The Books: “Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China” (Paul Theroux)

Next book on the history/travel shelf:

Paul Theroux’s Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China. Published in 1988, Riding the Iron Rooster is the story of Theroux’s journey across China – from east to west.

I’ll post an excerpt from his chapter on the terra cotta warriors.

From Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China by Paul Theroux.

The terra-cotta warriors (which cannot be photographed) were not a disappointment to me. They are too bizarre for that. They are stiff, upright, life-sized men and horses, marching forward in their armor through an area as big as a football field — hundreds of them, and each one has his own face and his own hairstyle. It is said that each clay figure had a counterpoint in the emperor’s real army, which was scattered throughout the Qin empire. Another theory is that the individual portraiture was meant to emphasize the unity of China by exhibiting “all the physical features of the inhabitants of mainland east Asia”. Whatever the reason, each head is unique, and a name is stamped on the back of every neck — perhaps the name of the solider, perhaps that of the potter-sculptor.

It is this lifelike quality of the figures — and the enormous number of them — that makes the place wonderful, and even a little disturbing. As you watch, the figures seem to move forward. It is very hard to suggest the human form in armor, and yet even with these padded leggings and boots and heavy sleeves, the figures look agile and lithe, and the kneeling archers and crossbowmen look alert and fully human.

This buried army was very much a private thrill for the tyrant who decreed that it be created to guard his tomb. But the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, was given to grand gestures. Until his time, China was fragmented into the Warring States, and bits of the Wall had been put up. As Prince Cheng, he took over from his father in 246 B.C. He was thirteen years old. Before he was forty he had subdued the whole of China. He called himself emperor. He introduced an entirely new set of standards, put one of his generals — and many of his convicts and peasants — to work building the Great Wall, abolished serfs (meaning that, for the first time, the Chinese could give themselves surnames), and burned every book that did not directly praise his achievements — it was his way of making sure that history began with him. His grandiose schemes alienated his subjects and emptied his treasury. Three attempts were made to kill him. Eventually he died on a journey to east China, and to disguist his death, his ministers covered his stinking corpse with rotten fish and carted him back to be buried here. The second emperor was murdered, and so was his successor, in what the Chinese call “the first peasant insurrection in Chinese history”.

The odd thing is not how much this ancient ruler accomplished but that he managed to do it in so short a time. And in an even shorter time, the achievements of his dynasty were eclipsed by chaos. Two thousand years later China’s rulers had remarkably similar aims — conquest, unity, and uniformity.

The rare quality of the terra-cotta warriors is that, unlike anything else on the tourist route in China, they are exactly as they were made. They were vandalized by the rebllious peasants in the year 200 B.C., when these people invaded the tomb to steal the weapons — crossbows, spears, arrows, and pikestaffs (they were all real) — that the clay warriors were holding. After that the figures lay buried until, in 1974, a man digging a well hit his shovel against a warrior’s head and unearthed it and the disinterment was begun. The warriors are the one masterpiece in China that has not been repainted, faked, and further vandalized. If they had been found before the Culturual Revolution instead of after it, they would undoubtedly have been pulverized by Red Guards, along with all the other masterpieces they smashed, burned, or melted down.