Curators picking objects from the Terracotta Army to transport to London for the British Museum's exhibition
When Karl Marx and George Bernard Shaw were stooped over their books in the Round Reading Room of the British Library, the Terracotta Army was still buried under cabbages in the dusty fields of a remote province of China, slumbering on its watch but still guarding the tomb of its emperor. Now the same room will play host to these inanimate, spellbinding warriors for The First Emperor, an exhibition that will run from September 13 to April 6.
It was only 33 years ago, as discussions began about moving the British Library out of the heart of the British Museum in Bloomsbury and taking it up the road to Kings Cross, that the earth was peeled back from the Xian fields, revealing a moving and haunting sight which has gripped the public imagination ever since.
The watchmen still stood row on row, rank on rank; their hands still clenching the wooden weapons that rotted over 1,000 years ago. Life size horses stood in their traces, drawing wooden wagons that had also vanished, leaving no more than a smear in the clay. Fierce officers, a head taller and far more opulently dressed than their men, still menaced them into perfect drill yard formation.
It's hard to believe how little news came out of China in those days, how few Westerners went in, how very few Chinese came out. When I went in 1979, for most of the Chinese I met I was the first Western woman they had ever seen. They tried politely not to laugh - as their ancestors had centuries earlier during the first trade missions - at my red cheeks, my curly hair, my huge feet. When I tried to buy cotton slippers, they were first embarrassed that I wanted to buy something so humble, then increasingly amused at the effort to find a pair to fit. They brought the biggest woman's size, then an array of men's sizes, and finally, precipitating cackles of laughter from the entire staff of the shop, a pair of oiled hide snow boots that would have fitted an elephant.
But news of the Terracotta Army did get out, and now the site has an airport and motorways, hotels and shops - all built to service the stream of foreign tourists who wanted to visit what instantly became one of the wonders of the modern world.
More and more pits were found, holding the skeletons of real horses with terracotta stable boys kneeling beside them, the graves of thousands of workers who lived and died on the site, the bronze dancing birds and the terracotta civil servants still bending over their accounts. Perhaps four-fifths of the site still remains to be excavated - and some of the very latest discoveries, the earth still clinging to them, have come to Bloomsbury.
After the new British Library finally opened in Kings Cross, the miles of cast iron stacks of books in the heart of the British Museum were emptied to create the Great Court. The Round Reading Room itself survived, exquisitely restored but bereft of its original function. It has been open to anyone to come in, take a book off the shelves, and sit down at the original glorious desks - but museum visitors tended to venture two steps inside the door, gaze up at the soaring ceiling, and back out, puzzled and overawed.
Crowds will now flood the room where a spectacular temporary display space has been created to welcome the Chinese warriors - temporary, because British Museum director Neil MacGregor promises that it will be restored again as a reading room. Perhaps some of the visitors will even come back to read a book.
