"Unique Faces" by Rev. Tom Schade

The Emperor Qinshihuang was the first Emperor of a unified China and the founder of the Qin (pronounced "Chin") dynasty.  At the age of 13 he became the King of Qin kingdom.  By 221 BCE, he defeated a combination of rivals and came to power as an Emperor at the age of 39. He died at the age of 50 in 210 BCE.  

 

Qinshihuang was morbidly afraid of death and sought immortality throughout his life. In service of that goal, he had built a huge mausoleum and tomb for himself, outside of the city of Xi'an.  It was his life's work.

As part of that burial site, a terra cotta replica of an army was buried to guard his tomb.  Eight thousand terra cotta figures, horses and men.  They were discovered in 1974 by local farmers. 

Sue and I visited the Terra Cotta Museum on our trip to China.  It is simply mind-boggling.  We stood in a vast room, the size of football field at least, in which thousands of the terra-cotta warriors were arrayed, in rows and columns like an army. 

In the beginning, they were standing covered by beams and a wooden structure.  During a later rebellion, they were all smashed and the wooden structure burned and collapsed over the wreckage.  Now, they are being painstakingly dug up and reassembled , thousands of them. 

We could see them in all their stages:  from faces and limbs emerging from the soil to the finally restored figures, whole and seemingly undamaged despite time.  They have all faded to a dusty gray brown, but it is possible to see that they were all once brightly painted.

This vast room is 1.5 kilometers from the Emperor's tomb itself, which has not been opened yet. The entire area is full of other burial sites containing all sorts of things.   Other buried objects are made of more precious materials than terra-cotta: bronze horse and chariots, armor made of linked jade panels. 

It appears that near the end of his life, 720,000 conscripts were working on the tomb. 

It is hard to imagine our way back into Qinshihuang's head, to see life through his eyes and to understand how he thought this was an effective way to stay death. How did he understand life and death that this all made sense to him, and to the people around him?

 

Death must have been, for him, a lonely journey of an isolated soul.  You will be alone, except for what and who you bring with you.  Compare his vision to the picture of heaven popular now.  The popular imagination is that in death we will be reunited with those we have loved and lost.We talk of "the choir invisible."   Since it is estimated that 95% of the human beings who have ever lived are already dead, heaven must be twenty times the size of our present earthly community. 

But there must have been, in Qinshihuang's mind, other people in the afterlife.  Otherwise, why bring an army?  Who are they to fight? 

Archeologists estimate that the terra cotta warriors are about 15% larger than the average people of that time.  His army was big and intimidating.

The Chariot for the Afterlife

Yet, the bronze chariot that he was expecting to ride is about half-size with half-size horses.  Did he expect to be in his physical body?  It seems that this vision assumed a spirit-body that survived death that was not fixed by size or shape.  Even that representations of soldiers were enough meant that it was a spirit-body, not a revived body that inhabited the other world.   (There are other cultures in which slaves and soldiers were killed and buried along with the Emperors, so as to be of service in the next life in their present bodies, revived.)

In some ways, Qinshihuang was trying to build a replica of this world in the next.  Other pits have revealed terra cotta figures of other occupations and roles, birds and animals.  One senses a desire to take the whole world in all its variety and diversity with him into the next one.

But perhaps the most striking thing is this:  it appears that each terra cotta warrior has a unique and individual face.  As though each figure was a particular person who sat for a portrait in clay to be made. 

People differ on the question of the afterlife.  Many say, now, that there is none.  But among those who say there is a life after death, some say that we retain our individual personhood, and others say that we do not.  Some imagine that we will know our friends in heaven, and they will know us, and others say that this identity of ours is but a surface accident that will be left behind.

I don't know, and I don't think that anyone really knows.  But I am touched, across all the centuries and cultural difference, that Qinshihuang wanted to take his army with him, not as a mass, but as individuals, people with names and faces, each one unique and irreplaceable.  There is something about the "inherent worth and dignity of every person" there.

Here are some of the faces of the terra cotta warriors of Qinshihuang.