Fall Fallowturn Moon
Walk through with Yang Liu today for the Terra Cotta warrior exhibition. Using the terra cotta term to shorthand this exhibition does it a significant disservice. Yang Liu visited many provincial museums as well as the museums associated with Qin Shi Huang Di’s tomb complex. He chose objects from 16 different museums in all, the bulk of them intended to the story of the rise of the Qin.
That means including Spring and Autumn period bronze ritual vessels and bells, plus a sword (looks more like a dagger to me) made of iron! This same sword has a pure gold hilt done in sinuous rectangular shapes, dragon motif, and inlaid with turquoise. The Qin began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period, 770-476 BC, grew strong during the warring states period, 476-221 BC, then, for a brief but centrally important 15 years, unified China and invented many of the marks of empire that would follow: standardization of weights, currency, script, chariot axle widths, a pyramidal style government with the emperor at the top and a bureaucracy to support it.
The story this exhibit tells is of a region at war with itself, splintering into multiple states, each vying with the other for land, resources, power. It is a long period because it runs from 770 BC to 207 BC, but it is a critical, perhaps the critical period for understanding the rise of China, many of its concepts still intact even in today’s People’s Republic.