I just want to quickly get into the Qin dynasty.
So we see a sort of escalation taking
place, where the Shang dynasty basically
produces the first idea of cities,
of hierarchies, and a compression, if you will,
of the world into structure.
The next dynasty basically introduces this new concept,
which is much more about the individual king, the emperor.
And this gets taken to the absolute extreme
by Qin, who basically is so important, that even though he
was so brutal and so terrible, that very word "China" comes
from Qin, the Qin dynasty.
So he was the first to now unify all of China.
He's a legendary emperor.
And today, still called the first emperor of China.
He believed very strong in certain types of magics.
And he thought that he was a god.
And as a god, he needed mercury in order for him
to be flexible and mobile.
So he ate mercury pills every day.
And you can imagine that-- Don't do that please.
It makes you insane.
And at the end of his life, he was completely insane.
And he burned books and he did absolutely terrible things.
It's estimated that maybe 3 or 4 million people
died under his regime, largely building
one of his favorite toys, which was the wall.
So he now sees the course to his relationship
with the Steppe, the Steppe people coming
with their horses, like gangbusters.
The Chinese people are agriculturalists.
They don't have a lot of fields where
you can go running your horses around, right?
So they don't have the traditional rapid fire horse
maneuvering.
They're in complete terror of what
they call the barbarians who live to the north.
So they build this miles and miles of wall
that is supposedly seen from space,
but you really can't, and make it into a great mythology.
If you ever fly to Beijing-- Any of you flown to Beijing?
Oh good.
When you come out of the air-- When you're in the airport
and you put your passport, and when you're in that passport
space, and you come out of the space, you're in a wall.
And there's the wall of China painted on the wall.
Not the real wall, wall of China.
And so that you're told, so to speak,
that you are the barbarians entering China.
And here's the gate through the wall into China.
So you're literally, today, are still
rehearsing the importance of this structure, which
never worked.
There's been millions of people, probably, died building it.
And the bones of those builders are just buried, literally,
in the stamped earth.
You just died.
They stamped you right into it.
And they discover it archaeological.
And it never really worked, because the horses would just
go over and around it or whatever.
And eventually, would conquer then
the way people who came from the north
with the horses, that just went right over.
And they conquered the Chinese for awhile and so forth.
So, completely waste of time.
But, anyway, there he did it.
So he built a new capital in a place that was called Xianyang.
But at the same time that he was trying to resist the invasions,
like these horse people, he also understood the economy
of trading with them.
So the new capital was way to the west
in China, where he could set up a capital
to actually control the flow.
So one end was to defend yourself
against them, but at the same time, keep one door open,
which was Xianyang, where you could control and negotiate
all the economy.
The economy was very strange, because the Qin dynasty
didn't trade with people.
Trade was beneath the Qin.
But you could only give to the emperor.
So the Mongolians, if you will, the Steppe
would come with their horses or their goods that they had.
And they would have to give those things to the emperor.
The emperor would think about it.
And a few weeks later said, OK, I'll give you back some silk.
Or here's some goods.
So they didn't actually trade.
This was a strange relationship that irritated the Mongolians,
in particular.
Mongolians were traders.
I have this.
You got that.
So swap.
But with the Qin, you didn't trade.
You had to first give everything over to the emperor.
And if the emperor was nice enough,
he might give something back.
But it might take some time.
It might take a few days, or week, or a month, or year.
You're waiting around with your horses.
When am I going to get my silk?
And finally, the doors will open.
And the great king gets you some silk.
This is also described as one of the reasons for the inadequacy,
ultimate collapse of the Qin dynasty.
But anyway, he built a fantastic city,
of which nothing survives.
Because the Wei, unfortunately, changed its course.
And the flood ruined it.
But he built a tomb.
It was truly a spectacular thing, really a gigantic event.
So we see the mound.
It has various enclosures.
There might have been buildings in here.
And in the various parts of it were the famous warriors
that are on display in some museums
today, by the thousands and thousands.
So these entire wars, after building the wall
and after conquering all of China,
he had all of these soldiers with nothing to do.
So he put them to work as craftsman.
So it was like a labor saving-- Because instead of sending them
back home, what are they going to do?
So all of them spent many years and spent their entire life
making these clay statues.
And each statue is a real person.
These aren't just cookie cutter stamp things.
They're very unique.
Each one is painted.
They give us huge and fantastic indications of the clothing,
of the armaments of the entire life and culture of the times,
standing in neat orderly rows by the hundreds and the thousands.
All, of course, this is buried.
And this is the sacred army that's
going to protect him into the afterlife.
So if you ever get to see one in a museum,
it's certainly-- It blows your mind.
So someone had to design all this,
there are these long trenches, and stick
all of these out in there.
And that's just one of the burial places.
We haven't even gotten to all of them yet.
The whole thing is just absolutely gigantic.
So underneath this mound, which hasn't
been archaeologically looked at yet.
And this is still considered to be a sacred mound
by the Chinese government.
So there will be no archaeology there in the near future.
But they could use some sound machines to figure out
what's underneath there.
And what's under there are tamped earth walls.
So a pit was made deep down into the ground.
Tamped earth walls were made.
And then in the center of this was a tomb chamber.
So it looks a little bit like this.
And then the center of that is the tomb chamber.
And we know from descriptions, this is a few hundred years
afterwards.
And he [Sima Qian] talks about the model of China
as a map that was made in this tomb chamber.
And everyone thought, ah, this can't be true.
This is hogwash and so forth like that.
Just so beyond belief, with quicksilver.
And how could that be?
Well, now actually, they discovered
that the site is completely contaminated by mercury.
And indeed, that means there must have been quote unquote
rivers of mercury into this space.
So now we vaguely reconstructed, there's a wall inside.
In the middle, there's this map with the river, maybe
the Yangtze River, so forth, some machine that
keeps the mercury flowing through and through.
And it's also leaked out now into the subsoil.
And so this is the building.
And then you take tons and tons of earth.
And you cover it up.
Insane.
Why would you cover up such an amazing architectural
accomplishment?
Well, it didn't matter.
It wasn't for you and me.
It was merely for the gods to understand the entire effort.
So we can only hope that in the future, maybe
they will do some archaeology there to figure it out.
But certainly one of the great buildings in the world, even
though we don't really see much of it.