Single-minded museum curator who discovered the ancient Terracotta Army in 1974 after farmers had unearthed shards of pottery
The Queen viewed the Terracotta Army in 1986
As he gathered up the terracotta heads, torsos and arms half-buried in the soil, Zhao Kangmin knew that he had made one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in the world — an ancient terracotta army designed never to be seen by the living.
He wrapped the earthen limbs in linen and took them back to the small government museum where he worked as a curator. He then laboured through the night, washing the shards and using glue and plaster to piece them back together. Some fragments were no bigger than his thumbnail. A man of strict discipline and few words, Zhao was devoted to archaeology and nothing if not patient. When he had finished, two giant terracotta warriors towered over him.
What he had identified that day in 1974 was a vast terracotta army, commissioned about 2,000 years ago by China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, to guard his tomb in the afterlife. As official excavations began around the ancient capital, Xianyang, about 22 miles from present-day Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province, archaeologists soon found that there were thousands of figures. Among them were infantrymen, officers and kneeling archers, each with different facial expressions and positioned according to rank, as well as clay chariots with horses. The army occupied a series of underground burial chambers nearly 200 times bigger than the Valley of the Kings in Egypt; one chamber was the size of an aircraft hangar.
Despite being the first person to recognise the importance of the figures, Zhao sought little recognition and his name was barely known beyond the county museum at Lintong where he worked. Instead, much of the credit went to the farmers whose shovels had first hit the terra-cotta army. They were installed as guides at a state-of-the-art museum above the burial chambers, but the real story was known by only a few.
Digging for water during a drought, the farmers had at first mistaken a warrior’s head for a jar. They eventually contacted the nearby museum where Zhao was employed as a curator.
“Because we were so excited, we rode on our bicycles so fast it felt as if we were flying,” he would recall. He later told the British historian John Man what he found as he arrived: “I saw seven or eight pieces — bits of legs, arms and two heads — lying near the well, along with some bricks.” He realised these were likely to be the remnants of Qin-era statues. The farmers had already sold some of the bronze arrowheads for scrap, so he instructed them to stop digging immediately and took the remains to the museum.
However, with China still in the closing stages of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution — under which the Red Guards were wiping out the nation’s heritage — he kept the chambers secret for fear that the warriors would be destroyed. A journalist visiting the area publicised the discovery and the authorities in Beijing decided to excavate the site. Within a few months more than 500 warriors had been uncovered.
The giant ghost army was given Unesco world heritage status in 1987 and has since attracted millions of visitors. When some of the figures were lent to the British Museum in 2007 there were such long queues to see them that people had to be turned away.
Zhao got little reward, but he said that he never cared for fame or fortune, only for thorough research and the truth. “Seeing doesn’t mean discovering,” he said. “The farmers saw the terracotta fragments, but they didn’t know they were cultural relics, and they even broke them. It was me who stopped the damage, collected the fragments and reconstructed the first terracotta warrior.”
In 1990 the State Council recognised him as their discoverer and awarded him a special pension. He would carefully sign books for tourists: “Zhao Kangmin, the first discoverer, restorer, appreciator, name-giver and excavator of the terracotta warriors.”
To date, four pits have been partially excavated. Archaeologists say that they may contain as many as 8,000 figures, but the total may never be known.
Zhao Kangmin was born in 1936 near Xi’an. His parents were farmers and he also worked the land before becoming involved as a curator in Lintong museum, which contained many ancient Buddhist scrolls and where he was to spend the next 40 years. Aged 24, he was asked to run the museum, the only one in the county. In 1962 he unearthed three terracotta crossbowmen. He was forced to take part in a public self-criticism for “encouraging feudalism” by caring for “old things”.
One of his students recalled long days spent visiting villages, where they would copy inscriptions from tombstones before returning to the office to search for documents until late into the night. He later directed excavations of a palace and a temple from the Tang dynasty of AD618-907; a whole room of his three-room museum was devoted to Tang art.
Tall and thin with a soft voice, Zhao did not often express his feelings. He was married and had two sons, the youngest of whom, Zhao Qi, also studied archaeology, but his family said that archaeology was like his own child and he did not say more than 100 words to his family in his entire life. So all- consuming was his work that he often neglected to visit his elderly parents and even when his granddaughter was married he hardly paused to celebrate.
For many years he slept and worked in the Lintong museum, where his wife would send him steamed buns for lunch. Later, he kept to a strict routine at home. He rose daily at 4am and spent long hours in his tiny study, which contained a bookcase and tidy desk by a window. His writing was straight and vigorous and he devoted hours to copying manuscripts. He walked 2km every day to the museum.
Zhao had been studying a stone tablet from the Tang Dynasty shortly before he became ill. When his youngest son returned home after his father’s death he found the manuscripts still lying open on his desk.
Zhao Kangmin, archaeologist, was born on an unrecorded date in July 1936. He died of a pulmonary infection on May 16, 2018, aged 82
No comments:
Post a Comment