(Reuters)
Updated: 2007-09-11 23:42

LONDON - Elements of China's Terracotta Army have arrived in England as part of the biggest overseas loan by the museum that houses them in western China.

 

Many people know of the astounding 2,000-year-old army of clay warriors unearthed by chance just over 30 years ago by a farmer digging a well near the town of Xi'an.

Far fewer know much about Qin Shihuangdi, a self-defined cosmic ruler who laid the foundations of modern China in 221 BC and whose rule they were built to perpetuate for eternity.

That may change with the "First Emperor" exhibition opening in London's British Museum on Thursday and ending next April.

"He was an extraordinary man, a visionary," said China expert Jessica Rawson of Merton College, Oxford. "He saw himself as a cosmic man, a deity. He built himself into the physical landscape in life and in death."

Born in 259 BC in Qin province in the west of modern China, he became ruler of the province at the age of 13 and just five years later set out to subdue his warring neighbours. It took about 20 years to achieve his goal -- and that was the easy bit.

"He created modern China that became for centuries the most powerful nation in the world -- something that is happening once more," said exhibition co-curator Carol Michaelson." And when China changes, the world changes.

"Between 221 BC and his death in 210 BC he imposed the Qin penal code -- which was brutal -- created a single currency, standardized weights and measures and imposed a single written language and bureaucracy," she added.

Many of the bureaucratic innovations he began continued in place until the fall of the last emperor in 1911.

"He built thousands of kilometres of roads, hundreds of palaces, the first Great Wall and organised the building of his magnificent mausoleum complex from where these artefacts come," she said, noting that about 700,000 people built the mausoleum and the palaces.

The tomb site statistics are as impressive as the artefacts they contain. In total the complex covers some 56 sq km and took about 35 years to build.

The Terracotta Army -- believed to be some 7,000 strong and all different -- were found in three pits well away from the burial mound.

"He probably felt he would need the army for protection -- after all he probably killed about one million people in his life," Michaelson said.

Other pits containing dancers, acrobats, musicians, bureaucrats, birds and chariots and horses -- in short everything the emperor would need to continue his rule -- have since been found, with more discoveries expected.

The exhibition contains some 120 artefacts -- including several of the larger-than-life warriors -- and explanations of their significance.

"This is not an exhibition about the Terracotta Army but about the man who changed the world by creating China," said Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum.