The First Emperor
The emperor’s tomb and necropolis
The tomb of Qin Shi Huang is located 35 kilometres (22 miles) east of Xi’an, between the Lishan Mountains in the south and the Wei river in the north. According to traditional Chinese geomancy, the land from the Lishan Mountains to Mount Hua is shaped like a dragon, with the imperial tomb in its eye of the dragon.
Today, all that can be seen is a vast vegetation-covered mound, as large as the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. Over the 2,000 years of its existence, the original 100-metre-high (328 foot) hill has weathered down to about 47 metres (154 feet). It is 515 metres (1,690 feet) long from south to north and 485 metres (1,591 feet) east to west, and covers an area of 2.18 million square metres – a bit less than one square mile.
The first inkling of its possible contents was the discovery of the Terracotta Army. But that was over a kilometre from the tomb mound. When archaeologists dug into the space in between, an incredible world opened up. To date, they have found over 180 separate pits containing much more than soldiers.
Hundreds of terracotta dancers, musicians and acrobats were built to the same exacting standards as the emperor’s precious army. The imperial craftsmen, freed from making weapons, created perfect birds to stand in the artificial lakes of buried gardens. And one of the most exquisite bronze artefacts ever found was a half-scale model of the imperial chariot, to convey the emperor in his underground world.
‘It turns out that the burial mound is, in fact, at the centre of an enormous necropolis,’ says Professor Jeffery Riegel, ‘an above-ground and underground city for the first emperor. It would continue to provide him with all the trappings of power and protection that someone of his status required.’
However, there was no way to see the ultimate symbol of power – the tomb itself. Yet again, it was the official history – the Shi-Ji of Sima Qian – that provided the only clue. But this time, the account seemed too incredible to take at face value. Sima told of how the emperor sent more than 700,000 convicts to dig down through three rivers, and fill the space with bronze. On the floor of the vault, they created a map of Qin’s entire empire. He had artisans place jewels into the ceiling, to represent the sky, and what were to be the streams and the ocean were, the text said, filled with quicksilver – that is, liquid mercury. A machine was devised to circulate the mercury, to simulate the flowing of the waters. According to Sima Qian, as long as this kept running, the emperor would continue to exist in his enclosed world.
A bronze tomb filled with liquid mercury – the idea seemed beyond fantasy. The weight of the mercury alone would be thousands of tonnes, and even though China has mercury ore in abundance, how could one man command such resources?
The tomb had been sealed for over 20 centuries, but there was a way in. Using a new combination of techniques including ground-penetrating radar, electrical resistance measurements and core samples, a research team under Duan Chingbo has been able to build up a three-dimensional model of the entire underground complex.
The first surprise was that the mausoleum appears to be a vast divided pyramid with passages leading to the tomb from the east and west. When they took the all-important readings from the base of the mausoleum, beneath the pyramid, they discovered the tomb itself. Seen on their computer screen as a clearly defined area in blue, it is a hermetically sealed space that is as big as a football pitch.
Although the pyramid had at first appeared to be a closed structure, covering over the emperor’s final resting place, the tomb is, in fact, exposed to the sky – or it had been originally, before it was covered by a million tons of earth.
Duan and his team have been probing that earth of the mound for almost a decade, tracing the shape of the pyramid beneath their feet with a series of 4,000 core samples. If mercury had ever been placed there to stand in for the rivers and sea described by Sima Qian, over the centuries, mercury vapour might have seeped through the roof and into the surrounding soil, to be detected by Dr Duan and his colleagues.
‘Samples of this sort enable us to see the rammed-earth structure supporting the entire mound,’ says Professor Riegel. ‘But of course what really interests us is what the burial is like. We can expect that a test of this soil will tell us whether or not it is true that the emperor had placed in the base of his tomb a map of all of China with rivers of flowing mercury. It will either provide us with corroboration or it won’t.’
With no way to preserve its contents, the Chinese archaeologists have no immediate plans to excavate the tomb. So for the foreseeable future, the mercury test may be their only way to understand what’s inside.
Each of the 4,000 or so soil samples from the tomb mound has to be individually analysed for mercury content. The first news is that there is mercury there – in huge concentrations. And it’s not found just anywhere. The highest concentrations are within the tomb itself.
‘One area of concentration corresponds to Boa Hai, the sea that we know the first emperor visited in his search for immortality,’ says Professor Riegel. ‘The concentration in the south and south-west would correspond to the great wetlands of the south-west and the Yangtze river.
‘It’s just startling that one would find such a striking and exact correspondence between scientific evidence and ancient legend. So yes, just as described 2,000 years ago, when the first emperor had his underground palace created, he did indeed have a map of his empire created, he did indeed have all of the rivers and seas represented, and in those rivers and seas flowed quicksilver – liquid mercury – for ever.’
