China’s Magical Creatures – Weekly Report #4

• Lauren B
• 0
• on Sep 29, 2022

This week all of our readings were centralized around the terracotta warriors, the discovery of and history behind them. Nearly all the readings were textbook chapters each specializing in a different topic like being a simple introduction, the absence of women in the tomb, the past and present, and the people who built the tomb. In the introduction chapter it talked about the basic origins of the tomb: how the first emperor commissioned them and how the tomb contained not only soldiers but chariots and horses as well. In the next chapter it mentioned the absence of women in the tomb crediting it to the traditional gender roles at the time. Women were supposed to take care of and manage the household while men had to provide and protect his family. So the women couldn’t join Qin Shi Huang in his tomb because they had to maintain the family after he passed. The third chapter dealt with the true origin of the pit and gave more background information on Qin Shi Huang. A fun fact mentioned was the tomb had an empty fourth pit that was left devoid of any statues. The last chapter was about the people who worked on building the tomb. The workers consisted not only of skilled artisans but prisoners as well who completed the more manual labor aspect of building the tomb. The artists were more concerned with properly molding and creating each statue. The PDF, A Magic Army for the Emperor.” In Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art was more about the specific details and context surrounding the tomb. For instance the PDF mentioned how every soldier was made by hand and there were multiple molds for each body part suggesting that each soldier was a different individual with different skills that could be effective in protecting the emperor. 

For the course I don’t really have anything that I need to complete. Honestly, this week I found the terracotta soldiers really interesting and I want to see if I can research anything else about them. I want to find out if the creation of the terracotta soldiers was related to divination in some way. If Qin had divined this or got a prophecy saying he might want to do this or if he just did it to show off his power. 

I’m wondering how the terracotta army was discovered and what were the immediate actions that followed this? Adding on I’m interested in discovering how the tomb existed for so long without massive damage since they were underground?