Hear
When archaeologist Zhao Kangmin answered the phone one day in April 1974, All they told him was that a group of farmers had found some relics when they were digging a well.
Desperate to find water in the middle of a drought, the farmers had dug three feet when they came across hard, red earth. Below, they had found life-size ceramic heads and several bronze arrowheads.
It could be an important find, Zhao’s boss said, so he should go and see it as soon as possible.
Zhao, a local farmer turned museum curator in central China’s Shaanxi province — who died in 2018 at age 81 — had a hunch about what it could be.
Zhao knew that figures had been buried in the past in the area near the city of Xian, not far from the tomb of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang.
A decade before, He himself had discovered three kneeling crossbowmen. But he had never been certain that they dated from the time of the emperor, who first unified the nation of China under the short-lived Qin dynasty (221-206 BC).
But what this expert was about to find surpassed anything he had imagined.
The peasants had stumbled upon one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century: an army of about 8,000 terracotta soldiersdesigned on an industrial scale 2,200 years earlier to defend the emperor in the afterlife.
Was a complete ghost army, with horses and chariots, hidden underground and never seen by the living.
Zhao headed to the discovery site with a colleague. “We were so excited that “We were riding the bikes so fast it seemed like we were flying.”he would later write, in an essay in 2014.
On one occasion he told the British historian John Man that when he arrived he saw “seven or eight pieces, pieces of legs, arms and two heads, near the well.”
He said he immediately realized that They were probably the remains of statues from the Qin era.
They told the farmers to stop their work. They had come across the pieces weeks before and, in fact, They had already sold some of the arrowheads bronze for scrap.
The relics were collected and taken to the museum in trucks. Zhao began to laboriously assemble the fragments. Some, he later said, were the size of a fingernail.
After three days of work, two imposing terracotta Warriors stood before him, each 1.78 meters high.
Although Zhao was encouraged by this incredible discovery, he was also nervous. In 1974, China was in the final stages of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, under which the feared red guards sought to destroy old traditions and ways of thinking to “purify” society.
Zhao, as Man told in his book “The Terracotta Army,” had been subjected to a “self-criticism” session in the late 1960s, as a person “involved with old things.”
So now, although the worst excesses of that period were over, Zhao worried about what might happen to the statues.
AND decided to “keep it a secret”, restore the pieces, “and then wait for the opportunity to report it.”
But their plans were altered by a young journalist from the state agency Xinhua, who came across the statues while visiting the area.
“He asked: ‘This seems like a great discovery. Why aren’t you reporting it?”.
Ignoring their pleas, The journalist published the discovery, and the information reached the leadership of the Communist party. However, Zhao’s fears that the relics might be vandalized for political reasons proved unfounded.
The authorities in Beijing decided to excavate the site and in the following months more than 500 warriors were discovered.
As work continued, the extraordinary scale of what the first emperor – a ruthless man who defeated six states to unite China under an imperial system that continued until 1912 – became clear.
He had ordered to create an underground project, which in total covers 56 square kmshortly after ascending the throne at the age of 13.
The thousands of warriors were placed in battle formation, ready to defend his emperor from what might await him in the afterlife. It was detailed work, with dozens of different types of heads, and there were 100 chariots and tens of thousands of bronze weapons.
The Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s tomb remains sealed. There could be thousands of precious artifacts inside.
But the risk of opening it and cause irreparable damage to whatever is inside has held back the Chinese government so far.
In 1975, a year after excavation began, it was decided to open a museum at the site. And while The excavations continued, during the following years, Word spread about the magnitude of the find.
Foreign leaders and some tourists began to visit the place.
But it took a few years for the site to receive global recognition. It was declared World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1987.
Today, the Terracotta Warriors are widely recognized as a national treasure of China. But there is a sense that Zhao’s personal role in the discovery was never fully acknowledged. He is not known at all in China.
In his place, one of the peasants, Yang Zhifa, who is said to have unearthed the first piece, is introduced to visiting tourists as the person who discovered to the warriors.
For years, he sat in the Terracotta Warriors and Horses Museum, signing books silently and unsmiling. It was he, not Zhao, who traveled abroad to tell his story.
In 1998, when then-US President Bill Clinton visited, it was Yang who shook his hand.
A few years ago he admitted that he did not go to see the restored army until 1995, when the manager of the museum gift shop asked him to sign books.
“He told me he would pay me 300 yuan (about US$50 a month). I thought ‘not bad’, so I came,” he told China Daily. Three other peasants joined him later and his pay was tripled. But everyone complained that They were never adequately rewarded for their discovery, and, in fact, had their land confiscated. to create the museum.
Three of the seven members of the original group of farmers died in terrible circumstances. One hanged himself in 1997, two others They died over the age of 50, without money to pay for medical careaccording to the South China Morning Post.
A local guide, Liu Guoyang, had never even heard of Zhao Kangmin, but said that impostors approached visitors, posing as Yang Zhifa or one of the other peasants.
Zhao was enraged when, in 2004, the four surviving peasants asked to be recorded as the discoverers of the warriors. They did not receive a response.
“All they want is money,” Zhao told China Daily. “Seeing does not mean discovering. The peasants saw terracotta fragments, but did not know they were relics cultural, and even broke them.”
“I was the one who stopped the damage, collected the fragments and rebuilt the first terracotta warrior.
If he hadn’t shown up, he told Hohn Man, “it would have been a disaster.”
Wu Yongqi, director of the Terracotta Warriors Museum from 1998 to 2007, agrees.
Without it, Wu said, the extraordinary find could have been delayed for years.
Unlike the peasants, who signed books for hordes of tourists at the main Terracotta Warriors museum, Zhao remained at the much smaller Lintong museum. Even In his later years, he could be found sitting next to some warriors he had restored, conversing with curious visitors.
Although he never achieved fame or fortune, Zhao seemed pleased with the recognition he received, proudly saying that during the initial excavation, an envoy from Beijing had told him that he had “made a great contribution to the country.”
In 1990, it was personally recognized by the Council of State and was granted a special pension. He is survived by a wife and two children.
Zhao’s vision of his own iconic position in Chinese history, no matter what others say, is clear.
At the Lintong Museum, he signed postcards and tourist books with an extravagant description: “Zhao Kangmin, the first discoverer, restorer, appreciator, creator of names and excavator of the Terracotta Warriors.”
