plants were popular as well (apparently their ability to grow from a dead host meant they could raise the
fallen). Many of us have heard the story about a particularly audacious pair of recipe gentlemen who
requested a thousand young men and women as well as a ludicrous amount of valuables, supposedly to
attract the help of immortals with their purity. Then they made off with everything and never turned up
again.
That said, for a man who had created an empire and then brought it to its knees before him,
gold and silver, priceless jewels, and even a few thousand youth were expendable commodities. But
eventually, the recipe gentlemen would exact the ultimate price. In 210 BC, he swallowed his final drugs
of immortality - toxic mercury tablets. He was dead before he got back to the capital. He had never
bothered with a will.
The Divine Emperor was irrevocably dead, it seemed. But it can't be said that he was dead and
gone.
In fact when his closest advisors and eunuchs made the call to hide his death, they kept up the
charade for months. That's how strong his presence was.
Take a moment to understand how it would have been to be Qin Shihuang, the First Emperor
of the whole of China. Having spent your whole life chasing power, and orchestrating things that were
nearly beyond belief, would you really want to give up everything you'd done for something as
meaningless as death? In recent years, psychologists and philosophers have been considering a new type of
never-ending life - symbolic immortality. Confucianism (which, ironically, was strictly banned in the
Qin Dynasty) once postulated that ‘The superior man dislikes the thought of his name not being
mentioned after his death.’ Symbolic immortality is a very close manifestation of that idea - it's the
avoidance of death by living on in acts and accomplishments that people will remember forever.
The Great Wall is world famous, but hardly anyone outside of China knows who began its
construction; nobody has followed Qin Shihuang’s written script since the Han Dynasty. And needless to
say, the roads and canals he so painstakingly weaved across China have long been demolished. His
real
legacy was unearthed in 1974, when some Shaanxi villagers were digging a new well. Instead of hitting
water, they hit the Eighth Wonder of the World - the Terracotta Warriors.
So
this
was the grand mausoleum and army the Emperor of Qin created when he was still the
King of Qin, at the tender age 13 and not yet knowing he would later change his mind about being a
mere mortal. But if we're to believe in symbolic immortality, that means he had finally gotten back his
legacy (and therefore his immortality) after all.
The First Emperor was, if not immortal, at least resurrected. And albeit by chance it was
Terracotta Army which made it so. It's tempting to just leave it there and call it a happy ending, but for
the sake of veracity we must be technical. If symbolic immortality is eternal life through our legacies and
monuments, that begs the question - is the Terracotta Army really
his
legacy?
After a new heir was firmly in place and the death of Qin Shihuang was finally announced, the
workmen who had meticulously crafted the Terracotta Warriors were been buried alive inside with him.
Nobody so intimate with the contents of the emperor's tomb could be allowed to live. For every stone
cold, lifeless soldier in those catacombs, there was a real man whose life had been ripped away; all to
provide Qin Shihuang with his Terracotta Warriors, his miniature tomb city, his resting place surrounded
by gold and jade and rivers of mercury. It was their work, and their spirit that took the hit. The drugs of
immortality that the emperor had indulged in for so long weren't mercury tablets or pine nuts, but the
endless toil of his people. Consider it again - whose monument is the Terracotta Army?
You can unite an empire without gaining its respect; you can die and still remain in power. You
can lose your immortality by mistake then get it back by chance, but not necessarily for yourself. The
Terracotta Warriors each house a spirit of unmatched vitality and creativity. But in the end it is not the
Divine Emperor who is alive among us today, but his army - the people of China.
