Qin Shi Huangdi likely qualifies as the most ambitious 13-year-old who ever lived. In 247 BCE, when he ascended the throne of Qin, one of the many warring states that competed for territory in what is now modern China, he set for himself two goals: to conquer all the rival states and to create a magnificent tomb that would contain a replica of his kingdom.
This is the first time some of the figures have ever left China. “They came over very gingerly,” says Gary Feinman, the museum’s curator of Mesoamerican, Central American, and Asian anthropology. “Each one looked like a person who had been injured in an American football game. They were strapped to a stretcher with foam padding. The heads were packed separately.”
Of course the central and most important part of the burial site is Qin Shi Huangdi’s tomb, but no one has opened it since it was sealed more than 2,000 years ago. There are two reasons for that, says Feinman. First, about a century after the emperor’s death, historians began to write accounts of his reign that claimed that rivers of mercury surrounded the tomb. And, sure enough, modern scientists have found traces of mercury around the tomb. (One of the historians’ other claims, that Qin Shi Huangdi buried builders and craftsmen alive, has yet to be substantiated.) The second reason is that conservationists don’t want to accidentally damage anything that’s inside.
