Qin Shi Huangdi: The Terrifying First Emperor Who United The Warring States

China, the Middle Kingdom, is a civilization which stretches back for more than 3,500 years. Traditionally regarded as a land of mystery, it is only in this century that ancient China's secrets have started to unravel, with incredible archaeological discoveries providing us with an insight into China's early civilizations. You could be forgiven for thinking that this is Shanghai or Beijing. It is in fact London's Chinatown. Many capital cities in the West now have their own Chinese Quarter, where Chinese culture is easily accessible. Whilst visitors can experience the flavours and architecture of the East, ancient China still reaches across hundreds of years and thousands of miles, with traditional symbols of lions and dragons abounding. The reality of ancient China is, however, a far cry from this bright, glossy Western interpretation. Chinese legend says that in the beginning of the world there was a great chaos, and the sky and the earth were like the yolk and white of an egg. Then Pan Gu, primal man, was born. He gave form to the earth and sky, creating earth from dark, impure elements, and sky from bright, clear elements. Every day the sky became 10 feet higher, the earth 10 feet thicker, and Pan Gu became 10 feet taller. Pan Gu lived for 18,000 years, by which time he was very tall, the sky was very high, and the earth was thick and solid. When Pan Gu shed tears, they formed the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, his breath formed the wind, his words created roaring thunder, and his darting looks became lightning. When he finally died, his eyes became the sun and moon, and his body formed the five sacred mountains of China. His hair turned into the trees and plants, and his fleas became the human race. In the countryside of China, nothing much has altered over the last few thousand years. Fishermen have fished on the Yangtze river in much the same way for centuries, whilst men and women work the fields. There is, however, a noticeable lack of ancient architecture in this rural landscape, as most buildings were made from perishable wood. We can, however, through archaeological finds, chart human civilization in China right back to Paleolithic and Neolithic times. This is followed by the Shang dynasty of 1600 to 1027 BC. These people were the successors of the stone bronze age people of China, and the Shang dynasty is the first indisputable dynasty in Chinese history, whose 27 or 28 kings ruled through divination, the reading of oracle bones and shells to forecast events. The earliest Chinese writing also comes from this period. This was a feudal system, where those at the core of the state were linked to the royal house by blood, beliefs, and self-interest. The Western Zhou dynasty runs from 1027 BC to 771 BC. The Zhou were a semi-nomadic clan who originated from the northwestern edge of Chinese land, and as they moved south, they came into contact with what was then China and the Shang kings. Over two generations, the Shang were gradually replaced. About 1000 BC, China, what was then China, which was just a relatively small area in the north, was conquered by the Zhou, what became the Zhou dynasty and the Zhou kings, and they set up or continued a feudal system of government, which quickly began to break down until the feudal lords began to take control and set themselves up more or less as princes of separate states. They still had allegiance, allegedly, to this king of Zhou, but in fact they were virtually independent. Confucius was an arch-feudalist, and he of course came from the ruling class, so naturally wanted to perpetuate it. And his teachings, which became king, as it were, right until this century, Confucius' teachings came out of that. But he wasn't alone. There were other schools of philosophy which advocated other ways of running China, one of which was not feudal. And in around 256 BC, along came a man who we know as the first emperor of China. He was head of a small state, the state of Qin. And he was very much influenced by a quite different philosophy, the legalist philosophy, which said, you know, government should be by merit. The people were rotten and therefore needed to be governed by a series of very harsh measures. He called it rewards and punishments, but there weren't many rewards. He was hot on the punishments. And he actually became extremely successful in organizing his society. It was a terrifying society, but it worked. And ultimately, it worked in that he was able to model his army on the same principles. His army became more efficient. And the long and the short of it was that in 221 BC, he was able to conquer all the other states of China and set himself up as top guy and called himself the first emperor of China. Each of these states had begun developing their own scripts for Chinese. He didn't want that. He couldn't communicate properly if he had different scripts. So he set to work or set people to work to devise a standardized script for China, which would operate right through his empire. And that standardized script is still with us. So when first emperor of China codified the language and he forbidden anyone else to use any other scripts. And today through archaeology, we discovered all kinds of evidence showing that writing or writings before the codification by the first emperor of China was in a great diversity. And you can see all kind of like a bird script and a script kind of written like a little bird or a little snake. And you can see some new elements being added to the writing, which probably represents some kind of local dialect. And all these things disappeared after the codification. And you can see Chinese writing kind of being brought into the mainstream. And obviously the official writing become something sacred. Nobody can change it. It's a little difficult for people used to English and European languages to conceive. But Chinese script is not dependent upon the sounds of words. It's rather like our number system. The number eight can be pronounced eight if you speak English, wheat if you're French, acht if you're German, whatever. But the symbol is the same for all of you. And that's what Chinese characters are like. All Chinese characters are, as it were, numbers. They are symbols for ideas. They're not connected to the sound of the word when you say it. And so although through his empire people spoke different languages, they all wrote the same. And so he had unity. And he had a means of communicating right across his empire. The first emperor, whose full title was Xing Shi Huang Ti, made himself emperor in 221 BC. Before taking over the other states of China, he was King Shen of Xin in the northwest of China. He ascended the throne in 246 BC at the tender age of 13. But things had gone far from smoothly at first. The man who actually had control of Xing was Sheng's regent, a minister called Lu Pu Wei. In 238 BC, Sheng's own mother was suspected of being involved in a plot against the young king. Sheng crushed the rebels, banished Lu Pu Wei, and was forced to place his own mother under house arrest. Unable to trust his own mother, King Sheng became mistrustful of anyone. It is perhaps these events that led to his strict rules. Sheng is described by one of his officials as a man with a high-bridged nose, long narrow eyes, the breast of a bird of prey, and the voice of a jackal, of an ungrateful disposition, and the mind of a tiger or wolf. Usually he behaved decently to his men, but in the intoxication of success, he only made them his victims. This paints a fairly ruthless picture of the man who became first emperor. He steadily prepared the Xing state for a great destiny, to reunite all of China's lands under one emperor himself. All Xing men had to dedicate their lives to military service, and systems of rank amongst nobles were removed. Power came from only one source, the king. He abolished the feudal system totally, that's to say he abolished hereditary class, and China became a society where you're promoted according to merit and according to ability. In order to run this state efficiently, he set about strong centralisation measures, and that meant good communications for a start. So he devised a road system, and the roads radiated out from his capital at Xianyang, and his roads went straight, rather like Roman roads, out in star fashion to the furthest boundaries of his empire. He set about the defence of this new state that he'd produced, and one of the most important ways of doing that was to defend it against attack from outside. All China's enemies, once you've got a concept that you can call China, all Chinese enemies came from the north, and he built the Great Wall of China to keep those enemies out. The Great Wall is still one of the seven wonders of the world, and remains an astounding achievement in terms of its size, stretching over 3,000 miles long from East China to the Gobi Desert, and rising up to a height of 25 feet. Watchtowers were built on rocky heights, and garrisons were erected by riverbanks to accommodate men to start the war. Now, bits of that war had been there before. They'd been built by these various states as they were fighting each other to keep the other states out, but he joined the whole lot up about 1,400 miles from the sea in the east, right across into the desert, into the west, and built this Great Wall of China. That helped to keep China safe from attack from the north, and meant he could then think about pacifying what was inside. A famous Chinese folk tale, which is over 1,000 years old, tells of a lady Mengqiang, who on hearing that her husband had died working on the wall, travelled 10,000 miles to find his bones for a proper burial. When she arrived at the wall, she spent days searching for his body, but to no avail. So she laid down by the wall and wept for days. The wall was so moved by her grief, that part of it collapsed, revealing her husband's remains. We tend to see the first emperor, that is we in the west, looking in from outside, tend to see him as a very important, dramatically clever, able ruler. The building of that Great Wall, as far as the Chinese people are concerned, even in the 20th century, was a horrific event. We look upon it as a major triumph of mankind. It's the only man-made thing you can see from the moon. It's built across quite inhospitable terrain. The cost of building it in terms of money was great, but in terms of human life was awful. Many, many died. And the Chinese have inherited from this a kind of belief that people buried under walls makes them strong. Now, whether that belief existed before the time of the first emperor is not known. It certainly exists now. Even in the 20th century, rumors still come up of people being surreptitiously buried under constructions in order to make that construction strong. In 1921 in Hong Kong, when they conducted a census, they found they had no returns on male children under the age of three. And it was because, at the same time, a rumor was going around Hong Kong that they were going to build a bridge across the harbor, resting on 99 piers, and under each pier was going to be buried a boy baby. And so no one declared boy children at all, and the census was totally messed up by this. And it's the kind of belief which is likely to emerge all the time in Chinese society, and one meets it again and again. And it's said to start from the Great Wall. Whatever, many people died building that Great Wall, and it remains for the Chinese a symbol of cruelty and oppression and of this tyrannical ruler. He standardized everything. All the weights and measures were standardized before each state had had its own, and even bits of states had had their own. He said, no, there will be one standard measure for everything, including, and this is the example that's very often quoted, including the length of axles of carts. And that actually wasn't so silly. He had these, this wonderful road system, but it wasn't a paved road system. It was a mud road system. And in wet weather, the wheels of the carts would very quickly make ruts. And unless you all have the same length axle, you know, one end of the cart is going to be tilted too much, and if you're unlucky, you're going to have a road accident, and you're going to block your communication system. So he more or less invented the tramway by having these same length axles. He invented the standardization of coinage, whereas everyone else had had their own coinage before that. He tried to make everything absolutely conform according to what he wanted. The first emperor of China achieved the notion of a unified China, of an empire. It was able to encompass Chinese people who, because they lived over a very wide physical area, developed local customs, local manners of speech, even slightly different local political systems, but that is at the local level. But the notion that China was a whole, was a unity, and that there should be a unified central government was with China forever from then on. Despite his success in unifying China, the first emperor's weakness was his fear of death. There were at least three assassination attempts on his life, besides which he had set himself up as the most important man in Chinese history, and only immortality would be a suitable follow-up to his reign on earth. So his preparations for death were as lavish as his palaces and great wall. He died in 210 BC, whilst on a tour of the eastern provinces, traveling along the Yangtze River and the coast of the Yellow Sea. He had had a dream about fighting a sea god, and was advised that if he wished to become an immortal, he must kill a giant fish with a crossbow. At Qifu, he killed what was most likely a whale, but the bitter irony was that he died a month later. His grand counsellor Li Siu and another advisor, afraid of losing their own lives, covered up his death, having his coffin carried around in a cupboard litter. This gave the men time to forge the emperor's will, leaving his empire to his second son. News of the emperor's death was released after their return to the capital, Xianyang. He was eventually buried at Mount Li, the place where he had constructed an incredible tomb. The first emperor of China, we know him through books, in the Shi Ji, the records of great grand historian, and it's written in great detail, its family and its achievement, but also described its burial, and the grand scale of his tomb construction is described in the book. Siu Ma Xian was an historian who lived about a hundred years on from the first emperor, and recorded the Shi Ji, or historical records, which discussed how the tomb was built. As soon as the first emperor became king of Xin, work was begun on his mausoleum at Mount Li. More than 700,000 conscripts from all parts of China laboured there. They dug three underground streams, they poured molten copper for the outer coffin, and they filled the burial chamber with models of palaces, towers, and official buildings, as well as fine utensils, precious stones, and rarities. The waterways of the empire, the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, were represented by mercury, and were made to flow mechanically. Above, the heavenly constellations were depicted, while below lay a representation of the earth. Lamps using whale oil were installed to burn for a long time. The actual tomb, buried deep under a grassy mound, is in the process of being investigated and preserved, so the magnificence of its interior can only be imagined for the time being. Today, the mound is surrounded by fields, but in 210 BC there would have been a walled inner enclosure, with gates on each side, with another walled enclosure around that. These enclosures would have been part of the strict measures taken to protect the tomb from grave robbers, and it is written that inside the tomb there were also automatic crossbows set to fire upon any intruders. The excavated pits of the first emperor's famous terracotta army are one and a half kilometers to the east of the burial mound. In archaeology, you can see there's two mysterious there today, and most amazingly, it's the probably very famous terracotta soldiers, also called terracotta army of the first emperor of China. It was discovered during the cultural revolution. Now it's a museum, and with the three huge pits full of terracotta figurines in immense size, or even taller. Some of them run like over 200 centimeters, and so some people say they were kind of early northerners, much stronger than today's Chinese. Estimated around 7,000 terracotta soldiers were buried beside the emperor's tomb. Not just soldiers, also horses and chariots, and these soldiers were originally had bronze weapons, but these bronze weapons mostly were taken by peasants' rebellion, or rebels. When they first got in the tomb, the first thing they wanted was weapons, bronze weapons. So the tomb was disturbed not long after it's been constructed. However, it's still in pact today. If you go to the site, you actually can see these soldiers and these clay horses. Why did the first emperor bury these soldiers' horses? They were replicas by his tomb. It's obviously a fascinating question. To consider this phenomenon or question, we may also have to go back to an earlier period, such as the Shang dynasty. In Shang's inscriptions, it's been recorded that human sacrifice was frequently used. The numbers can run five, six, a dozen, or hundreds, and sometimes thousands. I don't know exactly whether they actually used a thousand men to chop their head off and bury it in or beside the king's tomb. So far, there's no evidence of over a thousand people being killed, but certainly several hundreds of beheaded men were buried at the site that have been discovered. This human sacrifice is very much of Shang dynasty custom. When the Zhou ruler came, they reduced the use of human sacrifice because we all remember Confucius was very much against the barbarian custom of human sacrifice. But rulers or rich people, they are not quite giving up the idea. But since the less very powerful rulers still do sacrifice human beings, most people start to use replicas made in clay or wood, and as you can see through early Chinese tombs. So when the first emperor of China, when he started to build his tomb, when he was still alive, and he also started to make a terracotta army to guard his tomb, why did he do so? I mean, who were his enemies? And that's still a bit debated among scholars, but generally believe that in the east side of China, and he was not completely in control, so still rebels and rebellions against the first emperor of China at that moment. So maybe what's his worry made him to make this huge terracotta army to defend himself in the underworld. Little Chinese art can be definitely dated to the Qin dynasty. It's the subsequent Han dynasty which has proved rich in archaeological and artistic finds. This dynasty was founded only four years after the death of the first emperor, following a period of civil war. The western Han dynasty began in 206 BC to AD 8, and then sandwiched in between is the short Qin dynasty of AD 9 to 23. This is followed by the eastern Han dynasty of AD 24 to 220. So we are now looking at a total time span of around 400 years. The Han dynasty is one of the great periods of Chinese art, one of the great periods of Chinese history. More or less, the cycle of dynasties which continued uninterrupted until the beginning of the 20th century had its pattern set in the Han dynasty in this period from 200 BC to 200 AD, roughly speaking. And thousands upon thousands of Han dynasty tombs have been discovered from that time. Those are the material that give us the greatest insights, not only into Han beliefs about death and the afterlife, but also the daily life and activities and what they considered important in their lives. One of the most spectacular finds has been a series of tombs in Changsha in Hunan province, right in central China. Essentially, they are mounds about 16 to 20 meters high. In one of these, three tombs were discovered side by side, slightly overlapping. Each consisted in a deep pit cut through the man-made mound back down to ground level and slightly below. In this was a magnificent heavy timber structure forming a central compartment for the tomb for the actual coffins, which were a nesting set of coffins, and four compartments at the top and bottom and on the two sides which contained grave goods. All of these were elaborately wrapped up, for instance, baskets of clothing, tagged and listed in an inventory on bamboo slips. The whole burial was sealed in with a thick layer of charcoal and another thick layer of white clay, which rendered the whole thing impermeable. This was a common method of burial in this particular area, and ever since, well, the beginning of this century, tombs in this area have been discovered that were in good condition. But the difference in this tomb is that the condition in which everything was found was practically pristine. There'd been little decomposition, even of the body of the lady who was buried there. In the nest of three coffins, practically the last object that was deposited in the tomb would have been a silk banner which was folded and laid on top of the innermost coffin that containing the body of the lady herself. It appears to be a funerary banner which might have been carried in procession to the grave and which represents the lady herself, seen with her servants in the centre, and her transformation into a heavenly spirit with a snaky body right at the top of the painting. Dunhuang is an extraordinary site which links the Han dynasty to the present day, because originally it was in 111 BC that the warlike emperor, Emperor Wudi, seeking to consolidate his power, expanded westwards and eastwards. So in 111 BC, Dunhuang, which means great and glorious, something like that, was established as a garrison commandery. But it really began to become famous much later, in the fourth century AD, when a Buddhist monk, his name is Yuezun, was said to have carved a cave, probably for solitary meditation, in an amazing kilometre and a half long cliff about 25 kilometres from Dunhuang to the southeast. And following on, during the period of the northern dynasties, that's in the fifth and sixth centuries AD, and then at an increasing tempo in the following centuries, caves were cut at Dunhuang one after another out of the gravel cliff. Because the stone was a sort of pebbly gravel, stuck together and quite easy to excavate, but not easy to carve, these caves were all lined inside with a kind of clay plaster mixed with organic material, wild hemp and straw, which you can see very thickly enfolded in the plaster. This plaster has lasted over a thousand, 1,500 years without showing any signs of cracking or deterioration. And going inside these caves is quite an extraordinary experience, because every surface and sometimes even the floor is decorated, the floor with tiles, but the rest, clay plaster on the walls and stucco figures which were built on an armature, wooden armature. And these, while they were at first perhaps intended simply for solitary meditation in the wilderness, according to a vital part of Buddhist practice, soon became shrines to the Buddha. There are paradise scenes, there are scenes of daily life of merchants being held up on the Silk Road by border guards or by bandits. Dunhuang was this important place supported by the Han expansionary empire. It was that expansion of Han which made it possible for the overland route to Western Asia to become a real highway of cross-cultural influences and communication. And many luxuries reached China and left China through this route. The Buddhist art in the caves of Dunhuang reflects how popular the religion became in the 6th and 7th centuries in China. But it did not displace any of the existing religions already in practice, shaping and evolving around these instead, creating an ethos of balance and harmony. It's very difficult to talk of one religion for China. There really isn't a Chinese religion. What China has practiced is a whole heap of religious elements which have come together to make a kind of religious stew, I suppose. Most people in China, most ordinary people in China, have practiced a whole mix of religions all at once. And they would include Buddhism, which came from India into China about the 1st century AD sometime, not too far from the time of Christ, and very rapidly gained acceptance in China, but became changed in the process. Chinese Buddhism isn't much like Indian Buddhism. In fact, it's become very much Chinese style. But Buddhism was very acceptable to people. They hadn't at that time got a religion which talked about personal salvation in any kind of sense. You were merely a cipher in a family before that, and then there was fate which kind of sat over you. But there wasn't any way in which you could work in this life to get a better life afterwards. And Buddhism must have been like real jam on your bread when it first came into China, because suddenly the Chinese people could see that there was value to the suffering that they certainly experienced, that they could get something out of that. Taoism, that's T-A-O-Tao, usually spelled Taoism, was a native Chinese philosophy, which was one of those philosophies which was current at the time of Confucius and the legalists. And Taoism is very dear to Chinese hearts. It's a kind of naturalist philosophy, basically saying that nature doesn't really take any actions at all. Nature just is. And man, if he really wants to be happy, must somehow conform with nature, and that means he didn't have to ask where your money was coming from. Somehow it would appear. But it certainly appealed to the Chinese very much. And this notion that you could be one with nature and that the best you could hope for is to become one with nature was what Taoism came from. Trying to get like nature led them down some very odd paths, because nature, people could see, went on forever. It was eternal. And therefore, the notion that man should be eternal started to occur to people. And they started looking for the elixir of life. They started looking for ways to make themselves immortal. And they took some very strange paths to that, including looking for the philosopher's stone and all these things. But it became very obvious that whatever they did, whatever techniques they cooked up, whatever medicines they tried to invent for themselves, or whatever fasting techniques, or whatever they went in for, they died. And round about the time that Buddhism came to China, that is not too long after the time of Christ, Taoism had, of its own accord, merged into an area where it began to separate body and soul and became a religion. Because the body can't go on forever. That was obvious. You died. But perhaps there's a soul which can. So Taoism became a religion too. They also believed in ancestor worship. And ancestor worship, in the Chinese form of it, consists of worshiping your father and your grandfather and your great-grandfather and so on, in the male line backwards, as gods. And those ancestors would then look after you in this life, you hoped. In some ways, it's a kind of negative religion, because if you don't worship them, their souls get into dreadful difficulty in the afterlife, because their souls are kept alive by the offerings that you make to them. If they die, you're going to pay for it. But there was also the positive side, that you believed that your ancestors had a positive interest in your welfare. And in return for your worship, they would do their best to ensure that your life was good on this earth. It was the religion of the family. And the family was very important to the Chinese and remains so today. Ancestor worship, Taoism, Buddhism, all kinds of nature beliefs, the beliefs that mountains and trees and streams and things had gods associated with them, which had to be placated and worshipped. And a huge belief in the presence of evil spirits and ghosts everywhere, meant that the Chinese culture was kind of beset with all kinds of religious and quasi-religious phenomena. And Chinese people tended to believe in all of them. The Silk Route not only opened up China to religious and cultural influences of Buddhism, but also to trade with other countries. The Silk Route, as its name suggests, was used mainly to trade silk through to Persia and then on to Europe. And this network of roads remained the same throughout later dynasties. Way back in the time of the height of the Roman Empire, had a more or less common boundary with China in Persia. And silk traded across to the Roman Empire, you know, around the time of Christ. The Romans knew about silk. They couldn't produce it. It came from China. And some very odd stories about how they believed. It's rather like the spaghetti tree. They had this vision of the kind of silk tree, which produced this stuff, which they coveted. But trade with China went on, not by sea generally, a little trade by sea with the Arab world, but mostly by land across the old Silk Route and into Persia and then down into Europe. But it wasn't really considered to be a good thing by the Chinese. They didn't really want it. They wanted to be self-sufficient. And in later years, we see this same desire being acted out again and again, as Chinese rulers have tried to keep China kind of isolated from the rest of the world. And this has gone on right into, well, really into the 1980s, with just minor attempts by some slightly more enlightened, perhaps emperors, who have tried to trade a bit. And that trade changed over time. There was silk, of course, and later on, probably around the eighth or ninth century, we get tea. The Chinese had started drinking tea themselves by that time. And of course, tea is enormously valuable, not just because people like the flavour, but it's very good for health, because you have to boil the water. And it has an immense effect on public health, if you're a tea-drinking nation. And the Chinese knew about that, and tea was very important for China. Tea was not widely known of in China until the Tang Dynasty around AD 600, when it was introduced from the border country around India. Its arrival in China is actually ascribed to the later period of the Sung Dynasty of AD 960 and onwards. Buddhist monks discovered that tea contained something which helped to keep them awake during long periods of meditation. This, of course, was caffeine. Chinese legend has it that the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma cut off his eyelids to help keep himself awake whilst meditating. These fell to the ground, where they grew into tea bushes. The leaves on the tea bushes were exactly the same shape as his eyelids. The Chinese have, over the years, developed a special red clay, which they used to shape delicate teapots, which is said to improve the flavour of the tea. The worst problem was there was nothing they wanted from the outside world, so they couldn't trade it. And this, in the 17th, 18th centuries and early 19th centuries, developed into a major problem for traders, who wanted desperately to get Chinese goods and had no means of paying for it, except ultimately silver. And silver on the world market became an extremely difficult commodity in the 18th and 19th century, because it was all disappearing into China, which the Chinese didn't particularly want either, but there it was. Ultimately, opium was found as a payment instead, and that's a very different story and brings us into a much more recent era, which one could say ends in 1997, with the handing back of Hong Kong to China. Hong Kong having been founded, one could say, on the basis of the opium trade. China's history, which stretches so far back over thousands of years, still has a resounding influence on the way China looks today. Every part of Chinese life is infused with ancient traditions, and the Chinese pride in their culture has ensured that history and legends are kept alive. One of the most well-known and colourful examples of this is the Beijing Opera, which takes its roots from Chinese drama, a traditional form of entertainment with a continuous history stretching back over 900 years. The first recorded play took place in the early Sung period, around 960 AD, and combined together a number of art forms which had already existed for over a thousand years. Chinese plays are called operas because music is such an important element, yet they bear little resemblance to Western opera. The Beijing Opera was formed in the early 19th century, when the Emperor Qianlong ordered opera groups from all over China to Beijing to perform on his 80th birthday. Inevitably, some groups remained in the city and formed a new troupe, and in turn a new form of opera containing music, dance, mime and acrobatics. The audience will already be familiar with the tales enacted, which are based on historical events and folklore, and the characters are two-dimensional in that they are symbols for the virtues and vices which affect us in everyday life. There are four main character types which are identified by traditional makeup and costume. The male role or Shang, the female role or Tang, the painted face or Xing, and the clown or Shu. The Chinese attitude of balance and harmony is reflected everywhere, even in architecture, with houses arranged around courtyards. The space between the sides of the courtyard is as important as the inside of the building, the emphasis being on the contradiction of inside and outside. The orientation of the courtyard construction lies on a north to south axis, with the head of the family living in the superior northern section. Dwellings arranged in such a pattern go back to the earliest days of Chinese history, even in rural areas. But perhaps the finest example is the Imperial Palace, situated in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, or the Square of Heavenly Peace. The Forbidden City is contained from the rest of the city by walls, and inside there's a vast open courtyard overlooked by the Hall of Supreme Harmony, which contains the Dragon Throne of the Emperor. The inner courtyard is marked by a pair of golden lions at the Gate of Heavenly Purity, and it is inside this inner area that the imperial powers lived. Beijing abounds with traditional examples of Chinese architecture. The general ethic is that buildings should blend in with nature, or the surrounding buildings. The Chinese view of the cosmos is that heaven is round, and the earth square. Hence man's dwellings are square, whereas sacred buildings where emperors communicated with the heavens, such as the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, are round. This beautiful example of Chinese wooden building was built without the use of a single nail. Even Chinese gardens are a feat of careful construction, with the ancient Taoist principle of a delicate balance between man and nature constantly mirrored. The hard yang elements of rock is balanced by the soft yin of water, and an energy called qi can flow freely. This energy flow is also essential for a healthy body. Fragments of ancient drawings show that the Chinese have taken slow gymnastic exercise called tai chi for over the last thousand years to aid this flow. Chinese cooking continues this theme of balance, with flavors and ingredients carefully combined so as not to disrupt the body's harmony. The Chinese practice of herbal medicine has also evolved on Taoist principles, with the earliest herbal written in the first century during the Han dynasty. Most larger towns and cities have apothecary shops which still sell herbs and traditional medicines. So China's traditions and historical legacy is inextricably bound into Chinese life today. The archaeological discoveries of this century, such as the first emperor's terracotta warriors, and the remaining ancient structures such as the Great Wall, have contributed greatly to our understanding of China, the Middle Kingdom. They provide insight into moments in China's ancient and diverse history, but doubtless there are still many secrets to be unearthed in the Dragon Land.