Dan Snow's History Hit - The Terracotta Warriors

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

The world was astonished when 8000 terracotta soldiers were unearthed in 1974 by Chinese farmers digging a well; the warriors opened a window to the first dynasty of China unlike anything seen before.Dan travels to the mausoleum of the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang in China to discover what this clay army and his enormous mausoleum can tell us about life in the court of the First Emperor. Dan also goes in search of the mass graves of the workers who toiled to their deaths to build the mausoleum and traces the chaotic fall of the Qin and how the Emperor's pursuit of eternal life led to a gruesome and premature death.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.

We don't know for certain how the first emperor of China died, but the story that's told is a grisly one. It's believed that in his obsessive pursuit of eternal life, he poisoned himself by consuming mercury, something he was told that would actually help him live forever. We think we know a little bit more about the events surrounding his death. Written up in the Records of the Grand Historian, an ancient text on China's history, it tells a story of the emperor dying far away

from his imperial capital. Worried the news would cause an uprising throughout the empire, his entourage ordered that his death be kept secret, at least until they arrived back in Xianyang, his fabulous capital city. But the journey back lasted days, and after a while his rotting body began to smell. An imperial decree was issued. The grand historian Sma Qian writes, It was a repugnant end for the mighty emperor who had conquered and unified China. A man who ruled over an empire as powerful and vast as Alexander or the Romans. By 210 BC, he was dead.

Age 49, driven to insanity by his power and paranoia. His Grand Mausoleum, protected by his formidable Terracotta Army, would now be put to use. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit, and I'm in China to explore the secrets of the Terracotta Warriors and what they reveal about the rise and fall of China's First Dynasty under the visionary and tyrannical emperor, Qin Shiwen Di. These ancient statues at the mausoleum of the first emperor have helped us to piece

together the story of China's first empire, one of extraordinary engineering innovation and mighty imperial power that laid the foundations for China as we know it today. This is episode two, the Terracotta Warriors. For centuries, we've only had very fragmentary knowledge about the Qin dynasty and life in ancient China. And much of what we know about it comes from a book I've mentioned a couple of times, The Records of the Grand Historian, a huge tome. It's definitely our main source of understanding what went on

as the Qin rose to power and unified China. This copy I'm looking at talks about the birth of the First Emperor when he was a minor princeling in the Qin royal family. It gives us potted biographies of various important people at court. And it talks about the death of the First Emperor and the downfall of the Qin. It is a rollicking read, folks. It takes a place in Chinese history not unlike Herodotus as one of the first great history books in the Eastern tradition.

But it was written over a hundred years after the events we're describing in this podcast and how much can we trust it? Well, I'm going to head over and meet Jeremiah Ginny, an expert in Chinese history who's lived in Beijing for 20 years and is now going to shed a bit more light for me on this guide. Hey, Jeremiah, we're sitting on the nice pines. We're still in the Mausoleum

complex. We've got these beautiful mountains, a little bit hazy now in the spring sunshine looking down upon us. It feels like a good place to be buried if you're the first emperor of China in search of everlasting life. Part of planning a tomb isn't just the construction you're going to do. It's also the place you're going to do. It's also the place you're going to put it. And the idea was you tried to find places that had power, whether that's a place that balanced between the mountains and water or in some way tapped into the power of the land. You know, we think about things like feng shui and it's almost become a cliche, but I mean, it's still very important. And the idea that the land itself has a pattern,

and that you must fit into that pattern, both in life and especially in death. And I want to know more about this source because it's one of my favourite sources. It's got the best name of any source in the world. The records of the grand historian. They're pretty essential. I think for anyone who does history for a living, Dan, being called grand historian kind of seems like something you'd shoot for. But Sima Qian and his father were some of the first historians to kind of create a template for how you would do a dynastic history. But a lot of what we know about the Qin Empire and the Qin Emperor comes from Sima Qian. And there's a question of, okay, how much is this exaggeration?

How much of this is hearsay? But we have to remember, he's really writing this only a hundred or so years after the end of the Qin Empire. So this would be not unlike, I mean, obviously recording technology makes this a little different, but it would be not unlike you or I writing or talking about something that happened at the turn of the 20th century.

Jeremiah, what does he tell us about this tomb complex? In the text, it reads of rivers and lakes made of mercury, fixtures on the ceiling that are the stars in the sky. It is essentially his empire rendered into the afterlife inside this mausoleum. The descriptions of it defy credibility. And I think that's one reason for so many years people found it incredible and perhaps unbelievable. But then we started thinking in terms of modern examinations of the tomb. And Sima Qian, some of his descriptions seem to be quite,

if not totally accurate, at least validated. My favorite description of the tomb was the one a historian made the other day, calling it like an underground crazy golf course. I like that. What's your gut and reliability? Can we trust Sima Qian? I guess in one way, the discovery of this mausoleum complex has been an interesting bit of corroboration because he does talk about it in the book. It's a little bit of validation because, you know, for years like, well, he's obviously exaggerating. I mean, lakes and rivers of mercury. I mean, who does that? And then it turns out using sort of modern methods, it appears that there are actually rivers and lakes of mercury there. So suddenly the question becomes, OK, well, he's talking about armies of 700,000, 800,000. Was he exaggerating? And people said, well, we thought he was

exaggerating about the mausoleum. Who knows? Maybe he's actually more accurate in some of the other things he wrote or could be. And so he does talk about the first emperor's plans for his own death, the mausoleum, the way he lays out a sort of model of the cosmos, the emperor of China and has himself buried there. He doesn't mention the terracotta warriors, does he? He doesn't. Whether we're talking about like Sima Qian or Marco Polo, when someone leaves something out, I don't always hold that against them as much as when they put inaccurate information in. He doesn't mention the Terracotta Warriors, but it almost feels like, you know, we're going back and say, well, this huge and enormous history that you've written, by the way,

involving great personal and physical sacrifice, you couldn't have thrown in something about the Warriors too? I mean, I think that's asking a lot. Could it also imply that the Warriors weren't even seen as in the great scheme of this mighty complex? Well, either it means maybe they were secret and not talked about, or maybe within the great scheme of this mighty complex,

the warriors don't even deserve a mention because there's so much other amazing stuff here. I like that idea. I mean, the idea that the mausoleum with like stars in the sky and models of the empire on the floor and all of these things was just such a spectacular concept that relatively minor details like a ceremonial honor guard you know a kilometer and a half away were like yeah we'll put that in the footnotes in the paperback edition yeah you know yeah six to ten thousand soldiers buried underground that's not super interesting yeah the mausoleum complex sits in what is now really a suburb of Xi'an.

And it's only by going there that you get a sense of just how enormous it is. You enter through a big gate, like an amusement park. And you're greeted by what look like huge aircraft hangars that house two of the excavation sites. Pit one, where around 2,000 warriors are on display, standing to attention in their rows. That's the famous picture you always see. And next to it, another vast building for a pit that's still being excavated.

Beyond, there are other galleries. More hangars over excavation pits filled with terracotta acrobats, musicians, clerks, stables of horses and birds, stone armour, bronze chariots and weapons – everything the emperor needed to rule in the afterlife. As well as those, there are the tombs of other Qin royalty, and of course the 47-metre-high burial mound pyramid in the middle. All up, it's roughly the size of Manhattan. So when you think of it in its entirety,

you can see how the terracotta warriors, whose role it was to guard this kingdom in the afterlife, were overlooked by the grand historian. This is Dr Janice Lee, who's been a senior archaeologist at the site for many years, and she can explain more about the excavations and discoveries. Do we know how many pits there have been discovered so far, approximately, in the last 50 years? It estimates, including the tombs and the pits, you know, small burials, it's roughly like 500. So big and small.

But actually the three pits of Tarakid Buries are a very big one, you know, because they cover thousands of target worries. And also they have other so many pieces we still not excavated. So take me back to 1974. Some farmers are digging a well. What happens next? Yeah, so in 1974, so when farmers dug a well there and they found the pieces of target worries,

that's really accidentally. And then the archaeologists came to the site and they start to do archaeological survey. And then they find, okay, this three-piece containing thousands of tariff worries and then start to have a plan to have ongoing archaeology. So Pit 1, you've got these long lines of soldiers with a few chariots and horses, archers. How is Pit 2 and Pit 3 different to Pit 1? Yeah, Pit 1 is more infantry, but definitely they have some archers we call crossbowmen or chariots,

but they're mixed together. But Pit 2 are slightly different. Pit 2, that's kind of combination because of that times we call like military strategy because they have chariots, cavalry, archers, crossbowmen, and also the combination with infantry together. So that's a real military strategy in the Qin Dynasty. And P3, you know, only six, eight target worries. So it's supposed to be the headquarter, you know, of the P1 and P2. So probably

the military officials. So that's the commanding general. Yeah, commanding pit, you know, in P3. In those early excavations, archaeologists found the pieces for over a thousand terracotta warriors, many of which

need to be repaired and restored. The world's most stressful jigsaw puzzle. Excavations through the years continued and more manpower was needed as the full scale of what was beneath the ground started to emerge. I've come out to the countryside just by Lintong to a workshop.

It's in the shadow of Chinchuan Di's Mausoleum pyramid and the workshop belongs to Mr Han. In this workshop he builds terracotta warriors, not for the first emperor but for tourists so they can take one home with them, they can have a little piece of the terracotta army where they live. I'm going to take part in the process of creating them, stamping down the clay, pushing them into molds, and then sculpting them, because they use maybe the same methods they would have used over 2,200 years ago. But most importantly of all, I want to ask Mr. Han

about his own experience with the worries, because he was part of the original excavations in the mid-1970s. Hello, Mr. Han. Hello. How were you involved? What did you do on the excavations? So in 1976, the country decided to build a museum

because they found all these terracotta warriors. And at the time, I had just graduated from high school, so I was enlisted as a worker to help the experts, the archaeologists on the ground, to help them actually repair the terracotta warriors that they found. What on earth did you think was going on? I had no idea what these things were, where they came from. All we knew was we needed to, because we lived in a collective economy and we needed to make sure every day we worked so we could get food rations. So I just went there for work and

the experts would tell us, well, these are the burial goods from the grave of Qin Shi Huang. And so your job was just the archaeologist would bring you all the pieces and you would just stick them all together? So we had to label all the pieces we found and try to, you know, find all the pieces belonging to the same sculpture and glue them back together. We sometimes also had to draw their heads and where there were tiny pieces missing and then use clay to fill in the cracks.

So you were actually digging them out of the ground as well? Yes, at the very beginning. I was also digging them. And then later on, I moved on to repairing the statues. How many people were there? Were there just huge numbers of people in this big space? In pit one, the biggest warrior pit, there were about four or five hundred people. There were five meters of earth above the warriors, and we had no mechanical means at the time, so did everything by hand,

digging it out. When you were digging on the first bit, when you were digging, were weapons coming out of the ground as well as the warriors? Yes, I remember arrowheads, lots and lots of arrowheads, and maybe bows that were as long as 90 centimeters, but they were all crushed under fallen terracotta warriors. Before, when you were a kid, before that was discovered, did people know the burial mound was Chinchuan Di's burial mound? Yes, everyone knew at the time, not only locally, but also in Jian City, because the mound was so high and it was so obvious,

so everyone knew it was the burial mound of the first emperor. What we didn't know was just how big the entire complex was, that there were inner walls and outer walls, terracotta warriors and everything around it. Because at the time, around the mound, it was all agricultural land. I mean, when I was little, me and my friends would climb the mound and play on it. So we had no idea the mausoleum complex was so big. Now you hear the experts say that the size of the mausoleum is eight times that

of the Forbidden City. I can imagine any archaeologists listening to this sweating the idea of random members of the public being called in to fit pieces together. Obviously, things now are much more careful and meticulous. If you go to the museum you can see the conservationists and technicians piecing the warriors back together very carefully in a special roped off area surrounded all day by guards. They don't just let anyone in. So this is very exciting. We're just walking into the restricted area down into the pit itself in the vast hangar-like structure of pit one there are thousands of people crowding around the edges thousands of tourists all looking down at this gigantic pit and we are lucky enough to be

walking down into it now to get amongst the warriors there's a particular section of the pit in which they are conserving individual warriors. These pits were ransacked very shortly after the first emperor died. Somewhat undermining their eternal role as bodyguards to the emperor. As we excavate more and more of the real estate here, we do find vast numbers of warriors,

but they're all in need of enormous amounts of conservation. The one I'm standing in front of is quite slender he's about five foot seven which is pretty typical some get as tall as six foot five so they are lifelike they're a real size and it's thought they correspond to the minimum height requirements of the Chin Army and if you look very closely on some of them you can see the quality marks the water marks every time I come into these pits I'm just overwhelmed by the scale, the vision of what they were trying to achieve here. A vast army of handcrafted statues lined up in tunnels, burrowed into the earth, then covered over to be hidden for eternity. And it's so special to be among them and see them at eye level, to stare into their faces like this,

to recognise that little spark of individuality in all of their faces. And the terracotta warriors are earthen coloured, but they would have been even more realistic when they were placed in these serried ranks because they would have been painted in vivid colours, wild colours. And the best thing is there's a few around me now where you just get a sense of that colour. There's a little, there's tinges of residue. The pink colouring the face, the skin tone of the face, so it looks completely different to the warriors around it. And then this one over here has got, you can see sort of a red, the ribbons that seem to join the armour plates together.

There's several people here carrying out the painstaking work of piecing these shards of terracotta back together. And in charge is Mr Lan. He's just over here. I'll have a quick word with him. Hi, how are you? Ni hao. Ni hao. So this is the area where you reconstruct the warriors from the tiny shards. So typically, how many pieces are the warriors in

when you excavate them from the ground? So when we find these terracotta pieces in the pit, some can range up to 300 pieces, but the horses sometimes can go up to 500 pieces. A regular warrior is maybe 100 to 200 pieces. And so you just build them back up from the feet up, do you? With rebuilding these warriors, we build them bit by bit based on their colour and the body shape.

That must be such an intensive process. How long does that take your team just to build one warrior back up? So it really depends on the individual warrior that we're talking about. It depends on how much colour that we're talking about. It depends on how much colour restoration we need to do. If it's one that's not so fragmented, maybe three to six months, and one that's in a dire state is maybe two to four years. Wow, so you've got years and years and years of work left. Yes, we do. The more fragmented it is, the longer it takes, and the more colour remaining, the more preservation.

As we know, the 8,000 warriors are just a small part of the Mausoleum complex. So far, archaeologists and conservationists have discovered hundreds more terracotta figures, statues and even animal bones. This is Dr Janice Lee again. Janice Lee In addition to the target of warriors, so we found target acrobats and target, we call musicians, you know, but actually this is probably bookkeeper, you know, because we find these bronze waterfalls. And also we find, we call target officials, lots of target stablemen, because lots of stables were discovered in the Muslim complex. So you've got birds, waterfowls, you've got people looking after the waterfowls,

you've got civil servants, stable, you've got the whole of the royal court rendered in terracotta. Yes. Janice, what about the pits with animals, remains of animals in them? Do you think there were formerly alive animals buried down there as well? Oh yeah, we find large quantities of horse skeletons there. You know, there's stables in the east side of the tomb mount, and also the west side. And in addition to the horses, we find other animals. We saw a dog, we find other animals. We saw a dog and sheep and also some other birds discovered in the pit. So that's really astonishing because so many varieties of animal bones were discovered. Do you think the first emperor has just tried to build a replica of his court, his living court,

to build a replica of his court, his living court, underground. Yes, that's what we call now because like people always say kind of analog, kind of a very imitation of his real life. So everything he tried to imitate what he had in the lifetime. So let's move everything for his afterlife. So it's quite exciting because it's not just a wonderful spectacle it's not wonderful archaeology it also gives an impression of what his court was actually like yes that's exciting part because like for the qin dynasty very short only 15 years so we have even we have some historical documents written sources but it's quite limited you, only several paragraphs about the Qin dynasty and also no details, you know, because this is official writing.

But actually the Emperor Qin Shuanzi Muslim gave really solid material evidence, you know, to see what the emperor's palace looked like, what his court looked like, what that time the stable looked like, you know, what the living of the emperor's life at that time. So he loves nature, he loves birds, so there's a romantic side to him as well as this militaristic side. That's a good question. Yeah, I think he had some fantasy about, you know, he pursued immortality. I think that's why he buried all these objects he fancied, the birds and also the

other animals and also like acrobats performed for him. So I think that's his characters, not actually the emperor, you know, for the military success or political success and also for his daily entertainment. Janice, we see the product of the labour. It must have been hundreds of thousands of people. An army of people must have built that tomb complex and that whole site. Give me a sense of the scale of it. In the written resources, you know, in Sima Qian's Shi Ji,

I mentioned 700,000 people was involved in this project. And we discovered a variety of sources of these labours. So we find skeletons, you know, some of the skeletons of the labours. And also we find lots of names on the back of the target worries. You listen to Dan Snow's history, there's more coming up. 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. Well I've come about a kilometre away from the mausoleum now and I'm walking through neat rows of pomegranate trees laid out in Orchard.

And in the distance there I can see some very rural buildings, quite different to the tall, shiny new tower blocks that you're showed as you go through the middle of these new gigantic Chinese cities. And I'm here looking for a very important part of the first emperor's tomb complex, but not one that he perhaps put much thought into I'm here to learn more about the unsung heroes of this gigantic mortuary complex the first emperor was infamous for his gigantic building projects not just this tomb complex but something like 3,000 kilometers of great wall 7,000 kilometers of road canals and the massive building projects around his new capital city when he built something like

700 palaces for himself his family and the tens of thousands of nobles that he forced to move here members of the nobility of the competitor states that he'd managed to defeat and absorb. One recent calculation is that he impressed two million people to work on these projects. That's between 15 and 30 percent of the working population of China at the time. And for those individuals, life could be pretty grim. It was incredibly strict. were worked hard there was very tough discipline they had to obey a very particular set of laws and many of them unsurprisingly didn't make it they died on the job and in this orchard they've discovered some of their graves and I'm here exploring with Jude Sohon he's one of the senior figures at the first

emperor mausoleum. He's going to tell me a little bit more about the life and death of these men. How do we know that these bodies here were workers? So, firstly, we are outside the mausoleum complex, but still close. When they found the human bones here, they also found broken shards of pottery with references to names and potentially who these people were. Secondly, and most tellingly, they also found ancient shackles

and things that seemed like they belonged to people who were serving some kind of sentence or being punished. A combination of these things made the archaeologists here think this is the site of a planned grave for the huge amount of workers who would have worked on the emperor's mausoleum complex. A lot of them were probably criminals, indentured or slaves. Do we think that they were just worked to death? They worked so hard that they dropped dead?

Or do we think they were maybe killed? So from their discovery, the archaeologists believe most of these workers died from being overtired and malnourished, but with the exception of a few who might have tried to run away and then were perhaps beaten to death by overseers. Also, these people were quite young when they died. How were the bodies found here? How were they laid out? So when they excavated here, the bodies, each person had their own kind of slot to be buried in.

The whole building of the mausoleum process coincided with the expansion of the Qin Empire. So as the Qin took over more kingdoms and more people, they knew they could get more workers, slaves, from other places. The inscriptions on the pottery shards found here with the bodies identify where the workers were from. Some quite far from here. So walking through this orchard, how much of this have you looked beneath,

or do you think there could be workers' graves spread right across this whole area that we haven't yet discovered? This project of building the mausoleum lasted over 30 years. It was such a big project and so many people died, so I believe this gravesite is very big. OK, there's a concrete pillar with an inscription on it. It's a modern marker placed above the gravesite. He's just scraping a bit of mud and muck off the top. It's a pretty humble, low-key marker for such an enormous gravesite. So this marker, it says, this village is the site of the graves of the mausoleum workers.

But actually, as archaeology work continues, they find more clues and in my opinion, this is an area that connects this grave to the other known grave site and in fact it is just one, one mass grave. The whole thing? One mass grave? And even beyond this massive area, they also found workers' graves elsewhere, on another side of the mausoleum, but that one was even more crude. It was an abandoned kiln and they found 46 bodies and they were buried in a very gruesome way, stacked on top of one another in the kiln. These people might have had an even lower status because they weren't even worthy of a grave. Thrown into an empty space.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest space. 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. The legacy of the first emperor of China, Qin Shuandii, well, it's difficult. He and his Qin predecessors set the foundations for the behemoth that is China. He unified disparate warring states. He standardised the language and the money.

He undertook enormous infrastructure projects like canals, roads and walls, including the Great Wall, that protected China as it thrived and grew. But what made China broke its people. He accomplished what he did through force. Brutal measures like legalism, rewards and harsh punishments, forced labour, migration, slavery, as well as the execution of scholars and opposition who thought differently from him. He exercised absolute power, so when he died in 210 BCE, it didn't take long for things to fall apart, for a rebellion to break out, and for his closest advisors to eye up how they might seize power for themselves. This is Dr. Jeremiah Jenny again on the sudden fall of the

Qin dynasty. Jeremiah, the Qin, hundreds of years in the making, unimaginably successful, bind China together, create this empire. It all falls apart in a couple of years. What's going on there? Well, you have the enormous power of the first emperor and his officials who are able to bind the empire together by mobilizing their resources, marching their armies and using what really are effective if brutal tactics and techniques to complete this immense enterprise. But the same policies, the same tactics, the same strategy that you use to conquer the world or to conquer an empire might not be the same ones you need to keep it together or to keep it going. And were they too dependent on the figure, on the living, breathing body of

the first emperor himself? I mean, because obviously when he dies, it unravels pretty quick. Yeah, it's people sometimes say, well, you know, what did he accomplish? Because as soon as he's gone, his empire crumbles, or, you know, within a couple of years. So he held this thing together, and then suddenly he's gone,

and the whole thing falls apart. It would suggest that he had a massive gravitational pull on this edifice that he has constructed, one that his son and grandson just were not even remotely able to replicate. So are the cracks showing even before the first emperor dies? I mean, he's he, well, future historians may be biased, but they suggest a man in pursuit of eternal life, kind of getting a bit paranoid, not wanting to show himself to people. Well, that's megalomania

for you. You know, that's certainly how he's portrayed. But at the same time, I think there's a little bit of not slander, but this idea that he was only in it for himself and that he was only in it for his own power and glory. And I'm sure that was part of it. He had a vision. And like a lot of other great leaders, both good and terrible, that pursuit of the vision was just as important perhaps or essential to their identity, but also could lead them down some pretty dark paths

that we might describe as like megalomaniacal or tyrannical. So he dies on a pretty distant edge of the empire, ironically looking for a elixir of life, I believe. Who takes over after he dies? So with the emperor, when he dies, you have his younger son, you have this eunuch named Zhao Gao, who is part of this inner circle. You also have another minister named Li Si, who is a very famous or prime minister figure under the first emperor. They're still thinking about what the future might look like.

And if you're a minister, you're one of these powers in the palace, but not the power in the palace. One of the ways you can achieve your aims is by tying your fortunes to one of the potential heirs. And of course, this isn't unique to China. This is the story, you can't unique to China. This is the story, you can see it in Rome. It's the plot of many Shakespeare plays. It's the plot of not a

few fantasy TV shows of recent years. And so if you're going to tie your fortunes to one of the princes, it's preferable of a prince that you can control. The emperor is only 49 when he dies. of a prince that you can control. The emperor is only 49 when he dies. They realize that having this emperor die far away from the capital may hurt the chances of this younger son becoming the next prince or may cause problems. So they just keep it a secret. But they have to get the body back to the capital,

back to where the tomb is. And that's gonna take a little while because despite all the infrastructure and roads, it's still in the ancient world so they start bringing the body back they put him inside a litter and they talk to the litter as if the litter is talking back to them it issues orders the litter but eventually it issues more than orders this litter it issues odors and so to cover it up the one of the ministers who's traveling with them gets the idea to put baskets or carriages of fish in front and behind this litter the whole thing just seems like this complete comedy of errors but yet they managed to get the body such as it is back to the

capital and that's when they announced the death of the emperor, having allowed some time to politically sideline perhaps the chosen son and the more capable son to move the son that was in the emperor's company when he died into position to take over and to allow this eunuch and this minister to move forward with their plans for consolidating their control over the levers of power. So they put the slightly more pliant son on, maybe, and he's not as effective as his big brother might have been. No I mean his big brother one of the reasons he was sent out to guard the frontier one reason he's away from the capital is because he was capable. He also because of his time out you know guarding the the northern frontier he had an army around him he had the support of some of the military officers. Is this

the kind of person that you want in the center if you've got designs to try to run the empire through the emperor? Well, probably not. So you want perhaps his younger brother who is less talented and more, shall we say, open to suggestion. So when the son who's guarding the north, the one who probably should have been the emperor, when he finds out what's happened, it seems like he was ordered to commit suicide

as one of the posthumous orders of his father of course his father's been dead for a couple months and a lot of people have kind of asked like well like why i mean surely you must have thought something was up but it seems like this prince maybe i'm reading too much into this, but he either couldn't quite fathom that somebody would fake like their father's orders, or maybe, you know, filial piety. I mean, we joke about it in Chinese history, but it's a thing. Filial piety, this idea that, you know, you listen to your parents, your parents' word is like ironclad law. And the idea that if his father's last request was to have him commit suicide or not be the emperor, well, a loyal son doesn't question it. So for whatever reason, he takes himself out of the game.

And that opens up opportunities for these conspirators to take over. But conspirators are conspirators for a reason. It's a personality type that does not lend itself to playing well with others. And once you succeed in your conspiracy, sometimes you start looking at the other guy and thinking, what's he plotting now? And that kind of is what happened to this group.

The final days of the Qin dynasty were chaotic. Zhou Gao assassinated his co-conspirator Li Xiu in a grisly manner known as the Five Pains that involves chopping off various body parts before cutting a person in half at the waist and exterminating his entire extended family. Not long after, fearing for his own safety amid a series of uprisings, Zhou Gao then has the second Qin Emperor assassinated. Then he's assassinated himself by the third and final Qin emperor, the grandson of Qin Shiwen Di. Meanwhile, leaders from the other former states conquered by the Qin decide to challenge their rule during this

moment of weakness. And from there, it all just falls apart. So as often happens, in some ways, like if the first emperor sets the template for the founding of an empire, the end of his dynasty, it sets the template for how these things tend to fall apart. You have the center starts having weak leadership or confused leadership. And of course, outside of the center, you start having small rebellions, mid-sized rebellions that start to undermine the foundations of inevitability or foundations of invincibility of, or perceived invincibility of the central rule. When that occurs, people with ideas of their own, people with designs of their own, people with revenge on their minds, will say this might be an opportunity to strike. In future dynasties, sometimes they have misjudged that timing to dire results for them. But in this particular case, some of these figures,

particularly from the state called Chu, which was one of the big states of the Warring States period, one of the major powers, was subjugated by the Qin. This was a big moment in their road to conquest. But Chu, which is kind of in the, which today the central part of China, but then was sort of the southern area of the civilization, they found it very difficult to accept the way that the Qin ran their state. They found it very difficult to accept the kind of extractive bureaucratic nature of Qin rule. And there was a lot of resistance among the people and especially the former nobility of Chu that never totally went away despite, you know, the harsh suppression of the Qin.

And it is probably not surprising that the most effective or certainly the most stern resistance came out of Chu. And a military figure in particular, one of the most famous in Chinese history, named Xiang Yu, organizes his armies. And it's Xiang Yu who kind of takes the capital here and causes all the destruction, you know, burning the Emperor's Palace that was still under construction possibly damaging parts of the mausoleum of the terracotta wars we're not totally sure but that seems to fit the timeline he seems to have been content after kind of sacking the capital and getting his revenge and saying all right well we're going home now and i think there was almost an idea that maybe we

wanted to go back to the state like i'm true and, and you're this state, and I'm that state. And it is interesting that other military leaders at the time, they were like, yeah, I see what you were doing there. But we kind of like the idea of a unitary state. We just don't want the Qin to be in charge of it. of it. And one of these leaders who came from the state, or if you will, the area or the clan of Han decides that, okay, maybe we need a force that can actually unify this together. And it sets off then another war between this new power called Han and Xiang Yu and the Chu that ultimately leads to the defeat of Xiang Yu, the ascendancy of the Han, and a whole new dynasty, one that lasts much longer than the Qin.

That's what's so interesting. We know the Turkuatu warriors. We think that they were in this upheaval, that they were burned and smashed and the roof caved in. Other pits, though, show that that wasn't the case in every single part of the Mursaleen. So do we dare to dream that the central burial chamber of the first emperor might be untouched what it was your gut telling you there it is one of the most fascinating things to me the idea that even in the

21st century after all the grave robbing archaeological digs and everything that's happened there is still one of the most magnificent tombs on earth is likely still untouched inside. There's some good reasons for that. And, you know, some of it is what we see at the Terracotta Warriors, this idea that we only get one shot at this, right? Once we open that up, what's going to happen to the things inside? So it is almost a responsibility to future generations to take a beat and say, OK, we don't open it.

He started himself the first emperor. He said he created China. Is that true? I mean, does modern China owe everything to this founding figure? How sophisticated was the regime that he imposed and how lasting? So he creates a template. First of all, this idea that what becomes thought of as Chinese civilization is only at its full flowering when it is unified, and that when it breaks apart, that is not a natural state. That must be corrected. And that's something that subsequent dynasties, even after long periods of disunion, were always trying to bring it all together. And this goes down to the 20th century and 21st

century, really, if you want to get political about it. The other part of it too, is he sets a standard for setting standards. The idea that everything must be unified and the center controls what that will look like, what the money will look like, what the writing will look like, what the wheels on the carts will look like. And the idea that the center makes the laws. They send those laws, promulgate them down to the local. They don't listen to the local. Local listens to the center. Officials who administer the empire.

These are not local lords tied to their domains. These are bureaucrats appointed by the center, sent down to the different levels, and they report back up. Tax money goes to the center, sent down to the different levels, and they report back up. Tax money goes to the center, gets redistributed out. All of these things become part of, again, this template that future emperors will look at and say, is my empire functioning the way it should? Well, am I setting all these standards? If you go to the Forbidden City today, two things you'll see in front of the main ceremonial hall, the Hall of Supreme Harmony. One is a sundial.

One is a grain measure. The originals of those are put there in the 15th century, but they hearken back to this period. Even today, China, big country, one time zone. The great historian Francis Wood makes the point that the first Qin emperor probably didn't understand time zones at the time, but he'd be like, exactly, good call. Now that we've figured out the time zone thing, centralize that too. So what we see today in China under the current leadership, you could make an argument,

and there'll be people who maybe argue back, that this is part of a very long tradition of centralized authoritarian leadership but now with a fancy new coating of marxist leninism painted over it just because you know it's the fashion I'm in Xi'an now, walking along a crowded street. There are stalls on either side, selling fans and fabric and paper and little curios to the many tourists thronging this street. I'm lucky enough to be here during cherry blossom season. The street is lined with trees crowded with purple petals. Much of the city has been completely remodeled

over the last 20 years, but there are still fragments of it, little views, little angles where you can still see an older Xi'an. It's a good place to finish my journey here in China, my story of the remarkable first emperor, Qin Shiwen Di, because on the smouldering ruins of the Qin capital, the Han built their capital. Then when they were eventually succeeded by the Tang dynasty,

they also based themselves here. This city became the terminus of the Silk Road. This city became Chang'an, the first city on earth to have a population over a million people. A diverse, dynamic, wealthy place, attracting traders from across Eurasia, silver and goldsmiths from Persia,

exporting silk and paper and porcelain and importing people, ideas and religions from right across the Eurasian landmass. The tongue and all the dynasties that followed have been walking on the trail blazed by the first emperor. You've been listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. It was recorded on location by the tireless and multi-talented Marianne de Forge. It was edited by the ever the tireless and multi-talented Marianna Desforges.

It was edited by the ever-patient Dougal Patmore. Please make sure you follow wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review if you fancy. From Xi'an, China, I'm Dan Snow. Off to get some baijiu. Goodbye. you you