11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful photos of the Emperor's Army, July 5, 2008
This review is from: The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army (Hardcover)
The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army is the catalog of the British Museum's exhibition September 2007 through April 2008. (Much of the material is archived on its website.) The exhibition featured the largest group of important objects relating to the First Emperor ever loaned abroad by China.
Most of the 120 objects displayed in the exhibit and book came from the tomb of Qin Shihuangdi, the First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty. He reigned from 221 BCE when he unified China to 210 BCE. One of the key points of the exhibit -- apart from the marvelous art which is displayed in superb reproductions -- is to correct "[t]he written record [which] is distorted by bias, and the 'portraits' of him [that] date from the Ming dynasty onwards (AD 1368-1644) and are purely imaginary." The first half of the exhibit and catalog focus on his accomplishments and the second half focuses on the contents of his tomb.
The photographs and text are much too rich to summarize here; one of the best illustrations is of two recently discovered terracotta musicians, one sitting, one kneeling, with three bronze birds. The musicians are about to play and the tame, trained birds -- a swan, a goose and a crane -- are about to dance.
This short extract gives a fair indication of the quality of the text:
"Today his large burial mound occupies the centre of the compound. This artificial hill has the shape of a truncated pyramid, with a base of approximately 350 square metres, planted with bushes and trees. The terracotta army is buried in four pits to the east of the tomb mound, outside the walls of the tomb complex. It is as if it were placed there to guard the tomb from attack from the east, where all the conquered states lay. The four pits seem to represent a complete garrison: the total number of figures is estimated at over 7,000. All the warriors originally carried lifesize real weapons, many of which disappeared when the pits were looted and burned in the rebellions after the first emperor's death.
"It is perhaps the enormous scale of the terracotta army as well as the quality of the depiction and manufacture of its members that moves visitors so greatly. These mature, life-size sculptures seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, as there was no tradition of such large or such realistic sculptures in the centuries preceding the Qin. Although the warriors have been described by some as individual portraits in clay of actual soldiers, it has now been shown that their manufacture was a great and early feat of mass production: a small and quite limited repertoire of body parts was produced using moulds, coiling and slab building. (3) They were joined together in a multitude of combinations, with details worked by hand afterwards before the whole figure was painted. Endless variety, for example of costumes, hairstyles, hand positions or facial features, was therefore possible (Figs. 5-10), but in no way are the figures individual portraits."
The catalog contains eight pages of bibliography with four pages devoted to a glossary and to a chronology. (The over-all chronology covers 3000 years so the short portion for the Emperor's life is crammed and difficult to read, and sometimes not expanded in the text.) The maps are superficial and not particularly helpful to a general reader. Nonetheless, this is a very good survey of the First Emperor, and as Jane Portal writes:
"It is predicted that excavations at the site of the tomb will continue for generations, as new discoveries are made year after year and new techniques of conservation and scientific research are introduced and perfected. It will doubtless take longer to excavate the first emperor's tomb complex than the approximate 36 years it took to build."
Consequently, the general reader will have to continue to buy new books to keep up with the discoveries. This wonderful catalog is a great way to survey the current state of knowledge.
I've given this catalog only four stars, not to reflect any real weakness in the book, but merely to recognize the greatness of
The Eternal Army: The Terracotta Army of the First Chinese Emperor (Timeless Treasures). The reviews here on Amazon are accurate and glowing; Roberto Ciarla's text is fuller and much more detailed, and there are more photographs, some in extraordinary detail.
That written, the best approach is to buy both books. I learned a great deal from both of them.
Robert C. Ross 2008
Robert C. Ross 2008
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Qin Shi Huang: A Man, a Vision, an Empire, December 1, 2008
This review is from: The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army (Hardcover)
Originally published to accompany the exhibition at the British Museum, "The First Emperor China's Terracotta Army" book is now accompanying the exhibition that is currently held at The High Museum of Art in Atlanta. This exhibition is about the controversial Qin Shi Huang, his legacy, and artifacts from his city-sized mausoleum complex. This book helps its audience better understand how Qin Shi Huang rose to power and unified China to become its first emperor in 221 BCE. Readers will discover that Qin Shi Huang's tomb complex, an analogue of life, contains more than a terracotta army for which it is best known. Think for example about musicians, wrestlers, bureaucrats, and animals. A minor shortcoming of the book is that the chronology reproduced at its beginning goes only from circa 3500 BCE to 220 CE. Not everybody is familiar with the later Chinese dynasties such as the Tangs, the Ming, and the Qing. To summarize, "The First Emperor China's Terracotta Army" succeeds in its ambition to bring back to life a man whose legacy remains controversial in China to this day. As a side note, Amazon could sell "The First Emperor China's Terracotta Army" DVD that was originally produced to accompany the exhibition at the British Museum. This DVD contains among other things some interesting computer-generated imagery that allows viewers to better appreciate the topography of the mausoleum complex that Qin Shi Huang commissioned in his search for eternity.
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