Edward Burman - Terracotta Warriors: History, Mystery and the Latest Discoveries

Legend has it that each of the 2,000 warriors so far unearthed bears distinctive features. Certainly there are many facial types, reflecting the ethnic differences between warriors from the extreme north-west, the centre of China, the north-east and the regions of the south the areas of the six Warring States (the Qin themselves were the seventh) which were subsumed into the new empire. Let us take one warrior at random and assume for a moment that this is a realistic portrait of a soldier in the armies of Qin Shihuang.

Who is this battle-worn warrior?

His clothing and hairstyle show him to be of Chu origins, especially the knot on the right side of his head, but his battle experience was Qin. His imagined life will serve as a basis for understanding the terracotta army. We shall call him Warrior Chu.

He was born in 264 in the city of Ying, on the banks of the Yangtze River west of Wuhan, and very close to the Qin lands and Sichuan. At the time of his birth the Chu state was ruled by King Qingxiang, a powerful monarch whose reign lasted from 298 to 263. His kingdom was one of the seven Warring States, and included most of modern Hubei and Hunan provinces based on the rivers Yangtze and Han the latter a tributary of the Yangtze which rises in the south-west of Shaanxi. The Chu had long been the main rivals of the Qin and the kings father King Huai had been held hostage by the Qin, and died in captivity in 299. They might well have produced the first emperor in the person of one of Qingxiangs descendants had they not been subjugated by the Qin.

In their perpetual search for new recruits, the Qin conscripted All men between seventeen and sixty were legally recruitable, but boys of fourteen to sixteen often slipped through the net and perhaps lied about their age. He looked older, and was five centimetres taller than the minimum recruitment height of 1.77 metres, toughened by years of hoeing and ploughing. The next thirty years of Warrior Chus life were to be spent on the march, on guard duty, in the saddle and in battle as the Qin consolidated their power. Together with other boy recruits, he was taken north deep into Shaanxi for military training. In 248 the sixteen-year-old warrior was assigned as weapon-carrier to a crossbow archer on a mission to provide back-up for an attack on the Zhao city of Taiyuan, across the Yellow River to the north-east of Xianyang. The following year he was wounded in the leg, and joined a general retreat back into the Qin lands.

Most of the next decade he spent on guard duties along the already existing stretches of the Great Wall across the Ordos Desert, with brief spells of combat against the Zhao, so that in the year 238 when Zheng, as the First Emperor was then known, was enthroned as king of Qin he was an experienced and hardened soldier in his late twenties.

Then military duties and marches escalated as King Zheng implemented what was known as his Thirty-Six Stratagems for annexing the other six Warring States, the essential strategy being to create alliances with the most distant of them while attacking those nearest to his own lands (see ). Ten years of almost constant combat were to follow for Warrior Chu and his comrades-in-arms as the king sought first to conquer his close neighbours the Hann and the Zhao. For now, the policy was to block the Wei and the Chu, and make an alliance with the more distant Yan and Qi, both located on the eastern coast.

In 236, Warrior Chu marched with the troops of one of the four greatest generals of the Qin, Wang Jian, into Zhao territory, where they captured nine cities in a series of fierce battles which severely weakened the enemy forces. It was not all combat, for General Wang was an excellent and innovative leader of men. Like Napoleon 2,000 years later, he understood that infantry marched on their stomachs, and fed them well after allowing them the unusual luxury of washing after military action. This exceptional leader of men also ate with his soldiers, and encouraged them to indulge in their favourite forms of relaxation, which included martial sports such as stone-throwing, weightlifting and high-jumping. It was training as fun, creating a strong esprit de corps.

Figure 1.The lands of Qin and the other six major Warring States, c.300 BC

Warrior Chu relished the feeling of strength and superiority in this army, and marched with the certainty of companionship and trust in his fellow warriors which derived from years on the road together, tricky river crossings, the horseplay between warriors, the camaraderie, bustle and odours of campsites, close-fought battles and the joys of post-victory celebrations. We may imagine this solid footsoldier as he marched once more against the Zhao two years later, again under General Wang Jian, who this time commanded a force of 600,000 men.