There is still work to be done, but what can already be seen after the hustle and bustle of professionals preparing the rooms of the Archaeological Museum of Alicante (MARQ) gives an idea of ??the exceptional nature of the exhibition that opens on Tuesday, March 28.
It is a privilege to walk among these terracotta warriors fresh out of the containers that have protected them on their transatlantic flight, to look into the eyes of this proud general, created 20 centuries ago to protect an emperor beyond death.
These soldiers, a selection of more than 6,000, all different, found so far in a mausoleum that is considered the eighth wonder of the world, 2,000 years later they assume the role of ambassadors of an ancient culture and a country, the China of the 21st century, who occupies a central place on the board of world power, at the height of the ambitions of that leader, a unifier of peoples and diverse ethnic groups that formed the empire of the Qin dynasty.
The MARQ is obliged to maximize security as never before, not only in its electronic systems and surveillance personnel, but even in the fixing to the ground of the platforms on which the glass cylinders that safeguard the integrity of the sculptures; They must guarantee resistance to medium-level seismic movements. We are talking about a collection whose appraisal value, for insurance purposes, reaches 80 million dollars.
After the incident in Philadelphia in 2018, when a student broke the thumb of one of the figures while taking a selfie that he later uploaded to Snapchat, the Chinese authorities decided to demand greater security, reduce to ten the number of original statues that can be abandoned your country at the same time and limit your exit ‘visa’ to ten months.
Marcos Martinon Torres is the curator of The Legacy of the Qin and Han Dynasties. The Warriors of Xi’an. Professor of Archeology at the University of Cambridge, he hardly conceals his enthusiasm for the quality of the continent – he already knew the quality of the content – because the work of the technicians from the Alicante Provincial Council, the decoration and lighting of the rooms, the audiovisual material, the music composed expressly by Luis Ivars… Every detail contributes to making the exhibition that opens on Tuesday incomparable.
“It is an exhibition that has international repercussions”, he tells us, “and in Alicante they should not be so modest: what the MARQ -the Foundation and the Museum- have achieved is extraordinary. Because it is not only the first time that the Xi’an warriors have left China after the pandemic, which has an important symbolic value, but also the selection of objects that accompany them is another feat, because we are talking about 150 objects that are coming selected from nine different museums, which has required nine different negotiations. It is the first time that this collection is presented in the world.”
The warriors haven’t traveled to Europe for five years, the last exhibition was in 2018 in Liverpool, but the curator explains that a lot of progress has been made since then. “In both exhibitions, the warriors are in the center, but in this one there are a series of novelties: firstly, in the narrative aspects, because here we tell a thousand years of Chinese history, both before and after, and we better understand the when, the how and why of the terracotta warriors, and the legacy that the Qin dynasty left in the glorious Han dynasty, which succeeded it”.
Secondly, it is an archeology exhibition in which there is also science and technology: “It is guided by the latest laboratory discoveries, there are several zoom points, places that dot the route, with much more up-to-date research.” And finally, a key and unique aspect is that “everything in this exhibition has been thought of and designed specifically for the MARQ, and this is where the arrangement of objects, the narrative, the signage, the graphic design, the music come in. for each room and for each video, all the audiovisuals, all the didactic resources, the smells, the architecture, the showcases… everything is unique and specific for this exhibition”.
Martinon highlights that the international prestige of the MARQ has been fundamental. “It’s going to be hard to see anywhere better than this because the team here is amazing, I’m blown away by the work they do.” The curator highlights the perseverance of Josep Albert Cortés -manager of the Marq Foundation- and his team, “who since 2018 have never lost hope and continued to remind the Chinese authorities that this is a museum of an unparalleled category and has all the resources of infrastructure and personnel to do justice to this collection”.
Cortés will later tell us that at first it was thought that the MARQ would host the collection for six months, but understanding the importance of the event, the president of the Diputación, Carlos Mazón, opted to extend it until January 2024, reaching the maximum time that the Chinese authorities allow. Ticket sales, already active on the MARQ website, are going at full speed, there are already a multitude of reservations and hours with sold-out guided tours for the Easter dates.
On the relevance of the terracotta warriors, the Spanish archaeologist – who collaborates daily with his Chinese colleagues displaced to Alicante – believes it is important to clarify that 500 years before Qin, “China did not exist; in its place there were 100 or 150 feudal states, in permanent conflict, which annex each other until we have seven kingdoms. One of them is the kingdom of Qin (pronounced ‘chin’) and this king, at the age of 13, after the death of his father, began campaigns of annexation of the other kingdoms until he achieves what no one else has achieved, a unified country that takes the name of his dynasty”.
This emperor, who has grown up in a world of violence, gains resources and enormous power that no one has ever held before. “And that is a great challenge, to keep under control all this dispersed population, people did not know what an empire was, they speak different languages, they are different ethnic groups with different customs… and they must control that through the law and through the propaganda; the construction of the mausoleum is also a great propaganda work”.
The exhibition also explains in detail what the Chinese funerary world entails. “The belief that life continues after death was common – and still persists – in many parts of China, along with the idea that you have to take what you needed in life to the afterlife,” adds our interlocutor.
“So the noble and wealthy people were buried, already before the first emperor, with their horses, their servants, their concubines, their food, their musical instruments… the emperor does this wildly, to the extent of his resources, a true funerary empire, with its palace pyramid in the center, graves that continue to be discovered with servants, concubines, animals and, at the entrance, to protect it, a terracotta army”.
The astonishing thing, when one visits the excavations of Xi’an, is that this army “is nothing more than an accessory element, at the entrance of a funerary mausoleum, a city of almost one hundred square kilometers” that remains underground. Since 1974, after the accidental discovery of a farmer who was digging a well, thousands of experts and workers have been employed daily to bring to light an incalculable treasure. The exhibition remembers them, as well as the thousands of slaves who two millennia ago made the sculptures one by one. The names of eighteen of them have been preserved, which the MARQ exhibition recovers in homage to all of them.
Just to rebuild one of the emperor’s bronze and gold chariots (a replica of which occupies a prominent place in the exhibition), it took eight years of work in which the original was reworked like a puzzle. The mausoleum is a bottomless pit. “It is estimated that there are 600 graves.” And with the application of new techniques, “chemical analysis, genetic analysis, multispectral photography, 3-D reconstructions with which we then do geometric morphometry, that is, comparing their shapes to see to what extent they are different; so far, they are. all”.
In the MARQ will also be represented the mausoleum of Yang Lin, close in space and later in time to that of Emperor Qin -it is from the Han period- “which imitates the first and of which we also have terracotta warriors, which are a little more smaller and much more unknown; they will surprise, because it is an equally spectacular site excavated more recently, but less known in the West”.
