Professor Julia Lovell

So it didn't matter what status you were, what ethnicity you were within the original Chin state to.

It seems that the larger parts of the figures were done by less skilled labourers.

So local clay from the soil was pressed into moulds to make torsos, limbs, hands, heads and so on.

Yes, but the individuality of the faces suggests that they were completed by skilled artisans who'd shaped by hand facial details such as eyebrows, ears, beards and hairstyles like plaits and top knots and chignons and so on.

Most of the weapons in the tomb were inscribed with date of manufacture plus the name of the craftsman who made them and then the official responsible for that craftsman and so on and so forth in a long line of accountability that in some cases went

all the way up to the prime minister of the empire.

The first emperor's tomb complex seems to tell us a very clear, confident story of a man who proclaimed himself the first emperor of everything, who felt entitled to disrupt and often end the lives of millions of people to fulfill his own plans.

If we view this site out of its broader historical cultural context, we might see it as a swaggering endorsement of the power of the ancient Chinese state under a centralized autocrat.

But we're missing a big part of this cultural and political story if we don't say something about how ambivalent and even negative perceptions of the first emperor and his massive building projects have often been through Chinese history since.

Although the first emperor undertook monumental building projects during his lifetime and proclaimed himself the first of a dynasty that would last 10,000 emperors,

The Qin Empire actually collapsed only a few years after his death in 206 BC.

And some historians argue the stresses that building the emperor's mausoleum and border wall placed on ordinary people led directly to the eruption of civil war so soon after the first emperor exited the scene.

There are certainly many folk songs and tales complaining about the terrible sufferings

of ordinary people from the state's demands.

The Qin's successors, the Han dynasty, very much wanted to put distance between their regime and his.

They claimed the moral high ground.

They said that they, by contrast, would be humane, virtuous rulers, that they'd win hearts and minds.

And that critical view of the first emperor is very persistent through Chinese history, even though for the Han and other successor dynasties, this is a little hypocritical because they actually end up adopting the centralizing policies of the Qin.

They inherit the Qin's government structures.

And of course, they subscribe to the Qin's vision of a unified Chinese empire.