06 9 月 The Architectural Layout of Qin Shi Huangdi Tomb
In 210 B.C., Qin Shi Huangdi died of illness in the dunes of Hebei. A few months later, the body of Qin Shi Huang was brought back to the Lishan mausoleum, where a grand funeral was held. At that time, the tomb was surrounded by carriage guards lined up, civil and military officials lined up for the funeral, the harem band played mourning music, and the common people knelt by the roadside. Under Lishan, next to the tomb, a glorious palace was tall and lofty, a line of straight and heavy walls was majestic and solemn, a wide and neat road was straight and unobstructed, and the four gates of the tower and the wall were like a city pavilion on earth; the tall and bulging mound was buried with many rare treasures. The entire mausoleum is like a new capital city! This is the scene when Qin Shi Huangdi tomb was first built.
The Qin Shi Huangdi tomb inherited the culture of extravagant burial from the Warring States, and carried forward and systematized and institutionalized this form of extravagant burial, making the scale and pattern of the Qin tomb a model for the tombs of future emperors. The Qin tombs were so large and extensive that they covered an area of 56.25 square kilometers, and Liyi was set up specifically to manage the tombs. The setting up of imperial tombs also started from this time.
The architectural layout of Qin Shi Huangdi tomb has an inner and outer wall in the shape of a narrow north-south wall. In the middle of the inner city, there is an east-west wall that divides it into two equal-sized zones in the south and north; in the north, there is a north-south wall that separates it into two halves in the east and west. The inner and outer city walls are divided into four districts: east, west, south and north. The layout of the buildings in each of these zones and around the outer city is as follows:
(1) Inner-city South District.
The mausoleum is located in the center of the southern area. On the north side of the mausoleum’s mound are the large bedroom buildings as well as the chariot and horse pits and the accompanying burial pits; on the west side of the mound are the bronze chariot and horse pits and two large joint burial pits; on the south side of the mound are three accompanying pits; on the east side of the mound are three accompanying pits.
(2) Inner City North District.
The western half of the northern area is the other palace hall complex; the eastern half is the burial tomb area.
(3) The Four Subdivisions Between the Inner and Outer City Walls.
West Zone: From south to north, there are large stable pits, pits for rare birds and exotic animals, accompanying burial tombs, and the annexed buildings of the garden and temple official’s house in order. East Zone: Acrobats pits, stone armor pits and a group of burial pits with unknown contents. No large burial pits or architectural sites have been found in the south and north areas.
(4) The Perimeter of the Outer City.
On the east side of the outer city are Terracotta Warriors Pits 1, Pit 2, Pit 3, 98 small stable pits, and 17 accompanying tombs. On the west side of the outer city, there are cemeteries of tomb builders, stone quarry sites, and brick kiln sites. On the north side of the outer city, there is one building site and one burial pit. On the south side of the outer city, no relics or ruins have been found.
As can be seen from the above introduction, the architectural layout of the Qin Shi Huangdi tombs has two characteristics: firstly, the southern area of the inner city is the core of the mausoleum. Secondly, the east and west areas within the inner city wall and the outer city, where the distribution of relics and monuments is relatively dense, are the key areas of the mausoleum. The center of the entire mausoleum is prominent and clearly layered. The mausoleum sits in the west and faces east, with the main gate in the east. The east and west gates of the inner and outer walls of the mausoleum are opposite to each other, thus forming an east-west axis. Most of the large burial pits are located on the south side of the axis, and the Terracotta Warriors are located on the north side of the avenue outside the main gate.
The architecture of the tomb of the First Emperor of Qin is divided into two parts: the above-ground buildings and the underground buildings.
The above-ground architecture of the Qin Shi Huang tombs resembles a capital city. Beyond the tall mound, there are two walls built of rammed earth. The walls are rectangular in the north-south direction. The inner wall is 1,355 meters long and 580 meters wide, with a perimeter of 3,870 meters. The outer wall is 2,165 meters long, 940 meters wide, and 6,210 meters in circumference. Within this area is the central area of the mausoleum of the Qin Tombs.
To the north of the mound are the buildings of the bedchamber of the Qin Shi Huang tomb. The bedchamber buildings of Qin Shi Huang’s tomb are located 150 meters north of the tomb, where archaeologists discovered four east-west connected building sites in 1976-1977. From the observation of the remaining ruins, this was a particularly tall and opulent group of buildings. The walls were rammed and very strong, and the walls were coated with white powder, flat and smooth. The pavement outside the house, which was paved with flaked stones, had stone steps at the entrance and a passageway inside leading to other houses. The house is very wide, and the wooden purlins on the house are more than 20 cm in diameter. The roof is covered with slate tiles, and then covered with barrel tiles on the tile joints, and the rafters have brightly decorated tiles.
From the site of the bedchamber to the south is the area of the tomb that symbolizes the palace chariot, i.e. the palace chariot house, where the bronze chariot and horse pits were discovered in the winter of 1980.
The Qin Shi Huangdi tomb also had officials in charge of palace food. The ancients believed that when people died and became ghosts, they still had to eat. The official office of the food officials of Qin Shi Huang’s tomb is located northwest of the mound, between the inner cities. In 1981, archaeologists excavated more than 2,000 square meters of the food officer site and unearthed a large pottery urn, pottery cauldron, pottery basin, pottery jar, etc. Five of the jars had inscriptions on their lids, such as “Lishan Food Officer”, indicating that this group of buildings was the official food office of the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang. In the tomb, the government officials still treated the emperor like a living emperor, offering food to the emperor every day. The official food office should be equivalent to the “imperial dining room” of the emperor in the Ming and Qing dynasties.
In addition to the “imperial dining room” where the emperor was served, there were also large stone carvings on the tombs. Feng Yan, a literary figure of the Song Dynasty, said in his book Feng’s Witnesses: “Since the Qin and Han dynasties, there were stone unicorns, stone warders, stone elephants and stone horses in front of the emperor’s tombs.” Due to the long history, stone carvings on Qin and Han tombs are rarely seen now. However, Ge Hong of the Jin Dynasty saw them. He said that there was a Qingwu temple in the west of Wuzuo Palace in the Han Dynasty, and there was three Chinese parasol tree in front of the temple, under which there were two stone unicorns, one ten feet and three feet high. It has a line of characters carved on its chest, and these characters indicate that the stone unicorns are something on the tomb of Qin Shi Huang. This shows that the stone carvings had been moved at least during the Han Dynasty. Originally, these stone carvings should have been placed outside the four gates of the outer city wall, or on the eastern Shinto path.
In the east of the Qin Shi Huang tomb, 4 kilometers away from the mound of the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, there is a Qin Que, the remnant site of which is still more than two meters high, through more than 2000 years of wind and rain erosion, still standing in the east of the tomb, silently telling the prosperous scene of that year. The so-called Que is the two tall platforms built outside the gate of the palace, temple, or tomb in ancient times. The queue mentioned here is the East Gate Que, which is located in the direction of the east of the Qin mausoleum mound. When you enter the gate queue, you enter the Shinto of the Qin Shi Huang tomb. In this way, the main door of the Qin tomb is to the east.
The above-mentioned mausoleum mound, inner and outer walls, the bedchamber, the food officials’ offices, and the east gate Que are all part of the Qin Shi Huang mausoleum layout. There are also some buildings that are not part of the layout of the Qin Shi Huang tomb, but they are the relics of the Qin dynasty that still remain on the ground today, as they were built for engineering purposes during the construction of the Qin Shi Huang tomb. They are also part of the Qin dynasty culture in the area of the Qin Shihuang Mausoleum.
In the southeast of the outer city of Qin Shi Huang’s tomb, there is a waterproof dike more than 1600 meters long, which is the “Wuling Site”
The stone processing site of the tomb of Qin Shihuang, outside the northwest corner of the outer city of Qin Shihuang, south of the present Zhengjiazhuang in Lintong District, has a total area of about 750,000 square meters. There are remains of house construction here, as well as building materials such as tiles and barrel tiles, production tools such as hammers, shovels, mills and scythes, household utensils such as clay pots, jars, bowls, stone mortars and stone mills, and iron torture devices such as iron pliers worn around the neck and iron shackles worn on the feet with iron locks. The unearthed instruments here tell us that the workers who worked here not only had to do labor-intensive work but also worked under close supervision and wore torture devices.
There are also many Qin Dynasty kiln sites in the area of the Qin Shihuang Mausoleum, where terracotta figurines, pottery horses, and other pottery artifacts were fired in these kilns.
From the above introduction, it can be seen that the layout of the Qin Shi Huangdi tomb made clever use of the natural environment. The main features include: first, the combination of the mausoleum with the mountains and water, and the integration of the three; second, the placement of key facilities such as the tomb mound and the city wall on the highest plateau, and other ancillary facilities on the lower plateau, separated by natural rivers, with a clear relationship between the main and the subordinate; third, the design of the city wall, following the shape of the terrain, in the shape of a long strip, in harmony with the topography and landscape; fourth, the construction of a flood control dike in the south of the mausoleum, showing the relationship between the design of the mausoleum and the geographical environment Fourth, the construction of a flood control dike in the south of the mausoleum shows the relationship between the design of the mausoleum and the geographical environment, which is not only in accordance with nature but also cleverly modifies nature to avoid harm and tend to benefit. Fifth, in the overall layout, instead of seeking absolute balance and symmetry, the topography is used to make use of the ups and downs of the terrain, and the facilities of the mausoleum with different priorities unfold with the natural topography and landforms. In the history of the development of ancient Chinese mausoleums, the Mausoleum of the First Emperor is a good example of the harmony and integration of the mausoleum with the natural environment.