If ever you find yourself on a tour of China, one of the first places you will want to visit is Xi’an, home of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses site and its Museum. Once you get there, while being driven to the venue from Xi’an Xianyang Airport or perhaps from your city hotel after a ride around Xi’an’s impressive City Walls, the chances are that your Chinese tour guide in the course of his or her information talk will bring up the topic of Bill Clinton’s famous 1998 visit. The celebrated occasion has entered into local folklore and Chinese guides are quick to bring up the “special anecdote” concerning the US President in the preamble they give to international tourists on the bus. I’ll get to that story soon enough but first some basic background on the Terracotta Warriors.

The Yangs do some digging with totally unexpected consequences
The whole phenomena of the Terracotta Warriors has its origin in March 1974 when several dirt-poor peasant farmers (thought to be seven in number) in Xiyang village in Lintong County, were digging for water in the dry, forbidding countryside 35km east of Xi’an. One of the farmers, Yang Zhi’fa, struck something hard with his hoe which he thought was a bronze relic of some kind. Digging a bit deeper he discovered the object had the form of a shoulder and torso. The other farmers, thinking they were human remains and fearful of Buddhist superstitions, urged Yang to rebury it so as not to offend the ancestors (ghost lore has been commonplace in the eastern Xi’an region for centuries). Yang was unperturbed and shortly later took the dismembered clay warrior to the Lintong Museum. Before long archaeologists from Beijing were swarming all over the site and so commenced a massive state-run excavation (of three pits) which has unearthed over the course of the last 40 years, an army of terracotta soldiers, horses and chariots, of what is the Mausoleum of the first Chinese Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi who unified China c. 221BC (imperial Qin Dynasty).

The Terracotta Warriors discovery: Profitable to some involved but not to others!
The government eventually expropriated the land from the farmers to give free rein to the excavations, effectively destroying the Yang village. The dispossessed villagers were inadequately compensated for the disruption to their lives. By the early 1990s, after years of meticulous and arduous preparation work, the site area was opened as a museum and rapidly became a modern wonder of the world and a tourist mecca. The permanent exhibition proved to be a great little supplementary ‘earner’ for local Communist Party officials and many enterprising business people also profited enormously from the financial opportunities. This propitious good fortune has not been shared by the statues’ discoverers or by the Yang community as a whole. In fact Yang’s fellow farmers blamed him for the loss of their plots and livelihoods, and he was ostracised by his neighbours. Other misfortune followed for the community, two of the farmer Yangs died, only in their fifties due to impoverished circumstance and another, Wang Puhzi, hanged himself. To the farmers who had feared that the feng shui of the location would be disturbed by digging up the area, these tragic outcomes confirmed in their minds that it had been cursed.

A Terracotta Army fan with good connexions
Over in Washington DC, President Bill Clinton, when he wasn’t being leader of the “Free World”, had been following the unfolding archaeological story of the Xi’an terracotta army with growing interest and fascination. So, not long after, on a scheduled 1998 state visit to Beijing, Clinton requested that PRC allow him to make a side trip to Xi’an so he could see the terracotta marvels in situ for himself. The Chinese authorities, sensing a PR coup in the making, arranged for Mr Yang to be on hand at the site to meet the American president before the news cameras. For the occasion the (presumably) illiterate farmer was taught a few words of English to greet the president with. As it transpired, Yang got very nervous at the prospect of meeting the US leader and when introduced to Clinton on the day, instead of saying “How are you?”, what came out of Yang’s mouth in his halting English was “Who are you?” to which Clinton instantly responded, “I’m Hillary’s husband!” The flustered Mr Yang replied,”Me too!” Everybody laughed…on the Chinese officials’ part it was more of a nervous laugh!

⬅️ When Bill met Yang (but which Yang?)

Mr Yang, ‘professional’ book-signer
The encounter between president and peasant farmer generated a second anecdote: at the meeting Clinton asked Mr Yang for his autograph. Yang, who could neither read nor write, simply drew three circles on a piece of paper. Followed a slightly uncomfortable moment … not least for the embarrassed Chinese officials in attendance. Consequently, the local authorities later sent the uneducated Yang for calligraphy lessons, after which Yang was given a job by the government in the Terracotta Warriors tourist shop. His task was to sit at a table all day signing books on the Terracotta Warriors (leading to his being called by some people, “China’s First Professional Signer”). It should be added that Yang Zhi’fa subsequently disputed the inference of this story circulated by a Chinese newspaper in 2002 that he was illiterate, contending that he in fact had a primary school education. Yang sued the newspaper and was eventually awarded damages [Yu Fei, ‘Living with the Terra-cotta Army’, (Consulate-General, Peoples Republic of China in Houston), www.houston.china-consulate.org].

Crafty Mr Yang
If you venture into the Emperor Qin Museum shop in Xi’an, as I did three years ago, you will still see the same unsmiling Mr Yang, inscribing his signature on the inside of countless coffee table books, none of which are written by him! Although he looks distracted and bored in his sedentary confinement, he is in actual fact ever vigilant, on the lookout for maverick tourists trying to snap his precious photograph, something he is peculiarly adverse to. While he was looking the other way, and thinking I was out of the line of his peripheral vision, I tried to grab a surreptitious, sneaky photo of Yang from the side…just as I was about to, the sour-faced septuagenarian, suddenly and without looking towards me, raised a cardboard sign in my direction which said in large English letters, “NO PHOTOS OR VIDEOS ALLOWED!”.
But is it the ‘real’ Clinton? ⤴

Other spots, other ‘Yangs’
If you wander further afield around the Terracotta Warriors complex you may chance upon other individuals also purporting to be “Mr Yang”. It’s quite an industry in Xi’an! In one building near the entrance to the complex there is Yang Xi’an who passes himself off the discoverer of the warriors (although his banner actually says “the discover of the warriors”), displaying a photo of himself posing with Clinton as proof of his credentials. It transpires that this Mr Yang was in fact the manager of a Xi’an factory making replicas of the warriors at the time of Clinton’s 1998 visit – this explains the photo taken when “Slick Willie” stopped off at the factory on route to the Terracotta Museum.

Would the real Mr Yang, the genuine “Discoverer of the Terracotta Warriors’, please stand up?
In the glow of world attention being lavished on the terracotta army discoveries and the recognition bestowed on Mr Yang, it is not surprising that the other three surviving farmers present at the 1974 archaeological find wanted to get in on the act. Yang Quany was also given a spot in the museum signing books for a small stipend and began promoting himself as “the discoverer of the treasures”. The remaining two Yangs followed suit. Yang Zhi’fa however discredits his fellow Lintong farmers’ motives and insists that it is he who was primus intra pares (first among equals) in discovering the Emperor Qin relics.

And it doesn’t stop there by any measure. Zhao Kangmin, retired curator of the nearby Lintong Museum, has made his case for recognition as the real discoverer. The way Mr Zhao tells it, after the initial finding Yang Zhi’fa brought the fragment of the terracotta relic first to him at his museum and that he went back to investigate the discovery, and later he reconstructed the first terracotta warrior and horse. Zhao argues that he was the one who had the expertise to grasp the significance of the cultural relics, and that “seeing” as Yang and the others merely did, “doesn’t mean discovering”. You’ll find Zhao, despite being retired, most days at the Lintong Museum where he has set up a small display of the terracotta figures. Zhao spends the day signing postcards for tourists, on the cards he writes, very deliberately: “Zhao Kangmin, the first to discover, restore, appreciate, name and excavate terra-cotta warriors” [Ibid].

Whilst the Lintong farmers haven’t made much money from discovering (or being associated with the discovery of) the terracotta army, the same can be said of the workers who did most of the hard physical work of unearthing and restoring the statues. Most of those recruited to curator Yuan Zhongyi’s archaeological team found themselves working round the year with only a break at the time of the Spring Festival holiday for a wage of only 1.72 yuan (US $0.28) a day in 1976 [Zhao Xu, ‘Yang Zhifa, 76, soldiers on amid terracotta warriors’, (09-XII-2014),China Daily USA, www.chinadaily.com].

A Terracotta Warriors discoverer-impostor industry
Back at the Qin Terracotta Warriors and Horses Museum, as the fame and popularity of Emperor Qin’s Mausoleum grows, more impostors continue to spring up. These “fake discoverers” of the warriors were like Yang Xi’an, not even present at the discovery of the relics in 1974 (some are not even old enough to have been there!). A manager of one of the gift shops admitted that the complex shops hire men who fraudulently passed themselves off as discoverers of the relics to facilitate the sale of terracotta warrior books by the retailer [Simon Parry, ‘Curse of the Warriors’, South China Morning Post, 15 Sept 2007, www.scmp.com].

“The three in the middle just moved!” ⤴

PostScript: Discovery of yet more warriors made from fired clay
Meanwhile back in the football field sized excavation pits at Lintong, Emperor Qin’s life-sized army of clay statues continues to grow. Archaeologists working in pit Nō 2 recently made a fresh discovery, one which might yield another 1,400 warriors, archers, horses and charioteers (and 89 chariots of war) [‘China’s Terracotta Army has new recruits’, Daily Mail, 6 May 2015, www.dailymail.co.uk]. Chinese officials have speculated that there may be around 6,000 terracotta warriors at the site still to be excavated … ensuring no doubt that there will be plenty of new and ongoing opportunities for discoverer-impostors in the future.