Flowing rivers of mercury The Chinese emperor had done all he could to become immortal, but in vain. His physicians had prepared herbal and alchemical elixirs, but none could stave off his decline. He had sent a minister on a voyage far over the eastern seas in search of a mythical potion of eternal life. But that expedition never returned, and now the quest seemed hopeless. So Qin Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor of a unified China in the third century BC, had begun preparations for the next best thing to an endless life on Earth. He would continue his cosmic rule from the spirit world, and his underground tomb would be a palace for the afterlife, complete with its own army of life-size clay soldiers. Those terracotta warriors lay hidden for two thousand years beneath several metres of sandy soil a mile from the First Emperor’s burial mound at Mount Li, to the northeast of the city of Xi’an in Shaanxi province of north-central China. They were rediscovered in 1974 by farmers digging a well, and Chinese archaeologists were astonished to find over the next decade that there were at least 8000 of them, once brightly painted and equipped with clay horses and wooden chariots. As further excavation revealed the extent of the emperor’s mausoleum, with offices, stables and halls, along with clay figures of officials, acrobats and labourers and life-size bronze animals, it became clear that the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian, writing in second century BC, hadn’t been exaggerating after all. He claimed that 700,000 men had worked on the emperor’s tomb, constructing entire palaces, towers and scenic landscapes through which which the emperor’s spirit might roam. rsc.org/chemistryworld/2015/01/flowing-rivers-mercury
Posted on: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 11:46:51 +0000
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