PG-13 | 1h 17m | Documentary | 2024
This documentary marks the 50th anniversary of one of the world’s biggest archaeological finds: 8,000 life-sized, intricately designed terracotta warrior figures, concealed beneath mammoth mounds of grass and mud, silently guarding one of China’s most historically significant tombs.
Director James Tovell begins the film with a stunning, sunlit, extra-long shot of the Great Wall of China. For enthusiasts of Chinese culture, tradition, and history, the narrator’s (Jing Lusi) opening lines will be nothing short of arresting. She talks of a time 2,200 years ago, when the emperor Qin Shi Huangdi created the nation we know today as China by unprecedentedly conquering all six Chinese kingdoms. To protect his empire, he built the Great Wall and ordered construction of a spectacular tomb for his afterlife. She continues, “But after his death, the Qin dynasty would collapse in chaos and civil war, and the site of his epic tomb disappeared from history.” Tovell’s opening shot fades to black.
Tovell begins the story in 1974, in Shaanxi Province. Some farmers find something strange while digging a well near Mount Li, Xi’an. They summon a young archaeologist, who, dimly aware of the region’s history, can’t contain his excitement. He discovers the first warrior figure beneath Huangdi’s giant mausoleum, spread across a staggering 19 square miles.
With Chinese actors, Tovell recreates the ancient kingdom’s stories of betrayal, palace intrigue, rebellion, and coup after coup. They’re interspersed with contemporary discoveries of tombs within a tomb. He mixes footage of modern-day experts handling artifacts with breathtaking care, using footage of the 1970s excavation from archives of the BBC, ITN, Fox News, and WTTG.
Qin historian Hui Ming Tak Ted says that the emperor had terracotta soldiers built as if to guard him, acrobats to entertain him, servants to serve him, with chariots and horses. His tomb was an entire “world of terracotta ... for him to rule over for eternity.” Hui Ming likens the sheer spread of the site to an area about the size of Manhattan. Fascinatingly, each warrior bears distinct facial features and personalities. One restorer sees himself as a “relic doctor,” restoring the prone figures to life so they can return and rejoin their army.
Empires Bereft of Humanity
Before this dig, all histories about the Qin dynasty were from the 2000-year-old text, the Shiji. Authored largely by Sima Qian, it recounts Huangdi’s life and death, but combines history and epic drama. So, historians studying the dig artifacts must sift Qian’s fact from his fiction.Tovell uses closeups of an excavator delicately brushing soft earth, shielding a shard in cling wrap, and uncovering part of a terracotta warrior’s face or limb or torso, as the silent statues start telling their story. Restoration is painstaking. Piecing as many as 400 scattered fragments to reassemble a single warrior can take years; only 1,200 of the 8,000 have been reassembled.
To their credit, the archaeologists, forensic scientists, anthropologists, engineers, and restorers display a deep respect for history, utterly open to the kind of past they’ll discover, whether shameful or honorable. Tovell echoes that with a discordant note. The site was called the 8th Wonder of the World, but one expert clarifies that it was also a giant crime scene. Metal shackles suggest that Huangdi had forcibly conscripted 700,000 convicts as slave labor and craftsmen from across China as part of his self-homage project. But worse emerges as forensic scientists stitch together the tale of self-destructive violence that enveloped the power-drunk dynasty.
One expert admits that Huangdi may have unified China and given it its name. But his kingdom, meant to last for 10,000 generations, stood barely 15 years after his death. The Shiji reports bluntly that the house of Qin fell because “they ruled without humanity or righteousness.”
With an irony that’s possibly lost on today’s CCP, Ms. Lusi says that the first emperor dwelt so much on a glorious afterlife that he didn’t bother appointing a successor in this one. She pauses, then adds hauntingly, “it’s the danger of having too much power in the hands of one man.”
