Malone recalled reading about the find. Pau was right—it had proven significant for China. Millions flocked to the site every year. No visiting head of state left without a peek. Even the pope came during an unprecedented visit to China last year.
“While at the site,” Pau said, “on a fortuitous day, I happened onto something even more remarkable.”
The digging had been ongoing night and day for three months. Already, several hundred clay warriors had been unearthed, most in pieces, piled one atop the other like trees fallen in the forest. Luckily, the pieces were all near one another, so Pau ordered that a restoration workshop be constructed and the figures reassembled. His archaeologists and engineers had assured him that it could be done. In fact, they were confident that the entire army could be resurrected and stood up again, one warrior at a time. There could be thousands of them, he’d been told. Along with chariots and horses.
What a site that would be.
And he agreed.
But the nearby mound interested him more. It stood a kilometer away, south of the Wei River, beside the slopes of Black Horse Mountain. A vast, shallow-sided, earth pyramid with a wide base, veiled in fir trees towering over the grassy plain, seemingly part of the landscape.
But that had been the whole idea.
Men of Qin Shi’s day believed that the dead lived on, only in a different world, and they should be treated as the living. So the First Emperor fashioned for himself a massive imperial necropolis, a subterranean empire, to continue his rule in the netherworld. Once created, everything had been hidden with dirt, creating a mound that once rose more than a hundred meters.
Had it ever been breached?
