78 The EconomistJune 9th 2018
W
HO is the true discoverer of a buried
work of art? Is it the man who stum-
bles on it and digs it from the earth? Or is it
the person who, turning up later, under-
stands its importance? Fame and fortune
often hang on the answer—especially
when the work is hailed, by many, as the
eighth wonder of the world.
Zhao Kangmin cared for neither fame
nor fortune, but he treasured historical ac-
curacy. When visitors came to the museum
in Lintong, in Shaanxi province in north-
west China, where he was curator for 40
years (and still sat most afternoons, in his
trilby hat, after he retired), he would hand
them a business card. It described him as
“the very first man who discovered, deter-
mined, restored and unearthed the world-
famous Terracotta Warriors and horses.”
The vital word was “determined”. When
he was called out in April 1974 to look at
some “relics” found in a nearby wheat-
field, almost flying from his bicycle with ex-
citement, he knew at once what they were.
The farmer-finders, all brothers from
the Yang family, had been digging for water
to feed their pomegranate and persimmon
trees. As they unearthed arrowheads,
bricks and body-parts of what later
emerged as the Terracotta Army, they
threw them away into the wheat unless
they were sellable. The findingof the firstmore-than-lifesize head, rising from the
land of the dead, spooked them horribly;
they took it for an earth-god. All the same
Yang Zhifa, their spokesman, was quite
prepared to dump the whole lot in the river
unless they could get money for them.
It was Mr Zhao who told them that
these things were from the Qin dynasty of
221-206BC, the first imperial dynasty of a
united China, and that they must stop dig-
ging. As a former farmer, he understood
their frustration as they stood sulkily
smoking; he gave them 30 yuan for their
trouble. But after years of loving history he
was now a self-taught archaeologist, who
at 24 had been asked to run the Lintong
Museum, the only one in the county. In
1962 he had himself unearthed three terra-
cotta crossbowmen. Many times, out in the
fields, he had found bricks with patterning
he knew to be Qin. Now, by the half-dug
well, he knew it again. So he reverently
gathered up the “dead” limbs, down to the
tiniest fragments, wrapped them in linen
and took them to his museum. There he
stayed all night, washing them.
Over the next three days, using epoxy
glue and plaster, he pieced together two
warriors. They towered over him. Their
ruler, the First Emperor of Qin, had gov-
erned by force, and his masterful tyranny
was clear from written records; but herewas a portrait in hard clay of a soldier
guarding him in the afterlife, with his top-
knot, boots and wrap-around coat. It made
Mr Zhao’s heart leap to see him.
All the same, he did not mention the
warriors for some time. He was a quiet
man. And he feared, too, that Mao’s Cultur-
al Revolution was not yet over. Earlier on
Red Guards had smashed a Qin statue in
the museum, and he had been forced to do
public self-criticism for “encouraging feu-
dalism” by caring for “old things”. He re-
fused to apologise, since with his field-
work in all weathers, rising on the dot at
4am, and the hours spent in his tiny book-
shelved study, at his desk set out with one
page and one pen, he had done nothing in-
correct. If he was incorrect, it was in failing
to visit his parents as much as a son should.
In the end, though, he could not resist a
flash of justified pride, showing a journal-
ist from the Xinhua news agency his “terra-
cotta warrior of the Qin dynasty”. First he
had discovered them; now he had named
them. Once the national authorities were
alerted, proper excavation started, and he
joined the team that eventually uncovered
three huge pits filled with around 8,000 in-
fantrymen, officers and archers, 520 hors-
es, 130 chariots, and real, sharp, weapons.
In 1979 the Museum of the Terracotta War-
riors and Horses was opened above the
pits. By 2017 it had drawn 100m visitors,
and Lintong, once a huddle of mud build-
ings, had a university, hotels and a vast in-
dustry of terracotta-warrior-making.
Mr Zhao did not attach himself to the
new complex. The Lintong Museum was
his life, and other eras occupied him be-
sides the Qin. He directed excavations of a
palace and a temple from the Tang dynasty
of 618-907; a whole room of his three-room
museum was devoted to Tang art. Another
held Buddhist stelae, his special interest,
with inscriptions he had painstakingly
rubbed and transcribed. Amid all this, the
warriors took their place. He followed, but
did not join, the debates about them: most
controversially, whether this astonishing
jump in scale and expertise was the result
of contact with ancient Greece.Waiting for visitors
In 1990 the State Council officially recog-
nised him as their discoverer, and awarded
him a special pension. The new museum,
however, did not refer to him. It was Yang
Zhifa who haunted the souvenir shop,
signing autographsas the finder of the war-
riors. Meanwhile, five kilometres away, Mr
Zhao sat beside his mended warriors in a
darkened room of his museum, waiting.
He had redesigned the building in the
1980s in brightly painted traditional style,
expecting a crowd of visitors, but few
came—save his wife, most days, with his
lunch of steamed buns. When others
turned up, his card spoke for him. 7An army underground
Zhao Kangmin, curator of the Lintong District Museum and discoverer of the
terracotta warriors, died on May16th, aged 81ObituaryZhao Kangmin