Farmers do battle over terracotta warriors China

Submitted by vicky on Thursday, 08 January 2004 Page Views: 2943

Country: China The bowed and broken Chinese farmers who found the 2,200 year old terracotta warriors, one of the most important archaeological finds of the 20th century, are angry, reports Oliver August of the Times. Having toiled all their lives on the arid plains of northern China, the three men are suing the Beijing Government for cheating them out of the acclaim that they believe they deserve.

“I will die soon and I want my grandchildren to know who really found the warriors,” Yang Peiyan, 75, said as he stood outside his unheated hut at the back of the excavation site where he has lived all his life.

Mr Yang and his comrades were digging wells in March 1974 when, 10ft down, they made a discovery of unimagined consequences. They found a 2,200-year-old clay replica of a general’s head and arms entangled in ancient bamboo matting. The fragments proved to be part of a lifesize underground army of 8,000 foot soldiers, archers and charioteers covering several square miles adjacent to the tomb of Qin Shihuang, the Chinese Emperor who first united the Middle Kingdom.

The men told the authorities, but claim that officials then took all the glory — and the money. Zhao Kangmin, a local museum director, is said to have received a government fee of about £50,000, while the farmers received only 20p each and free entry to the museum, where they can sometimes be found signing autographs for tourists.

The warriors attract millions of visitors to Xian region, generating huge revenues for one of the poorest parts of China.

“I may only be able to write eight Chinese characters, but I know what is right,” Mr Yang said. “We followed all the correct procedures.”

Officials from the government relics bureau in Shaanxi province have rejected the farmers’ demand that they be recognised officially as the finders. The region’s state-owned water company now claims the credit for the discovery.

Where China once eulogised its worker and farmer heroes, it now treats them with disdain. “In Mao’s time, people like us got a lot of respect,” Yang Xinman, another of the discoverers, said as he stood in his living room under a picture of the chairman. “Today you have to be a boss of a private company to be treated well.”

Many of the 900 million Chinese who live in the countryside share his sentiments. The rewards of post-Mao economic reforms are hoarded by officials, entrepreneurs and city-dwellers. Rural incomes and social standing have declined.

In Xiahe, where the finders of the terracotta warrior live, farmers can heat their mudbrick homes only when they can find enough firewood in the area’s waterless gullies. Life in the village has more in common with the dusty towns of Afghanistan than with booming, high-tech Shanghai.

Yet recent legal reforms have given new hope to the disenfranchised, allowing them for the first time to bring complaints to court with a realistic chance of being heard.

The three farmers have hired Mao Jiaxing, a lawyer from nearby Xian, whose letters and petitions have stirred the state bureaucracy into action. A decision is expected this month.

Mr Mao, whose parents’ named him after the city where Chairman Mao founded the Communist Party in 1921, said: “I didn’t have many clients who were farmers before, but now it is getting more and more. They hire lawyers to establish their rights.”

Many changes in China have been viewed as historic only in retrospect. Shrouded in government obfuscation, the incendiary character of reforms such as the nationwide establishment of the legal profession is being recognised only slowly.

Source: The Times Online, Worldwide 07/01/2004

Contributor Bio for vicky: Ex Megalithic Portal Editor, Co-author of 'Rock Around the Peak - Megalithic Monuments of the Peak District' and... More

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