Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The Death and Burial of Qin Shihuang
After conquering China and unifying it under his rule, Qin
Shihuang began to look for a new challenge. His cruel policies led to
many attempts on his life, and in this he found his next challenge: his
own mortality. He wanted to live forever, and he became obsessed
with discovering an elixir of immortality—some chemical or medici-
nal compound that would halt or perhaps even somewhat reverse
the aging process in his body. He seems to have hit upon mercury, of
all things, as a possible candidate for this elixir. Ironically, he died in
middle age, possibly as the result of ingesting too much mercury.
(Bodily decay does in fact slow down in persons who have died from
mercury poisoning, and this observation may have been responsible
for his fascination with mercury as a possible elixir of immortality.)
Qin Shihuang was buried in a magnificent tomb complex that thou-
sands of workers had been constructing for him for many years. Sima
Qian, a great historian who lived during the Han dynasty, describes
the tomb itself as a huge model of the cosmos that contained a domed
roof with the constellations painted on it and even a geographical
model of China on the floor, complete with rivers of mercury repre-
senting China's Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. His casket was suppos-
edly placed floating on an artificial sea of mercury. When the tomb
was finished, the workers were killed by sealing them inside the tomb
so they would not divulge the magnificence of what they had been
working on, and the entrances to the tomb were booby-trapped with
crossbows.
Modern archaeologists have located the tomb and have inserted
probes deep into it. These probes reveal that there is indeed a high
concentration of mercury in the tomb, more than 100 times the natu-
rally occurring rate. Sima Qian's accounts have been verified archaeo-
logically before, and many scholars expect that archaeologists one day
will discover a tomb largely matching his description of it.
The exact location of the tomb has not always been precisely known.
In fact, it was not discovered until the early 1970s, when a team of
Chinese peasants drilling a well accidentally drilled into a portion
of the tomb's outer complex, which contained a large contingent of
exquisitely made life-sized terra-cotta soldiers. (Terra-cotta is fired
but unglazed clay.) Subsequent digs have revealed thousands of such
terra-cotta soldiers arrayed in military formations as if to guard the
tomb itself, which looks at first glance like a small hill but is in fact a
huge, man-made mound. Many of the formations of terra-cotta sol-
diers and terra-cotta horses are now on public display near Xi'an in
