Feat of clay

The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army, British Museum, Sponsored by Morgan Stanley

Here’s a show to pull in the public. More than 100,000 advance tickets already sold (Michelangelo’s drawings, though popular, sold only a fifth of that before it opened), and so much media coverage you scarcely need my review. Except, of course, that most of what passes for reporting is ill-informed and simply parrots the party line of press release and salesmanship. In other words, it’s just another form of advertising, which is why the art institutions of our country are desperate to get it — the life-support system of free publicity apparently necessary to the economic survival of museums. So often exhibitions are invented around an idea which someone (or a committee) hopes will be popular, because they need the turnstile revenue and the visitor numbers. Even great institutions are guilty of this, and sometimes scholarship is put on the back-burner in favour of sensation or popularism. But there are also, from time to time, properly scholarly yet accessible exhibitions which touch a chord with the public. The First Emperor is that rare item.

The man who gave himself this primary title has been called one of the greatest military leaders and administrators in history, far more impressive than Alexander the Great, Caesar or Napoleon. Accounts of him vary, with historians showing their teeth (and their prejudices) in typical fashion when subsequently writing up his achievements. His great cruelty and ruthlessness were legendary, but based on what facts? It seems that many of the more colourful stories attached to him, such as the occasion when he ordered a mountain to be stripped of its trees and painted red to punish the mountain god for causing a storm, were later inventions. (Shame.) ‘The Tiger of Ch’in’, as Leonard Cottrell called him in his 1962 bestseller, was an inspired autocrat who as Ying Zheng became King of Qin (pronounced Chin) in the west of the country in 246 BC, before conquering the other six major kingdoms of China and unifying them for the first time.