Posts Tagged ‘The Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang’
China’s first emperor was buried with a great army of terracotta warriors guarding his journey to the afterlife.
Qin Shi Huang (260-210 ad.C) was the first emperor of China. Brought together for the first time in history, by successive conquests territories now form the Republic of China under the rule of one sovereign (until then the country had been divided into numerous feudal states in continual struggle with each other), and unified by the introduction of a common identity such as the use of the same coin, writing, legal system, metrics …
Dictatorial and uncompromising character, the Emperor Qin Shi Huang imposed strict rules and do not doubt for a moment to use force to impose its rules. He burned the books that contained distant ideas from their own, buried alive at his detractors, thousands of intellectuals condemned to hard labor in the work of the Great Wall … all in search of the perpetuation of his dynasty on the throne.
He was also a big spender, and undertook various quasi mammoth project as was the Palace Afang or her own mausoleum.
Among his achievements is the initiation of construction of one of the great wonders of the world: the Great Wall of China. The objective of this fantastic building was to defend the territory of China of the continuous attacks of the nomadic Xiongnu of Mongolia and Manchuria.
In the construction of the mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor (discovered in March 1974) involved about 700,000 men, and took more than thirty years to complete. It is located in Lishan Mountain, about 30 kilometers from Xi’an, in Shaanxi Province. The enclosure measures 56 square kilometers and its height is about 76 meters. Its shape is pyramidal, and around it are more than 400 tombs and graves of the emperor’s subjects with funerary objects.
The mausoleum is the famous terracotta army. This is a large number of figures of soldiers and horses buried with the Emperor his side to them their orders. So far 500 soldiers have been unearthed, 18 wooden chariots and 100 horses. All figures of warriors scale models are natural traits and characteristics and different from each other.
Since 1987, the mausoleum is considered World Heritage by UNESCO.
credit to: Gorka Vault