The last time they traveled to Europe was in 2018. Alicante has been waiting for them since 2020, but the restrictions derived from the coronavirus pandemic forced the long-awaited exhibition to be postponed twice. The management of the archaeological museum of Alicante managed in the meantime to program two remarkably successful exhibitions related to the Roman world: one dedicated to the Etruscans and a second to gladiators. Finally, at the end of this month of March, the nine original terracotta warriors and one horse, belonging to an immense army that remained underground for more than 2,000 years in the spectacular mausoleum of the first unifier and emperor of China, Qin Shi Huan, they will fulfill their mission as ambassadors of an ancient culture and a country, the People's Republic of China, whose ambassador to Spain participated this morning in their presentation at the Chinese Cultural Center in Madrid.
Since 2012, this center has been working in the Spanish capital to establish ties and bring Chinese culture closer to Spain. Its director explained that the mausoleum from which the warriors come is considered the eighth wonder of the world, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Marcos Martinon Torres, Professor of Archeology Sciences at the University of Cambridge and a world authority in research on the warriors of Xi'an is in charge of curating it, together with Dr Hou Ningbin, director of the Shannxi History Museum.
After the announcement made by Julia Parra, deputy for Culture, that the tickets will go on sale tomorrow, three weeks in advance due to the great expectation detected, the curator Marcos Martinon has assured that "an exhibition of this caliber in Spain”, since in addition to the nine original terracotta warriors and horse, it will exhibit more than 120 pieces from nine museums in China, spanning a thousand years of its history.
The curator explained that "it is not a static presentation, but an immersion through which we will look at an empire from beyond the grave that was not made to be seen." In addition, the assembly in which more than 200 people are participating will allow "entering the laboratories where scientists seek answers" with the greatest advances in genetics and other sciences, to many questions: "How was it possible to create something so big? and so sophisticated? Why did Emperor Qin take a ceramic army to his grave? Why are we still talking about the Qin and Han dynasties in 2023?”
One of the novelties of the exhibition is that it will be dotted with points where visitors can “zoom in” and stop to discover specific aspects of what is shown to them: “Why were their swords so lethal? what is special about jade? What can the modern DNA of the found human remains tell us?
To achieve this "immersive atmosphere", the MARQ directed by Manuel Olcina has used the latest advances in museology, and the music (originally by Luis Ivars), the videos, "everything has been done for this exhibition". Subsequently, a bilingual book will be published, in Spanish and English.
On March 29, coinciding with the beginning of the exhibition in Alicante, it will be 49 years since the day that some peasants who were looking for water dug a well and found some ceramic remains. Behind that trivial incident, the greatest finding of modern archeology was hidden.
The Ambassador to Spain, Wu Haitao, explained that the exhibition that will be presented to the public in Alicante is the inaugural project of the events organized to mark the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Spain and the People's Republic of China. "The exhibition will be a complete success and will leave an indelible mark in the annals of cultural exchanges between the two countries," he stated.
Next, Carlos Mazón, president of the Provincial Council of Alicante, on which MARQ depends, recalled that work has been underway for more than four years on a cultural event that should have opened in 2020. "The most brilliant discovery of the The history of archeology comes to the city of light and the country of the sun”, he assured. And he has appreciated the extraordinary thing about having achieved the objective, with the help of the Chinese government and people, "after four years where we have had the worst floods in history, the worst fires in recent years, a pandemic that has cracked our society and our tourism sector”.
Convinced that there will be "hundreds of thousands" of visitors who will attend the exhibition over the next ten months, he assured that "we have tried to live up to the content in preparing the continent for the exhibition.
As the curator explained, "The legacy of the Qin and Han dynasties, The Xi'an Warriors" is not only fantastic for bringing in the terracotta warriors, "but we will see other figures, such as stable assistants or servants, and stretching out the chronological period we will see another terracotta army from the Han period, in miniature, which imitated the first emperor. We go back 500 years before and 500 years after. We will see sounds and tastes, Chinese bells and lithophones, we will see China's first hollow bronze sculpture, how it was made… and we will understand much more about the diversity of China's history.”
