Feb. 19--When the figure known as a standing archer was found, it was one of thousands making up a 3rd century B.C. underground army crafted out of terra-cotta to protect a Chinese emperor in the afterlife.
When spotted in Chicago earlier this week, it was dangling in mid-air from a hook on the end of a forklift boom while a team of 21st century A.D. humans fussed around it.
One of the flesh-and-blood figures, exhibition preparator Kate Ulschmid, held the archer's shoulders so the statue wouldn't spin. She looked like she was dancing with it, a maneuver she had executed with several of the terra-cotta warriors Field Museum staff put into place this week for the upcoming special exhibition, "China's First Emperor and His Terracotta Warriors."
"The second one back there," she said, pointing to a life-size clay figure with outstretched hands farther back on the wood platform, "he had his hands on my waist. It was like we were at prom.
"This guy was more of a tango, I would say."
For its journey and slow dance into place, the archer had its hands wrapped in white cloth, like an accident victim or early-stage mummy. It was headless. The clay skull, face and neck that would be popped into the hole between its shoulders was in a vault, being checked in after its travels from China. The archer had yellow straps around its knees, just below the robe and up toward the empty neck, culminating in a rope knot for the hook to grab onto.
"It's called a dead lift, straight up and straight down," said Shelley Paine, an exhibitions conservator with the museum. "We need them to touch down perfectly onto the deck."
"Going up" said the forklift operator, Hector Gonzalez, a Field production supervisor, after he moved his boom a few inches to the left, and a few toward the back.
The archer hung about 8 inches in the air while workers slid the L-shaped remainder of its shipping crate carefully out from under it and off the platform. "I'm just concerned about the object behind it," another terra-cotta warrior, said one worker. "We don't want to have a domino effect."
When the plywood had been safely moved away, another specialist got down on all fours to look at the air between the platform and the archer's heavy feet, ready to make sure the touchdown would be exactly even.
This intricate maneuvering is some of what it takes to put an exhibition of priceless artifacts before the public. When "Terracotta Warriors" opens its doors March 4, visitors will see a tableau of five terra-cotta figures and a horse, all brought over from their discovery site in Shaanxi province in north central China, on the standing archer's platform.
There will be four other clay figures elsewhere in the show, including one, a bureaucrat also consigned to service in the afterlife, with pigment still on its face. Surrounding these 10 figures, cornerstones of a leading tourist attraction in China, will be scores of objects from that same era, the time when Qin Shihuangdi united the many Chinese factions into a nation, proclaimed himself emperor and commissioned thousands of clay figures that would stun their discoverers a couple of millennia later.
Visitors will see ancient treasures -- a bronze goose, a metal plowshare, all manner of chimes and drinking vessels -- artfully laid out in protective cases, with labels explaining what they are and why they mattered.
But all of that is later. The rare view this week was, in a sense, of the exhibition's unboxing. Blue crates as big as a Fiat were everywhere. Some signs were already up on the walls: maps of the terra-cotta warriors site, for instance. The purple wall paint in the archer's area smelled fresh -- and felt it a little bit, too, when you leaned against it.
On various platforms lay pieces of paper bearing pictures of the objects that would go there. Considering everything had to be in place in less than two weeks, the chaos turned into the historically precise and carefully designed order of a major museum show, staff, including several Chinese cultural authorities flown over to help with their loan, seemed remarkably calm.
Paine and fellow conservator Erika Hernandez Lomas had spent three weeks in China recently, writing reports on the condition of each object before it boarded the cargo plane. As they guided the unpacking in Chicago, they wrote new reports, checking to make sure the objects had survived the journey intact. They worked at this with Chinese counterparts to assure that all were in agreement.
Inside one vault, while workers on the exhibition floor were still assessing the best way to rig the standing archer for balance and protection, Hernandez Lomas watched as a blue crate was pried open. Inside was enough packing foam to handle a small city's eBay mailings. Smaller wooden crates within the foam, each one holding an urn, or a tiny clay duck, or an array of menacing little arrows, were nestled precisely together, a fit as tight as the cloth gloves workers wore to handle the artifacts.
"Remember, I was telling you about Tetris?" Hernandez Lomas said.
"We're unpacking objects, staging them on carts," she said. "They'll go to a second vault for an incoming condition report. Next January we'll do it all in reverse."
Back to the floor, Paine took photos of everything: how the archer was packed in its crate, how the straps were wrapped around it. The goal was not only to document the handling, but to make sure the object's repacking, when the show ends in January, goes smoothly.
An exhibition designer came in to determine at what angle the archer should be set down, because you don't want to do such a lift twice. Using a photo, he determined the feet should be at about 45 degrees so that the head, once mounted, would be facing the platform's front.
Gonzalez, in the forklift, lowered the statue slowly, squarely to the platform, until it made contact and there was slack in his line.
Paine, standing beside him, gave a quiet little golf clap. "That was a beautiful lift, well thought out," she said. "It's such a tense thing to do."
Staffers began wedging shims under the figure's feet for stability, like you do with a bookcase. Paine called for the head and, moments later, the visage of the terra-cotta warrior came wheeling in on a plastic cart.
"On with their heads!" somebody joked.
sajohnson@tribune.com
