The buzz around the British Museum has reached fever pitch
as it opens its biggest exhibition in a generation.
It's about the First Emperor of China, one of the most important men
who has ever lived and creator of the Terracotta Army.
We've had exclusive access to the exhibition team,
from the earliest planning stages,
right through until the last-minute preparations for opening.
Right, nice and easy. If you just get a hand on the warrior.
Your first sight of them has to be drop dead, that moment.
It has to hit you emotionally.
For the first time, the museum's historic Reading Room has been transformed into a gallery.
The room is still a star. It's still expressed within the exhibition.
On display will be some truly iconic objects.
He's the unarmoured general, isn't he? Yeah.
It's amazing, isn't it? They look so real.
It's the job of a lifetime for the curator.
This exhibition's the biggest one I've ever done.
I've done permanent galleries, I've done temporary exhibitions, but this is the biggest.
Her challenge is to tell an epic story.
The creation of an empire, the building of a great wall...
..the unification of a people.
The First Emperor ruled China for 11 years and built a lavish tomb to inhabit for ever.
The objects which the British Museum is gathering together will tell
the story of the man who made China and his spectacular eternal army.
God, that's breathtaking.
The woman in charge of the First Emperor project is Jane Portal.
This gallery's enormous.
It's the biggest gallery in the British Museum...
Jane is the curator of one of the best collections of
the Chinese bronzes, jades and ceramics in the West.
But the First Emperor's dynasty, the Qin, is a little under represented.
I'm just going to show you what there is in the British Museum which is from the Qin, which is here.
We only have these three objects.
This is it? This is it, yes.
So no wonder you're getting excited about the Qin exhibition.
And in fact, the Qin exhibition, we're having a large majority of
everything there is to do with the Qin is going to be in our exhibition,
because there isn't that much to do with the Qin, apart from the evidence from the First Emperor's tomb.
That's why it's so important, the evidence from the tomb.
Objects from the First Emperor's tomb, including Terracotta Warriors,
are being brought across the world from Xi'an in central China.
This thriving city was once a great capital of the ancient world, like Athens, Cairo and Rome.
Today, two million people come here each year to visit the Terracotta Warriors Museum.
The Terracotta Warriors that were excavated in 1974 are really the most
spectacular archaeological find in the world.
In June 2006, after a year of negotiation,
Jane visited Xi'an to select the items she wanted for her exhibition.
She came with the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor.
What is so extraordinary is that this was an army ready to ...
well, actually, on the march.
They were hoping to secure 20 figures, more than had ever been loaned before.
The design challenge is how you get some idea to the visitor in London of the scale of the site.
If their exhibition can't convey the sheer size of the army,
it might be able to give visitors a different experience.
A face-to-face encounter with individual warriors, something which is only possible for VIPs in China.
What's so extraordinary is to be able to look them in the eye, isn't it?
And I think to give the visitor the sense of how big they are
and that's something we can do in the exhibition which is not really possible for the visitor here.
The exhibition is not just about the Terracotta Army.
It's about the First Emperor himself and the Qin Dynasty.
The Qin ruled the most westerly of several warring states for over
600 years before they conquered the others and united China.
With designer, Caroline Ingham, Jane embarked on a 900-mile journey
around the ancient Qin state searching for objects to display.
Although the Qin was mainly known for its military abilities
we're trying to get over the fact that they actually made beautiful things as well.
I have seen pictures of them, because they're very famous, and they are incredibly impressive.
But this will be a show which is about far more than a collection of objects.
It comes at a time when the West is trying to make sense of the rise of modern China.
That is, of course, exactly what the British Museum is about.
The point was always that if you thought carefully about the past,
you would be able to think differently about the present.
This exhibition allows us to try to do
something we really haven't done before,
to think about what it meant to make China.
And how it came that one man was able to create
what is the oldest political entity in the world.
Every morning this flag is raised in the heart of the capital here in Beijing.
It symbolises one united country, and a pretty powerful one at that.
It could all have been so different if it wasn't for the First Emperor 2,000 years ago,
who took seven separate kingdoms and created one state.
The First Emperor set the template for modern China.
He centralised rule across his vast empire,
with ruthless organisation backed by military might.
He created an everlasting version of his victorious army,
7,000 Terracotta Warriors guard his tomb, ready to spring into action against the ghost of his enemies.
In his short reign of 11 years, the First Emperor created
a coherent society with strict laws governing every aspect of life.
Could I have some mushrooms?
Standard units of weight and measurement meant that business
could be done fairly across the empire with a new single currency.
He built roads linking the former warring states and fixed the width
of cart axles so the ruts on those roads would be uniform.
Famously, he secured his empire from barbarian attack with a great wall to the north, a wall
re-routed and rebuilt by successive emperors over the next 2,000 years.
How on earth do you do justice to all this in just one exhibition?
The question you want to ask is, how did he do it?
This is why we're hoping to use this steely idea...
Many people are planning the exhibition, but it's
Jane who has to work out how to tell the First Emperor's story.
How or where in all this can we try to address the question of what he actually believed?
This is obviously related to
an extremely complex belief structure of him after death.
Do we know what that was?
It's not like Egypt, where there's the book of the dead telling you what happens to the dead spirit...
The only evidence we have is the Shujing, which is the book of history which was written in the Han dynasty,
the following dynasty and it's written by this Confucian historian
and he describes the making of the tomb.
We've got no idea whether the Emperor is waiting for judgment or whatever.
As far as we know, he's just going on doing for ever what he was doing.
So this is the life of this world going on indefinitely, rather than,
as far as we can see, a different kind of world.
We may never know exactly what the First Emperor believed about life after death,
despite the wealth of material found around his final resting place.
Lots of people have heard of the Terracotta Army, but few realise
they're actually just a small part of a giant necropolis, a kind of palace of the dead built
by Qin Shihuangdi for himself, and in the middle there is this very prominent tomb mound.
The Terracotta Army are actually about a kilometre and a half to the east over there and
all over this area there are pits that have been found full of other figures, animals and precious goods.
The Chinese people have always known their First Emperor was buried here,
but there was no record of the Terracotta Army.
It was discovered in 1974 when a peasant digging a well saw a pottery head looking up at him.
The Chinese government began excavating,
bringing in workers from a local commune and captured it on film.
The first warriors went on display in 1979.
This model third-century BC army is in battle formation.
There are columns of infantry in different types of battledress
and teams driving wooden chariots, which have long since rotted away, each drawn by four horses.
These are the faces of people that lived, loved and fought over 2,000 years ago.
And they're all the more important because they're the only Qin statues in existence.
Only about 20% of the pit has been excavated.
The columns stretch back much further with thousands more Terracotta Warriors still buried.
And that's not the whole story.
Close by is another smaller pit.
Here, partially excavated, are archers and cavalry and more infantry to support the main army.
And there's a third pit, a command post for the army with high-ranking officers.
There was also an ornate canopied chariot which has disintegrated with charioteers holding the reins.
When you're lucky enough to make history programmes, you come to a huge number of places and see
all sorts of amazing things and often you have to get terribly excited about them, but here,
today, at the Terracotta Army, I've been completely overwhelmed.
This is THE most extraordinary thing I've ever seen.
The exhibition is to be held in the British Museum's historic Reading Room.
Now a public library, it was once the preserve of scholars, the engine room of British intellectual life.
Chinese visitors want to know where Karl Marx sat when he wrote Das Kapital here.
It's a marvellous tomb-like space, but converting it has been controversial.
The books will move and a modern gallery is to be inserted into this Grade I listed building.
Head of exhibitions, Carolyn Marsden-Smith, has commissioned the exhibition designers.
It's certainly a challenge and it's something we wanted the designers to take head on.
It's a very different space to the kind of spaces that we would normally present an exhibition in.
It's a unique historic interior, so it has a real personality of its own.
The museum doesn't want to hide that personality, it wants to show it off,
as well as having this extraordinary exhibition in the space,
so that is a very unique brief for the designers.
Stephen Greenberg's design company, Metaphor, has won the commission.
We have an archer the top of the stairs at the beginning, we have the other archer
at the end, the painted one. And there's a lovely symmetry of -
you arrive, you see the head of archer, and you can just imagine leaving,
and people turning back down the stairs and, you know...
So you're going to move him from the side into the middle?
At the moment, he's there, Jane, which is nice because he's facing out.
That an improvement on how we had that last week
because you have to look at him as you go out, which is really nice.
The key thing is the display of the Terracotta figures...
The idea of allowing visitors to look the Terracotta Warriors
in the eye has now become integral to the design.
What do I see as the big wow?
It's not the first wow in the show, but it is the wow of wows.
Dare I say it, maybe you even walk on the exhibition surface.
If you walk on the same surface as the object, you know what I mean?
That changes... You're on the surface...
The one time you step on the same surface.
Then you're really in amongst them. Which is what we wanted all along.
In amongst them, yeah.
Because the space is 40 metres across and it's such a strong space,
you've got to do things that people actually notice in the space.
You have to start with this.
You have to start with this great big thing.
So if we peel the dome off...
..the exhibition is divided into two halves, with this piece up the middle, the monolith piece.
This half is all about his life and works and achievements and the other half is all about his eternal life.
Everything that's been found in the archaeological dig and pits.
What a marvellous challenge, to be able to make an exhibition
in a space like this, to do such a great story.
I mean, it's a once-in-a-lifetime project.
This is the step of Inner Mongolia, the northern border of the ancient state of Qin.
The land still probably looks as it did in the days when nomadic warriors swept to and fro.
The First Emperor imposed order by building the most famous national boundary in the world.
This is part of the original Great Wall of China.
It's made out of compressed earth and it's over 2,000 years old.
It's not like the bit of the Great Wall that all the tourists are taken to.
That was rebuilt over 1,500 years after this one.
The original Great Wall was built during the reign of Qin Shihuangdi.
He wanted to join together lots of little walls to create one massive
defensive barrier to protect his new empire there to the South against the barbarian tribes of the North.
Thousands of people died building the wall.
Some call it the world's longest cemetery.
Before becoming Emperor, he ruled these lands for a quarter
of the century as the King of Qin, from the age of 13.
Unfortunately, there are no contemporary images of the young King of Qin, so we don't
really know what he looked like, but one of his enemies said that he had a waspish nose and elongated eyes.
He also had the voice of a jackal and the heart of a wolf or a tiger.
He governed for a sophisticated bureaucracy, promotion was on merit.
Rejecting the gentler traditions of Confucius, he meted out harsh punishments for law-breakers -
being cut in half, beheaded, or pulled apart by horses.
The king was ambitious to expand his territory.
After a decade of alliances, bribes and battles,
he conquered the other six states to form one united country in 221 BC.
The Barbarians beyond the Great Wall would hear of the Empire of Qin and call it China.
Standing up here on the northern frontier of this new empire,
it's extraordinary to think that it extends from these frozen lands here
here right the way down to the warm tropical waters of the South China Sea.
It really rivals anything achieved by Napoleon or Alexander.
He considered himself divine, a living god.
He called himself Qin Shihuangdi, the First August Emperor of Qin.
Names and titles matter.
The British Museum has a team dedicated to making the exhibition text clear to the visitor.
Catherine Cooper and Jane must decide how best to refer to the Emperor.
I mean, the title is quite a difficult thing to get over, because Qin Shihuangdi,
Qin is the Qin state, Shi is number one, first,
Huangdi means sort of August or divine Emperor.
I'm just wondering if we need to put in August and divine, that's the thing.
Right, whether we can just choose divine? That would be nicer for us.
I'd better check with various other people, because it's quite a major thing.
Because he's usually called First August Emperor of the Qin.
August is a bit of a weird word.
A visitor who doesn't speak English as a first language won't know that word, will they?
But who's this aimed at? Is it aimed at everybody or is it aimed at people who don't speak English properly?
Well, it's aimed at everybody, isn't it, which is one of those tricky things.
We'll probably have to think about it and see what other people think.
It is rather important, this.
I know, I know, I know. That's why I don't want to...
It's practically the most important thing in the whole exhibition, what he was called. And why!
For the ancient Chinese, there was nothing worth having beyond China, just inferior lands and barbarians.
So the First Emperor believed that he ruled all of civilisation.
Having conquered the known world, Qin Shihuangdi made a series of tours around his vast new empire.
He visited all of China's sacred mountains, in particular, this one, Taishan, the most important.
Here, following in the footsteps of the mythical leaders of the past, he ascended to worship and
talk to the gods and, above all, stake his claim to immortality.
The mountain was sacred, not just because it brought the First Emperor
closer to the heavens, he worshipped it as a god in its own right.
Today, it's still a place of pilgrimage for Daoists and Buddhists.
The First Emperor's claim to be a god did not make him universally popular
and several attempts were made on his life.
Increasingly paranoid, he decreed that anyone
who revealed his whereabouts would be sentenced to death.
The First Emperor once even punished a mountain, ordering all its trees to be cut down.
But he was respectful to Taishan, putting leaves on his carriage wheels to protect it.
Today, the mountain is still cherished with careful landscaping.
But, in China, there's still only one way to move a tree up a mountain.
It's extraordinary, it's like nothing has changed since the Qin dynasty.
Lots of people trying to get this tree up to the summit.
Really I suppose reminiscent of the entourage of Qin Shihuangdi getting
all his possessions up here for the ceremony at the summit.
DISTANT SINGING AND CHANTING
Up here on the summit of Taishan, you come across these extraordinary carvings
made by subsequent emperors, detailing religious ceremonies.
This tradition was begun by Qin Shihuangdi.
He came up here and carved his legacy into the scenery.
His carvings, which alas don't remain although copies were made,
say how none come to him except in submission, and what a good governor he is.
And it says that his influence will be unending.
His unending influence can be seen in the written script.
People across China often can't understand each other when they speak.
But there's no confusion when they write, thanks to the First Emperor.
He imposed one set of characters across his empire.
Probably don't want something as boring as the Chinese
version of Times New Roman, or Courier, or anything like that!
Part of the exhibition text will be in Chinese.
But choosing the font is not easy.
This looks like quite contemporary.
Hmm. I don't like it. No. So we're on this page. Yes.
When we started the project and we were beguiled by the exotic,
and China, the more we learnt about Qin, how utterly ruthless he was,
and everything he did was for standardisation and rigour and control.
So, since the beginning, we have been chucking out
decorative elements, and getting more and more basic.
That's why we chose that one.
This to me looks like Chinese magazine, because of the contemporary feel.
Whereas this is more traditional.
This looks more classical. Yes.
So we are down to these two really, don't you think?
Jane has to be across every aspect of the exhibition, from typefaces, to ancient history.
There is a lot to do, but it's very exciting.
Her immediate task is the exhibition catalogue
with essays by the world's leading experts in Chinese history.
This list of authors is fantastic.
I'm very impressed you've got everybody but one in on time.
You're a fiercer editor than I've ever been able to be, obviously!
Well, the one who hasn't replied yet, he says he's had a bereavement,
and he's going to get working on it soon.
Photographs are required to illustrate the catalogue.
This one here looks just...
Hiromi Kinoshita, Jane's assistant,
has recently been to China with photographer, John Williams.
This, we can use in the catalogue, but we can also use in the exhibition.
Really really big, to show the huge numbers of figures in the pit.
We've got to think about a picture for the cover of the catalogue of course.
At the moment, what we're doing is getting the text together.
And trying to put pictures into the text.
This is great, can we see this?
Look at that head dress.
Yes, that's a general's head dress. He's the unarmoured general?
Yeah, yeah.
He's got a really good face.
Both the generals have got excellent faces though.
It's amazing, isn't it? They look so real.
And this chap here, if I can find him. This guy's got a great face.
We've just decided on the title as well.
It's The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army.
The First Emperor is what I'm interested in.
The Terracotta Army part of it is, of course, to do with marketing because
that's what is the key thing people know about, so it's got be in there.
The Reading Room is about to close, to be transformed into the temporary gallery.
The famous desks are part of the Grade I listed fabric, so they can't be touched.
That means that a platform has to be built above them.
Below them, the hollow structure presents a problem for construction chief, Steve Clarke.
These ceilings are just a series of arches that were built to support
a light level-loaded floor by the Victorians.
They were never designed for an exhibition space, so we can't
transfer onto this, because this is just a thin layer of brickwork.
And it couldn't support the load.
The building and design teams have to spread the load across
the raised platform, and the major objects are very heavy.
The Terracotta Warriors which are coming out at about 180,
this horse though is 340.
And then the heaviest thing is this bronze chariot.
But it's over quite a large area.
And that's 1,061 kilograms.
What I'm feeling slightly concerned about is, we might need to spread the load.
That would mean we'd have to have a slight raise in the height of the floor in those areas.
That would probably be 150-200, so it's not going to be that much. The problem is...
That sounds like a lot to me. From my perspective, it's quite a compromise.
We don't want to load any more weight than we have.
The sooner we can identify this, the better.
Because we are going into manufacture imminently. Yep.
We need to think creatively then. Even if we went for this scheme...
'We were having a very useful conversation about how
'the actual installation of the platform will integrate with the exhibition.
'Because there's quite a lot of heavy material'
going in the exhibition, and we want to make sure
the platform can take the weight of the warriors,
and of all the people who'll come to the show.
It's mid-March, and after months of planning,
the Reading Room refit begins.
The books are going to a temporary library elsewhere in the museum.
The construction site is in an awkward place.
The Round Reading Room is right in the centre of the Great Court of the museum.
From 9 o'clock in the morning, that space is open to the public,
which means all our materials and all our men
need to be in our working space by 9 o'clock in the morning.
Logistically that means the deliveries coming in at 7am and
our lorries being off the forecourt by 9am.
And that's not the only problem. There's only one door to get everything in and out.
The nearest analogy is like building a ship in a bottle.
So, fantastic exhibition space for the museum.
Logistical nightmare for the builder.
We've got the first delivery of the steel today, the steel that
actually forms the new deck that the exhibition is going to be on.
The last estimate was about 35 tons of steel coming in.
We have to finish the exhibition space by the end of June.
That gives the exhibition team a couple of months to come and
dress the exhibition, ready for the public.
There's more exhibition work to be done in China,
so I'm joining Jane and Hiromi in Xi'an.
Their first task is to return to the Terracotta Warriors Museum, to check some vital statistics.
We need between his legs. Here.
Yes, but his foot.
Because they need the point of weight.
Three of these horses we are having actually. So it's very useful that they are in a state of being half
being unpacked because we can measure all the measurements we need for the floor loading for the Reading Room.
These objects have come back from an exhibition in Rome, and this is a cavalry horse here.
And they had a bit of an accident.
It was when it was being moved in Rome that it broke.
I mean, obviously, the horses have been restored anyway.
You can see the lines of restoration. This is obviously a broken horse which has been stuck together again.
So it would have been an old break.
In the Terracotta Warriors pit, you can see the way the horses and the warriors were excavated.
They were all lying higgledy-piggledy all over the place. It's rather a moving sight.
It looks like a sort of end of a battle or something, with them all dead.
When the warriors were discovered, not a single one was intact.
Every standing figure has been painstakingly reconstructed.
There's archaeological evidence that the figures broke very soon after the First Emperor's death.
The pits were ransacked and burned, and the roofs collapsed.
Jane and I went into the back of the pit to look at some warriors under repair.
This is stunning because you actually
get a sense of the jigsaw, of them putting it all back together.
The intricacy of what they had to do to rebuild this army.
And you can see how tall they are. You're pretty tall.
These guys are big.
Do you know, one of my first impressions, apart from scale,
is actually they are beautiful in their own right, individually, beautiful sculptures.
They look very fierce as well.
It's a silly thing to say, but they look particularly fierce, I think.
The more you look at them, the more details there are.
So it is true that each Terracotta Warrior is different?
I think each one is slightly different, yes.
But there are similarities. There are sets.
But the details are done by hand, so they are slightly different.
Here you can see a belt hook. And you can actually see how they were used.
And it's even more interesting, because when we have our exhibition,
we are going to have some bronze belt hooks from that period.
This man has got a centre parting, and a little goatee beard.
And round the back, he's got a rather interesting
sort of French plait type thing.
The detail, that's exquisite.
And this, I guess, is a sort of hair slide in the middle to fix it together.
And it's very intricately plaited.
It's extraordinary.
These ones have got side topknots. And plaits.
And you can see not only the details of the plaits, but the details of each individual hair.
Why do you think there is all this diversity with the hairstyles?
Well, I think they show different ranks.
For example, the officers have hats on.
The infantry, a lot of them have side topknots.
So it's to do with rank and possibly to do with
the different areas of China that they come from as well.
The faces in the Terracotta Army reflect the different
ethnic groups brought here to work from across the Empire.
You can still see this diversity in the faces around the city.
The Terracotta Army is big business for Xi'an.
There's a booming trade in replica warriors.
The Chinese invented mass production.
And that's what's driving their buoyant economy today.
You can actually touch these ones, can't you!
Is this, in miniature, a bit like the process that
was gone through 2,000 years ago, to build the real terracotta soldiers?
It's a little bit like it.
It's not entirely like it because this is one small terracotta warrior been built in one whole mould.
Whereas, of course, the big ones were built in pieces.
Some of the parts were in moulds, like the heads.
You can tell. They've got lines here where they've been joined together.
And also the hands were made in moulds and stuck on to the bodies.
The legs were sometimes made with slabs of clay rolled into a pipe, like drainpipes.
It does give you a strong sense, all the ladies here, of the production line. Yes. Absolutely.
Just as these replicas are individually finished by hand,
so were the original Terracotta Warriors.
The full-sized figures take a week to be fired in a giant walk-in kiln.
The people who built this vast army were part of a massive logistical operation.
And this is what underpins Qin Shihuangdi's success.
If you can manufacture and build on such a massive scale,
you can mobilise and supply armies for long periods.
That means you can defeat your enemies in war.
Archaeologists have a good idea of how the Qin workers constructed the Terracotta Army.
First they dug a pit with access ramps and built walls of compressed earth to create corridors.
Then they closed off the pit with a wooden roof.
They then carried the warriors down the ramps into the corridors.
Presumably they had some form of lighting as, of course, it would have been dark.
It must have taken skill to carry the heavy warriors, horses and chariots into the cramped spaces.
Once the army was in place, the roof was covered in matting,
the entrances were sealed, and earth piled on top.
The underground army was not designed to be seen by human eyes,
and it remained hidden for over 2,000 years.
There's something many of us don't realise about the warriors.
When they were entombed, they didn't look as they do now.
Wow!
Look, these are the warriors that have got pigment on them.
This comes as a real surprise to me.
Well yes, they are not terracotta-coloured at all, they were brightly painted.
This was the result of conservation work done with the Germans,
and they've come up with this technique of preserving the pigment.
They've got a flesh-coloured face.
And then these wonderful reds, the detail of the red holding the armoured plates together.
Then this fantastic, what colour is that? This is the Han purple, it's called.
It's electric.
It's so bright, it's extraordinary.
It is incredible. It's very rare, this colour.
To think that they had purple armour, it seems incredible.
Purple, yellow, pink, blue, red.
Do we know if this is an accurate depiction of the colours they would wear into battle?
Well, we don't have any evidence about what the armour looked like,
what the clothes looked like, except for the warriors that have been excavated from the pits.
So actually this is our evidence.
Whether the colour was the colours that the clothes and armour would have been when they went into battle,
or whether they were actually in ceremonial armour and dress, I don't know.
Pit one is staggering enough.
But imagine if they were all in their original colours?
It would have been incredible, wouldn't it? So bright.
They would have looked amazing.
At the British Museum, it's May, and the Reading Room has been closed for two months.
Nobody seems to be complaining about the temporary library.
The librarians can still access the books left in the Reading Room.
This is the first time that Carolyn and Steven have seen the space since building work began.
Oh, it's huge!
So this is the archer.
Go down the stairs a bit and see when you start to see me.
I can see you there. That's a perfect sight line.
Yeah. That is amazing.
You've got a fantastic view.
On the bottom of the stairs, you get the archer.
How good is that?
So we're in the second section, and what I really want to understand
is the scale of the presentation of the warriors.
And I am pretty blown away.
There's David at the other end.
David's at the lectern edge, the rail.
So, from where we are here to where David is, is the footprint of where the warriors will be positioned?
Yeah. It's wonderful.
They are on this floor that is a putty colour, terracotta as well.
If you can persuade your client, and say, I know it's going to be good,
and the models and the drawings you do, nothing is like standing there.
It is going to look extraordinary.
The long imagined design is emerging from the drawing board.
The fabric wall is a screen for projected images of the Terracotta Army, to give a sense of scale.
So we've got the army here.
And you've got these changing shows.
On the cyclorama. On either side.
As a grand theatrical backdrop. It's going to be spectacular.
A great green ring hides the lighting cables and helps reduce the echo in the room,
while allowing visitors to see the beautiful 19th century dome which is actually made of papier mache.
So the room is still a star.
It is, isn't it? It is still expressed within the exhibition.
And people won't know, they won't realise,
that they've been lifted up into the dome.
And it will have that more tomb-like feel.
Yes, I hope so. Yes.
Qin Shihuangdi had started building his tomb during his 25-year reign as king of Qin.
And building was expanded during his 11 years as emperor.
It was an amazing feat of organisation, with forced labour from all over the empire.
He conscripted 700,000 workers, that's twice the population of Cardiff.
The whole area was made its own government district, with officials
to oversee the building and the maintenance of the big tomb complex.
You can imagine the scene here.
It would have been seething with people, factories, kilns, armouries and potteries.
Everyone working towards one goal which was one of the most ambitious
construction projects of the ancient world.
No one is sure how extensive the tomb complex is, but there are frequent new discoveries.
These blue sheds enclosed pits that were unearthed in 1997.
One contains some grisly remains.
You don't have to be a pathologist to
know what these bones are here.
Pretty evocative remains of some of those who must have died building this massive complex.
Some of the army of several hundred thousand conscripts.
I talked to Duan Xinboa,
who has one of the best jobs in world archaeology.
He's in charge of excavating the First Emperor's necropolis.
It's a long-term project requiring compulsory purchase of the land.
TRANSLATION: We are migrating all the villages and factories
in a two square kilometre area around the tomb mound.
First we will focus on that area.
And then gradually work up to an area of 60 square kilometres.
They've already made some stunning discoveries.
The tomb mound sits at the heart of an underground palace surrounded by rectangular stone walls.
The outermost is 2.5 kilometres long.
North-east of the tomb mound, beside a large lake
is an F-shaped pit which contains life-size bronze water birds, cranes, swans and geese.
Nearby, there were terracotta musicians in wooden compartments.
Within the palace walls is a pit which contain two magnificent half-scale bronze chariots.
One has a completely enclosed carriage which may illustrate how
the First Emperor travelled on his tours around the empire.
Another pit contains entertainers, an acrobat who might once have spun a ball.
A strongman whose arm once gripped a pole.
And a huge bronze vessel, perhaps for weightlifting.
And to make sure everything ran smoothly, there were civil servants.
Paper hadn't been invented, but these men wrote on bamboo strips.
They made corrections with a knife worn on the belt, sharpened with a whetstone.
No one knows what treasures await the archaeologists
when the local residents have gone, and the whole area can be excavated.
But work continues where possible.
A huge collection of armour has been discovered very close to the tomb mound.
It's actually quite deep. What is it?
Six, 8, 10 metres?
Duan Xinboa estimates that this trench represents just one per cent of the entire armoury.
This is the armour made of stone.
It's an incredibly intricate process.
They are labelling every single...
SHE SPEAKS MANDARIN
THEN SHE TRANSLATES: They are preparing to lift one part up,
so they are labelling it.
Certain parts are still quite intact. There, there's a couple of pieces there.
Is this armour for the torso up here?
HE SPEAKS MANDARIN
TRANSLATION: It's for the shoulder.
Once lifted, it's taken next door to be painstakingly reconstructed.
Each suit weighs around 18 kilograms with up to 801 limestone pieces held together with copper wire.
What was stone armour? Because you couldn't wear it, it was too heavy.
So what was it doing down here?
TRANSLATION: It was probably for use in the spirit world.
You in the West believe that after dying, the spirit goes to heaven.
And in China, we believe the same thing.
Who was wearing this armour?
Is this spare armour in case the Terracotta Army needed some more?
TRANSLATION: This is not for the Terracotta Warriors, no.
In the other world, the emperor would have a spirit army.
The main difference is that the Terracotta Warriors don't have helmets.
Here, they have helmets, so it shows that on the battlefield, the Qin army did have helmets.
What way of thinking he had when he decided to have stone armour, he really doesn't really know.
TRANSLATION: We couldn't find reasons for many things.
For example, we don't know why he made the warriors so big, or why he made bronze horses and chariots.
But for all that we don't know, Duan Xinboa is probably closer to the First Emperor than anyone.
TRANSLATION: I believe I am the person who understands him best.
It doesn't matter how much treasure there is.
The most important thing is that he put into his tomb his new system of government.
It's a grand vision.
Not just a collection of beautiful artefacts for the afterlife,
but a representation of the First Emperor's whole society,
the united China he created surrounding him in his final resting place.
The tomb itself has never been excavated. We don't really know what's in there.
What we do know comes from one source, the historian Sima Zhen,
who wrote about 100 years after the First Emperor.
He says the tomb was "full of replicas of palaces and scenic towers, as well as rare utensils.
"Mercury was used to fashion imitation of the 100 rivers, the Yellow River, and the Yangtze.
"The seas and above were representations of the heavenly bodies."
So basically what he's saying is, inside that mountain
there is a model of the entire First Emperor's domain.
Sima Zhen records that crossbows were rigged to shoot at tomb robbers
and that many people were sent to their deaths in there -
The craftsmen who knew the secrets of the treasures within, and the Emperor's childless concubines.
We can't be sure about the crossbows and the corpses,
but Duan Xinboa and colleagues have made some fascinating discoveries,
using ground penetrating radar and other non-invasive surveys.
TRANSLATION: Until a couple of years ago we knew very little about what was under the mound.
We have recently discovered the hollow chamber, the bottom of which is 30 metres below ground level.
It's a stone structure with a hollow space about 15 metres high.
A stone chamber surrounded by stepped walls is 50 metres wide
and 80 metres long, like three Olympic swimming pool side-by-side.
The Emperor's coffin presumably lies inside,
and there's tantalising evidence that he really is surrounded by mercury rivers and seas.
TRANSLATION: We found high levels of mercury in the soil of the tomb mound.
The mercury levels are up to 70 times higher than in the soil in the surrounding areas.
That seems to support the version of the tomb found in the book.
Who knows what else is in there.
Perhaps more warriors, and a horde of treasures from around his vast empire.
This is the most exciting archaeological site on the planet.
This is the place that keeps archaeologists all over the world
up at night and, for my part, I hope they open it up before I die.
For now, the Emperor and his entourage lie undisturbed.
The tomb is a tourist attraction.
A pleasant place to visit, especially to dress up as an emperor.
Or, if you just want to climb up for the beautiful mountain views.
Well, Jane, pretty tiring.
It might have eroded a bit but I'm still feeling it. No!
I can't believe it. That's the oldest trick in the book.
Thanks very much!
Look at the view. Yes, look at the view.
Sneaky!
And we're standing on top of the tomb chamber.
And he built it high because he believed this brought him closer to the gods?
It's in the shape of a mountain.
You know he went on tours around China, and he wrote inscriptions on mountains.
And he had his tomb built like a mountain.
It's like he's making his tomb part of the Chinese landscape, making himself part of China.
Would you open it up?
I don't know. It's such a tricky question, it's up to them, really.
Of course. What would you do?
Well. I do think caution is important.
I think it's absolutely the right thing to do, to wait until
it's possible to even think about preserving what they might find.
But it's really a question at the moment of them not wanting to disturb him.
He is still there.
He's there.
At the British Museum, the Reading Room windows have been blacked out
so it's more tomb-like inside the new gallery.
It's quite, fraught, probably is the word, because we are in the final couple of weeks now.
We are all very excited because we've just hit a record for the museum.
We've managed to get 50,000 tickets sold in advance for the exhibition, which is a record for us.
It's really exciting.
That will be £12 please.
But apart from that, the shops are getting prepared.
The catering all sorted out.
There's a lot of buzz outside the Reading Room as well,
because we really have got to deliver for those 50,000 people now.
There's now a partition wall dividing the exhibition into two halves, life and death,
with a doorway from one to the other.
What we know about the First Emperor comes from the archaeological evidence of the tomb,
and the historian Sima Zhen.
We know that he had at least two sons.
But we don't know the names of his empress or concubines.
Or if he truly believed he was a living god.
The Emperor called himself divine, but of course, he wasn't, he was all too human.
He became obsessed with immortality.
He set his servants off to the furthest flung parts of his empire
looking for herbs and mushrooms, anything to make him immortal.
Some say he also ate mercury, not knowing that it was poisonous.
But he couldn't escape death.
It came on a journey around his empire.
News of it was suppressed, perhaps for fear of an uprising.
His body was returned to the capital in a carriage, possibly like the bronze chariot buried with him.
His courtiers carried supplies of dried fish to mask the smell of his rotting corpse.
After his death, Qin Shihuangdi's sons weren't really up to the job.
His dynasty came to a violent end a few years later.
But a new Emperor took over and founded a new dynasty. And that's the point.
From then on, the fighting was not about dismantling China, but dominating it.
Qin Shihuangdi had created more than just an empire.
He'd created an idea that would prove so powerful that it
was never seriously challenged over the next 2,000 years.
In the middle of a chilly August, it's closing time at the British Museum.
After travelling thousands of miles, the precious objects from the First Emperor's tomb are arriving.
It's very exciting to see this, but it's a bit scary.
But I'm sure it's all under control, really.
I slightly feel that I don't have a function!
It's all so well organised, I might as well not be here.
It's an all-night job for the heavy lifting team to get the crates in.
Each horse weighs 340 kilos.
All the objects have to be brought in through the Reading Room door,
then lifted up to the exhibition floor.
The Terracotta Warriors Museum has sent its top team to help with the installation.
Their lack of English doesn't worry Darryl Day.
My Chinese is not great!
But we are using the universal sign language for object moving,
which seems to be working for me and their technician as well!
The small objects are opened and checked before being taken to the Reading Room.
What we want to try and do is put the stone helmet, as it would have been worn, on top of the stone armour.
But we've got to make sure that we are happy that we can do that absolutely safely.
There are still decisions to be made about displaying certain objects,
like a large weight providing a standard for trade under the First Emperor.
This is the one that's got the inscription around the back. Yes.
And this is in relief, so it looks rather nice.
I think it's a good idea to put it this way around.
It would be nice to let audiences know there is something around the other side.
The only way to do it is with a mirror, or a picture.
'There's also a problem with the standard measure which has been
'displayed to show an inscription on the back of the scoop.'
The only thing that worries me slightly, putting it upside down,
is that, will people realise that it's a measure for putting stuff in if it's upside down?
You could tilt it, perhaps?
Again, you see, it's a matter of, when you tried it this way, you can
see it's a measure, but you can't see much of the inscription.
And then you just look into the inside, and it's rather boring.
The Chinese don't allow the half-size bronze chariots abroad,
so they've made a replica for loan.
One terracotta figure has arrived with a little problem.
Here's the acrobat, and here's the mount.
It's not the most attractive of mounts.
The problem is that he can't stand up on his own. He's only got one leg.
And the question is, whether we can get anybody to make a mount in time,
and get a mount made that is better looking than this one?
It must be possible to make him be able to stand up without having
this whole framework around his leg, for the whole of the leg to go in.
It must be possible to put a peg leg of some sort.
To just to support him on one side.
And these perspex bars are actually distracting.
It would draw attention to the fact that he only has one leg.
That is a bit of a contradiction in terms, having a one-legged acrobat!
The real stars of the show are the Terracotta Warriors.
The museum press team has organised a photocall as the first one is uncrated.
How long will it take, lifting it and getting it out?
Half an hour, something like that.
Why, you got another job on? There's nothing more important than this!
If you can take the cameras back a little so it's not over the top.
Can you just get a hand on the warrior?
Nice and easy.
A bit more pouting!
Come back a little bit more.
I don't want to take him off the frames until they have decided where they're going. Yes.
The precious terracotta figures are left in their wooden travelling cradles until the very last moment,
and then, everyone holds their breath and hopes they stand upright.
One, two, three.
OK, you need to go quite a bit over. Yes.
My left, my left, my left. OK.
Yes, I think that's quite good. Then you can move the acrobat.
Very, very nice.
Finally, the exhibition is ready to open, telling the story of the life and death of China's First Emperor.
The original aim was to let you get really close to the things,
so that you could see that these are individuals,
that they are crafted separately, and that you can see that they
really are works of art, that these are sculptures as well as massed ranks.
This chariot's great, isn't it?
Yes. I think it's very clever the way they've made this replica to show the ones that would have disintegrated.
And then here, you've got this light infantryman, the one with the big nose.
They look absolutely beautiful here, and it's wonderful to see them so close.
I love the details on his face, where you can see the hands
almost of the workmen, the lines on his face in the clay.
Jane, I think it looks absolutely beautiful. Are you happy with it?
I think it's more beautiful than I thought it was going to be.
The design, and the display, is fantastic.
As far as the content is concerned, I think it's very difficult for me
to judge that because I'm so close to it, I know it so well.
And I really hope people will like it.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd