I found this article in today TOI. The Chinese emperor has quiet a few similarities with PRC except that PRC was no madman.
China's 1st emperor: madman or genius?
Waldemar Januszczak
Art can do many useful things. It can decorate, commemorate, remember, describe, envisage. These are important functions, and human history is busy with examples of all of them.
But the spellbinding exhibition that has arrived at the British Museum devoted to Ying Zheng, the first emperor of China, shows art performing one of its rarest duties. What you see here is attempted only when a crackpot achieves supreme power in a great land and decides he doesn't want to die. It's a spectacle as rare as it is magnificent.
You have no doubt heard of the socalled terracotta army, the remarkable accumulation of life-sized clay figures of soldiers with which the first emperor decided to be buried. Their discovery, in 1974, by a farmer digging his well is described here as the greatest archeological find of the 20th century. By being buried in the ground with his army, the first emperor hoped to continue in the afterlife what he had proved himself to be so good at in this one: conquering. The idea was that his terracotta army would give him the power in the spirit world that he already enjoyed on earth.
The site where the terracotta army was found, around the first emperor's tomb in Xi'an, China, is said to contain at least 7,000 of these clay soldiers, arranged in military formation and ready to fight again for their ruler. So far, only 1,000 or so have been excavated. And now 20 of these complete figures — the largest group ever to leave China — have arrived at the British Museum, where they form the centrepiece of a display that turns out to be about much more than them. For me, the clay soldiers aren't even the stars of the show. The star of the show, the thing I kept noticing, thinking about and reassessing, was the mind of the first emperor.
Ying became the king of Qin (pronounced "chin") when he was just 13. Qin was the westernmost of the seven provinces that were to make up the united China, but it wasn't the strongest of them. In fact, it was one of the weaker ones. But when you become king at 13 and the train set you are playing with is your nation's shape, size and destiny; when your orders are unquestionable, and you have at your disposal an almost limitless number of bodies to do your bidding; when you are in a position to impose a 13-year-old's world-view on the nation you command; and when, like all 13-year-old boys, you like playing soldiers, you can do a lot of conquering.
Ying became king in 247 BC. By 221 BC, he had succeeded in subjugating all the other provinces, creating what we now know as modern China. He ruled as first emperor until 210 BC, when he died, aged 49. These are paltry time spans. Yet this astonishing character somehow achieved in them all that is described at the British Museum. To be as crazy as this, and as fearless, and as brilliant, is a rare combination. The boy-man was as remarkable a figure as any you will ever find.
The first emperor's dream of conquering all his neighbours, then doing it all again in the afterlife, was a madman's dream. But he's as compelling a figure as he is because he was simultaneously a madman and a practical genius who organised and prepared his society so thoroughly, and with such attention to detail, that the dreams could actually be fulfilled.
He gave China a script that is still in use today. He created a working administration whose descendants still run the country. SUNDAY TIMES, LONDON
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