In 221 BC the first Emperor of the Qin, Qin Shi Huangdi (221-210BC) completed his military conquest of a huge territory. He thus realised his dream of a single empire, and reunited a conglomerate of settlings and cities that from Neolithic times had been connected by a fine web of conflict and exchange.
The artifacts in China, the Birth of an Empire span this period of the first Chinese Emperors. Beginning with the Zhou clans (1045-221BC) and ending with the two Imperial dynasties of Qin (221-206BC) and Western Han (206BC to 23AD) it marks a time of great complexity and splendour, in which the foundations of an empire were laid that became increasingly anchored in its refined culture and administrative structure.
With some 350 objects from 14 Chinese museums that have never yet left their country, this is the first European display of Chinese artifacts on such a scale.
Among the treasures to be displayed are artefacts from the tomb of Yi di Zeng (433BC), a pre-empire warrior from the neighboring state of Wuhan. These will include a sarcophagus of lacquered wood made for a concubine, fantastic bronzes, and a renowned rain tambourine in the form of a bird with bronze antlers, unique in its type.
Also to be displayed is a shroud, pre-eminent for its quality and beauty, made from over two thousand pieces of inlaid white jade. Surviving from the time of Han (206-195 BC), it was sewn with hundreds of metres of gold thread. To make such an object took highly skilled craftsmen many years, and yet, because of the belief that jade could preserve the dead body from decomposition and allow the soul to live, this practice lasted for several centuries.
The exhibition will culminate in the terracotta figures from the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huangdi (221-210BC). This will be the largest number of statues ever loaned abroad, and for the first time in the West there will also be statues from all the graves and not only that which was reserved for the army.
On display will be a general, an archer, a seated crossbow man, a horseman with a saddled horse, and four horses pulling an imaginary chariot driven by a charioteer accompanied by two armed foot soldiers (of the chariot's original wooden structure there is only a small portion left). All figures are unique and life-size. There will also be servants in civil dress, rowers, gymnasts and stablemen: all excavated in the last four years.
After Qin Shi Huangdi, all emperors desired a terracotta army as testimony to the great material resources that characterized the enormous power of their time: to be exhibited for the first time are treasures from the tombs of the first Han emperor (Gaodi, 206-195 BC). Consisting of over two hundred painted terracotta statues of infantry, horsemen, servants and domestic animals and with a height of up to seventy centimeters, these were found in their thousands in the satellite tombs and graves situated near his mausoleum, which (like that of the First Emperor) remains as yet, unviolated by archaeologists.
