The discoverer of China’s terracotta warriors was 81
WHO is the true discoverer of a buried work of art? Is it the man who stumbles on it and digs it from the earth? Or is it the person who, turning up later, understands its importance? Fame and fortune often hang on the answer—especially when the work is hailed, by many, as the eighth wonder of the world.
Zhao Kangmin cared for neither fame nor fortune, but he treasured historical accuracy. When visitors came to the museum in Lintong, in Shaanxi province in north-west China, where he was curator for 40 years (and still sat most afternoons, in his trilby hat, after he retired), he would hand them a business card. It described him as “the very first man who discovered, determined, restored and unearthed the world-famous Terracotta Warriors and horses.” The vital word was “determined”. When he was called out in April 1974 to look at some “relics” found in a nearby wheatfield, almost flying from his bicycle with excitement, he knew at once what they were.
The farmer-finders, all brothers from the Yang family, had been digging for water to feed their pomegranate and persimmon trees. As they unearthed arrowheads, bricks and body-parts of what later emerged as the Terracotta Army, they threw them away into the wheat unless they were sellable. The finding of the first more-than-lifesize head, rising from the land of the dead, spooked them horribly; they took it for an earth-god. All the same Yang Zhifa, their spokesman, was quite prepared to dump the whole lot in the river unless they could get money for them.
It was Mr Zhao who told them that these things were from the Qin dynasty of 221-206BC, the first imperial dynasty of a united China, and that they must stop digging. As a former farmer, he understood their frustration as they stood sulkily smoking; he gave them 30 yuan for their trouble. But after years of loving history he was now a self-taught archaeologist, who at 24 had been asked to run the Lintong Museum, the only one in the county. In 1962 he had himself unearthed three terracotta crossbowmen. Many times, out in the fields, he had found bricks with patterning he knew to be Qin. Now, by the half-dug well, he knew it again. So he reverently gathered up the “dead” limbs, down to the tiniest fragments, wrapped them in linen and took them to his museum. There he stayed all night, washing them.
Over the next three days, using epoxy glue and plaster, he pieced together two warriors. They towered over him. Their ruler, the First Emperor of Qin, had governed by force, and his masterful tyranny was clear from written records; but here was a portrait in hard clay of a soldier guarding him in the afterlife, with his top-knot, boots and wrap-around coat. It made Mr Zhao’s heart leap to see him.
All the same, he did not mention the warriors for some time. He was a quiet man. And he feared, too, that Mao’s Cultural Revolution was not yet over. Earlier on Red Guards had smashed a Qin statue in the museum, and he had been forced to do public self-criticism for “encouraging feudalism” by caring for “old things”. He refused to apologise, since with his fieldwork in all weathers, rising on the dot at 4am, and the hours spent in his tiny bookshelved study, at his desk set out with one page and one pen, he had done nothing incorrect. If he was incorrect, it was in failing to visit his parents as much as a son should.
In the end, though, he could not resist a flash of justified pride, showing a journalist from the Xinhua news agency his “terracotta warrior of the Qin dynasty”. First he had discovered them; now he had named them. Once the national authorities were alerted, proper excavation started, and he joined the team that eventually uncovered three huge pits filled with around 8,000 infantrymen, officers and archers, 520 horses, 130 chariots, and real, sharp, weapons. In 1979 the Museum of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses was opened above the pits. By 2017 it had drawn 100m visitors, and Lintong, once a huddle of mud buildings, had a university, hotels and a vast industry of terracotta-warrior-making.
Mr Zhao did not attach himself to the new complex. The Lintong Museum was his life, and other eras occupied him besides the Qin. He directed excavations of a palace and a temple from the Tang dynasty of 618-907; a whole room of his three-room museum was devoted to Tang art. Another held Buddhist stelae, his special interest, with inscriptions he had painstakingly rubbed and transcribed. Amid all this, the warriors took their place. He followed, but did not join, the debates about them: most controversially, whether this astonishing jump in scale and expertise was the result of contact with ancient Greece.
Waiting for visitors
In 1990 the State Council officially recognised him as their discoverer, and awarded him a special pension. The new museum, however, did not refer to him. It was Yang Zhifa who haunted the souvenir shop, signing autographs as the finder of the warriors. Meanwhile, five kilometres away, Mr Zhao sat beside his mended warriors in a darkened room of his museum, waiting. He had redesigned the building in the 1980s in brightly painted traditional style, expecting a crowd of visitors, but few came—save his wife, most days, with his lunch of steamed buns. When others turned up, his card spoke for him.