measurements, they took core samples and they built up a picture of what lay within the mound and that all revealed something extraordinary. What they believed they found was that inside the mound was a large pyramid and within that a sealed up space

really the size of a football pitch so this could only be one possible thing the first emperor's tomb it's in there folks we think the tomb would be laden with treasures but to this day no one has been inside really folks compared to ch, compared to Chinchewandee, Tutankhamun was a short-lived, cash-strapped, provincial teenager buried in a shoebox. This could be the most epic sight ever uncovered. We know from the records of the Grand Historian, which is our only real historical source that refers to the tomb, that there was a model of, well, the universe inside, in fact, certainly the

first emperor's realm, the starry skies above in the ceiling with all sorts of important constellations on it, and then down below a model of his empire with palaces and cities and then waterways of mercury to represent the Yangtze, the Yellow River and the Eastern Ocean. to represent the Yangtze, the Yellow River and the Eastern Ocean. And by some strange mechanical device, that water was kept moving. It really is the stuff of legends. And just when you think it couldn't get any more Indiana Jones, there are also, apparently, according to this same text,

crossbows set up as booby traps to shoot anyone who dares to break into the tomb. There are no plans at the moment to open the tomb. I've been talking to lots of archaeologists out here and they all agree that this is something you only get a chance to do once. And people want to be absolutely certain that we've got the technology and the techniques before we burrow into that tomb and potentially contaminate it or destroy vital archaeology in the process. I've said it before and I'll say it again. This is the world's greatest unexcavated archaeological site that we know exists. It is just electrifying and every time we make a new discovery here it just raises

so many new questions. What do the terracotta warriors, the stone acrobats and bronze chariots, tell us about the Emperor's court, his obsessions and life in the First Dynasty of China? Join me for episode two of this mini-series on Friday, as we discover more about the astonishing things that have been found at this site, including the mass graves and the bones of those who toiled their death in staggering numbers to fulfill the Emperor's vision for the afterlife, from the workers to his concubines. We'll also chart the fall of the Qin Dynasty, from the first Emperor's death and the chaos, the disarray that he left upon his untimely death. You do not want to miss it, so hit follow in your podcast player and it'll drop into your

library automatically. This episode was produced by Marianne Desforges and edited by Dougal Patmore. Bye-bye. you