Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huangdi:

Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huangdi: The Terracotta Warriors

In 1974, one of the greatest archeological finds in the field of Chinese history was discovered in the Shaanxi province of Lintong. The structure was that of the burial chamber of the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi (r. 246-210 B.C.). The tomb was massive and sprawling, and according to a 2009 article on the website Planetware, uncovering its many treasures remains a work in progress ("Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huangdi: Terracotta Army," 2009). Ironically, the Mausoleum would never have been discovered at all, had not some local peasants been digging for water, much like the Dead Sea Scrolls were also discovered by chance. The relatively recent nature of the discovery and the fact that the archeological site is still under construction may be one reason there is relatively limited research on the topic. Some authors, such as the anonymous scholar on Planetware, a site devoted to discussing archeological finds, take a factual approach, while scholar Ladislav Kesner's 1995 article "Likeness of no one: (Re) presenting the First Emperor's army," from The Art Bulletin attempts to contextualize what the work's symbolic and religious meaning would have meant to Chinese society during the time of the construction of the Mausoleum. Specifically, the figures known as the 'terracotta army,' a series of warrior figures enclosed in the structure along with the dead emperor, fascinate Kesner. He alleges rather than stereotyped and strictly symbolic figures, as they initially appear, the terracotta warriors are in fact meant to be realistic depictions of individual figures the Chinese army of the time.

"Close to the tumulus which, according to historical accounts, should contain the tomb of the First Emperor itself, the terracotta army, situated in three subterranean pits, is the most conspicuous part of the entire burial compound, which also includes remains of a funerary precinct with auxiliary burials, sacrificial pits, and many other structures. According to the commonly accepted explanation, the underground army was created as a replica of the Qin army ('First Emperor's bodyguard sculpted in clay'): clay soldiers and horses represent Qin Shi Huang's army and stand in place of the real soldiers who could not have been actually buried" with their master (Kesner 1995, p. 115). The symbolic function of these soldiers, some scholars believe, was to guard the corpse of the Emperor, much like the actual dead bodies of servants and attendants were interred with Egyptian pharaohs. However, according to Kesner in the case of the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor, questions and controversies still rage as to the nature of the figures' realistic depiction of the 'real' Chinese army. Kesner notes that the majority of scholars point out "that the clay warriors' faces conform to a certain number of stereotypes" and are "unwilling to regard them as representations of individuals or to consider the Qin terracotta figures as portraiture" (Kesner 1995, p. 115). Kesner, however, disagrees with the majority of the scholarship, and believes that the figures were likely to be intentionally representative of real individuals. He believes that historical evidence suggests "that the figures were modeled after living soldiers, that they were actual portraits of individual warriors" (Kesner 1995, p. 115).

Kesner's article, although written in an art publication, reflects the New Historicism of the mid-1990s, a movement in literature and sociology that stressed the historical contextualization of works of art, and emphasized the contradictions inherent in artistic representations rather than singular and linear meanings. He writes: "it is hoped that the current elusive and unsettled issues of portraiture, resemblance, construal of identity, and other related problems of theoretical interest can be enriched somewhat by attending to the ever more complex artistic tradition, which has been literally surfacing from Chinese soil in recent decades," Kesner writes (Kesner 1995, p. 115). In contrast, the more general 2009 introductory article on Planetware states that "although the faces of the warriors show individual features, parts of the figures were probably mass-produced in large workshops" (Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huangdi: Terracotta Army, 2009). In comparing the two articles, it is interesting to note the different likenesses used by the authors to accompany an illustration of their central point: Kesner selects individual depictions of different statues, while the Planetware comment on the mass-produced nature of the terracotta army shows legions of the figures, seemingly innumerable in their similarity. Many of these figures are headless, a desecration which further underlines their sameness.

Kesner, an art historian, disagrees with the common idea that the figures were mass produced without thought to existing human beings, calling this a reductive assessment. First of all, he points that the terracotta figures do not conform to typical, previous Chinese notions of figure stereotyping or caricature. Simply because the figures do not conform to Western constructions of realism and realistic art does not mean that they do not reflect what their crafters believed to be individualized 'reality.' Figures had a dual function: they protected the Emperor in a generalized way, but also had to represent reality to 'defend' him in the 'real' afterlife, and thus had to be individualistic and replicate real figures from the army.

Kesner begins his article with an assessment of the mortuary practice of symbolic burials of protecting figures. Interestingly, he notes Confucius opposed the use of anthropomorphic figures in mausoleums, "fearing that they may prompt the use of real human victims" much like the victims of Egyptian funeral rites (Kesner 1995, p. 116). The goal of tomb builders was to represent the real world in its totality, a belief that lead to the idea that artificial sculptures were regarded as better, given that they "could be used to represent all aspects of this world in the netherworld, to produce within a tomb a comprehensive replica of the human world" and could to depict "all the required activities" that would be needed by the dead Emperor, "embodied in specific postures and gestures-far better than sacrificial victims could… Thus, even though originally tomb figures may have come into existence as surrogate people, by the time of the construction of the First Emperor's tomb, they were deemed artificial objects, intentionally commissioned…In the replicating task, only the maximum visual accuracy, as literal a notation as possible, would do" (Kesner 1995, p. 116). This is why Kesner believes that the works are meant to represent real people from the Emperor's army, not to suggest the totality of the army in general.

The figures present an admitted challenge of interpretation for the visual historian in terms of their alleged realism. They are highly stereotyped in nature, as is characteristic of classical examples of archaic Greek sculpture. As the Planetware article points out, the fact that they are similarly clothed and in armed formation leads a gazer to believe that they were not meant to represent known persons, as Kesner alleges. However, Kesner points out that "the postures of certain warriors have a fair degree of organic interplay of planes, and escape the strict frontality and the awkwardness associated with most of the standing figures" of Egyptian and early Attic antiquity (Kesner 1995, p. 117). Stiffness in posture and disproportionality of the figures, as well as their horses and weapons, are contradicted with a great deal of individuation of figures and what Kesner calls "verisimilitude" that is essential to understanding their purpose of both 'being' and 'representing' the real world in the afterlife in the same time. "No two faces are alike," many have observed, in defiance of the notion of stereotyping and workshop creation (Kesner 1995, p. 117).