When The Greatest Tomb on Earth, Secrets of Ancient China (a National Geographic Channel/BBC documentary) was broadcast last year it made headlines worldwide. The media breathlessly announced that new scientific evidence proved that: ‘Western contact with China began 1,500 years before Marco Polo’ and ‘Ancient Greeks may have built China’s famous Terracotta Army’.
In the documentary, Professor Lukas Nickel, Chair of Asian Art History at the University of Vienna and one of the few Western archaeologists who has been allowed to excavate in China, said: ‘I imagine that a Greek sculptor may have been at the site to train the locals.’ This was hot news indeed – especially as it concerned one of the largest, most fascinating and still mysterious archaeological sites in the world: the tomb of Qin Shi Huang Di, China’s first emperor (259–210 BC). Located in Lintong, about 30 kilometres from present-day Xian, it was here that the great army of the famous ‘Terracotta Warriors’ was unearthed in 1974.
But was Nickel’s remark misconstrued? And what can new research show as more excavations are undertaken across the huge untouched area surrounding the tomb mound? These were two of several questions I put to him.
The history of China is surely not one of isolation. Far from being sealed off by the Great Wall in the 3rd century BC, you suggest there is substantial evidence of contact and interaction between China and Central Asia and also with Caucasian people, both before and after its unification by Qin Shi Huang Di in 221 BC.
