Friday, March 29, 2024

FROM THE RIDGE: Relic hunter hoards bits of foreign lands

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Last week I mused on modern China and our relationship with it and now I’m thinking of ancient China on account of a wonderful visit to Te Papa to see the Terracotta Warriors exhibition before it finishes at Easter.
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I was no great scholar at school but I did like and was good at history. I even considered going to Durham University in the north of England to study archaeology but chickened out and went to Lincoln instead.

But, whenever digging a hole for a fence post or scratching around in the dirt, I’ll get distracted by little finds that usually end up as old nails or fencing wire. Bones are carefully scrutinised in case they are human but, so far, have all been from the ubiquitous sheep.

However, I do have my little box of treasurers gleaned from foreign lands, which my heirs will no doubt fail to appreciate.

Three Burmese pottery opium pipes came from a long-ago visit to a small village near the ruined city of Pagan. They were dug up by farmers tilling the soils around the old temples and willingly swapped for my t-shirt and some pens. Kublai Khan’s grandson had swept down the Irrawaddy River in 1283 and sacked this beautiful city, resulting in the disintegration of the Pagan Empire.

Returning through Sydney dressed as a hippy, the pipes caused me an interrogation and thorough search by customs because the official reckoned he could smell they’d been used and I was stupid enough to say he must have a good nose because not for some 800 years.

Several rounded stones used as slingshots in a long-forgotten battle several thousand years ago near Stonehenge in Wiltshire were found in my great uncle’s garden.

A few Roman coins were bought off a fellow with a metal detector on the riverbed of the Thames.

And some shards of pottery came from my Mexican host’s house site preparation. I was there a few years ago to speak to their sheep conference. Hector lives just a stone’s throw from the great pyramid of Cholula, which is the biggest in the world and was constructed by the Toltecs, who preceded the Aztecs some 2300 years ago. And here in my office on the other side of the Pacific and two millennia later, I have some pieces of one of their cooking pots still with paint on them.

However, lets return to those patient terracotta figures standing in their glass case in Te Papa.

They have learnt the art of patience as they stood guard over their dead emperor for more than 2200 years before being rediscovered. Qin Shi Huang was the first emperor of a unified China but his dynasty didn’t survive very long after he was entombed with his warriors and countless other items to take him into the afterlife.

Some peasants digging a well for water in 1974 found the warriors and to date 3000 have been excavated from a likely 8000.

And here were eight of these warriors and two horses just on the other side of the glass. One was actually a civil servant because it seems even the dead need bureaucrats, two were archers with one crouching and the other pulling his bow, two chunky generals and the other three soldiers of varying ranks.

It is said that no two faces are alike and many were modelled on living humans of the time.

So, it was very cool viewing all the exhibits and to spend a great deal of time gazing at these faces from the distant past.

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