Eight Thousand Bodies And The Question Of How

ABelow the loess plain east of Mount Li, in pits opened by well-diggers in 1974 and excavated in stages ever since, stands a body of evidence no other ancient site can match: an army of roughly eight thousand ceramic figures, life-size, made for one client within a single generation. For historians of technology the interesting question is not who commissioned them, which has never been in doubt, but how such a quantity was completed at all. The only narrative account, the Shiji of Sima Qian, was compiled about a century after the work and puts the labour force at seven hundred thousand, a figure that specialists on both sides of the present argument regard as rhetorical rather than administrative. What survives in quantity is therefore material rather than written: the fabric of the clay, mould seams, kiln waste, characters pressed into the wet body of a figure, and some forty thousand bronze weapons. What divides the field is whether these things record an early system of standardised production, or an ordinary cluster of workshops that has been read through a modern industrial metaphor.

BMei Zhenlong, an archaeometrist at the Institute for Archaeometry in Xi'an, holds that the system is legible in the clay itself. Her group catalogued 1,342 legible inscriptions on the undersides of feet and inside torsos, from which 87 individual foremen can be named; twelve of those names recur on roof tiles and water pipes fired for the palace workshops of the capital, which places at least part of the labour inside the state's own establishments rather than in hired village kilns. Petrographic analysis of 214 clay samples matched the fabric to two beds lying within six kilometres of the pits, so the raw material travelled a short distance under supervision. The figures were built from separately made components: legs, torsos, arms and hands were produced apart and socketed together, and the head-blanks fall into eight recurring types. A system in which responsibility for a batch is recorded by name, and in which parts of one figure will serve another, is for Mei a system of standardised production in everything but the word.

CThe claim has a boundary, and Mei has drawn it herself. Standardisation, on her account, governs the structural core and stops at the surface. Once a figure had been assembled, the face, hair and armour were worked by hand, and her survey of 1,106 ear outlines found no two that matched within her tolerance of two millimetres; had ears been taken from moulds, matches would have been abundant. She also declines to extend the argument beyond the ceramics. The bronzes were made by other hands in other workshops, her group has never sampled their alloys, and she treats any inference from the figures to the weapons as unwarranted.

DThe weapons carry a claim of their own, and it is older. Analyses published in the 1970s reported chromium on the surface of blades recovered from Pit 1, and the finding hardened into a familiar statement: that Qin metalworkers had applied a chromate conversion coating against corrosion, a treatment not patented in Europe until 1937. Rafael Ortuño, of the Laboratory of Ancient Materials in Coimbra, has tested it. He took 483 surface measurements from 121 weapons, and 37 of those measurements returned chromium above background; the raised readings clustered on the parts of a blade that had lain against a lacquered scabbard or a lacquered wooden shaft, and the lacquer itself, where it survives, carries the element in quantity. The burial soil carries some too. Two limits attach to the work, and he states them himself. His instrument reads a surface without resolving depth, so it cannot separate a thin applied film from a residue left by decay; and every weapon he sampled came from Pit 1, the only pit whose conservation records have been published in full.

EThe argument left the laboratory long ago. Museum panels in Xi'an and in the travelling exhibitions repeat that rustproofing was in use in China two millennia before Europe patented it, school textbooks on several continents carry the sentence, and a large tourist economy has grown around the site; meanwhile under two per cent of the necropolis has been excavated and the central tomb mound has never been opened. Each researcher concedes something awkward. Mei accepts that a stamped name records who answered for a batch and nothing about how work was divided inside the workshop, so her inscriptions cannot say whether one hand made a whole figure or one component of many. Ortuño accepts that showing where the chromium came from does not by itself explain why the blades emerged as clean as they did; an unusually high tin content in the alloy and the alkalinity of the surrounding soil are both candidates.

FWhat is emerging is less a verdict than a division of labour between the two accounts. Asked how the ceramic workforce was organised, the inscriptions answer, and no rival reading of the 87 names has been put forward. Asked whether the bronzes were deliberately treated, the surface measurements answer, and they answer in the negative. What remains unresolved is why the blades survived in the condition they did, because separating the contribution of the alloy from that of the soil would require weapons lifted with the soil column around them intact, and almost nothing excavated before the 1990s was lifted that way. What both researchers reject is the habit of grading an ancient civilisation by whichever of its techniques a modern industry happens to prize.