China is a land with many hands whereas in the US we lack labor. Be not deceived by the US unemployment rate. Too many oldsters have retired. We need younger folks to support them and our economy. We are troubled being unable to  match skills with available work. Through American economic history we have always lacked for the right people. For the foreseeable future therefore America will be land of opportunity.  China has a surfeit of hands, which is why everywhere you look you see all kinds of things made by tedious and patient labor.  People are painting with wolf hair bristles in tiny bottles and spend days banging fabric with hammers to make them thin and with countless other mindless physical activities. They seem to have beautiful landscaping having more than enough people to plant them. When you go there you will see people and hands everywhere, many with no opportunity.

It also seems to me the individual counts for much less than in the US. There is a cult of the collective, huge groups of tens of thousands performing in a coordinated dance the likes of which could be seen in the Beijing Olympics. Body parts move in unison and in crowds. This may have been a spectacular show or spectacle to some but for me is rather frightening. It reminds me of a goose-stepping army.  Single persons as a rule count for nothing except for a tiny few or one single person that all others obey.

The Chinese have a history of massive public works projects. One of these is the largest tomb in the world constructed by the very first Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, in about 210 BCE, the famous tomb of the terra-cotta warriors. It is said over 700,000 workers contributed to the project. I just  got back from seeing it near the city of Xi’an, a museum is constructed over the site of what are 4 massive pits.  Whereas the Egyptians took pains to mummify their pharaoh, strikingly in the Chinese case, the body of the emperor is not unearthed yet, only his inanimate retinue, out of fear that it will suffer from improper handling. You see rows and rows and columns of clay warriors. The communist government has taken great pains to show to their populace and tourists such as myself, this great public work. They’ve  assigned expert restorers who work in public view. A friendly old  farmers who supposedly discovered the massive grave in the 1970s, is smilingly available for pictures. They taught him write well enough to autograph picture books  I have one of the books and photographs with my wife.

terra cotta warriors in situ. First of 4 rooms

Each of about 8 thousand clay warriors seems to be unique and I am at pains to say why they took so much trouble for this. These appear as unique and mass-produced at the same time. Certain parts such as legs were produced as in an assembly line. Warriors were brightly painted but have lost most of their pigmentation over the millennia after suffering earthquakes and tomb collapses, becoming pale broken relics.  A lot of them are smashed to bits. You can witness some painstaking reassembly right before your eyes.  I thought of the crumbled Dead Sea scrolls of Qumran. Tiny pieces of the scrolls which were also found by local explorers ignorant of their worth, were spirited away and assembled in secret. They were kept away from public scrutiny out of fear of what they would refute the New Testament but most were after an acrimonious fight finally made available to all on the Internet. Here in China, at least some of the restorative work is on public display.

Three Gorges Dam and locks model on Yangtze

At any event the Chinese government seems to enjoy the idea of exposing this magnificent public works project of over two thousand years ago, They probably sought to showcase the productivity of the proletariat. Presumably this enormous grave, largest in the world, was commissioned at the behest of the great emperor of kindred public spirit as the Great Leader. Many of the warriors were signed by the individual artist as if claiming responsibility for individualized works. The pottery is not poured. Wet clay was wound and wound to make the torso. The necks are elongated to support the head and each figure has a scarf meant to hide that arrangement. You have to wonder what is the meaning of having each warrior in an individual stance, some are kneeling archers, others standing, and each one with different coloring and face. Though each and every warrior is unique, I personally thought studying the faces, that these did not represent a specific individual but types, that is a person of a different job and station.  More than any account of the individual as such the Chinese seem to have an hypertrophied sense of status or caste and this is seemingly what these statues represent.

What could the emperor have been thinking in burying terra-cotta warriors with him?  Could he possibly think lifeless statues could be of any use in the next world?  We know of some precedent as persons of high rank had buried their entourages or courts, such as wives, servants and advisors at the time of a king’s death. Thus the death of the king was a great tragedy  for all. Even today wives of a dead husband might throw themselves on a funeral pyre or otherwise bury themselves along with a departed husband. At the demise of one household,  a warlord might seize power to obliterate the memory the previous potentate. I was reminded of the same in The Jungle Book which accurately depicts the male lion who not only will take the consort of a departed dominant male,  but kill and eat offspring of the departed lion. Was the burial of terra-cotta warriors somehow a recognition of similar practice?  Perhaps the exercise is It about dominance and submission.

I got to thinking, the emperor or his people were after survival in the next world but which next world?  Chinese emperors, like the highborn of many other cultures, were deified like children of the Sun or other Gods and thought to have eternal life. Eternal life for the average person was a much more questionable proposition. Some people may have worshipped the emperor as a god but what fascinates me is that the emperor himself and all his priestly entourage had to know better. As such they were perpetuating a lie. OK the emperor may, like the rest of us, have harbored hope of regaining life in the next world. In that case he would have known that the terra-cotta warriors wouldn’t be of much use against a real army coming up against him. Perhaps he thought of using this as a sign, so as to brag of his greatness when the inhabitants of the next world should come upon him.

I have another theory. Though his ignorant and illiterate subjects may not be aware, the emperor himself was wise to his own mortality. He knew himself to be the son of an ordinary mortal person. But he had some prescient thought of us, future archaeological tourists, coming upon his tomb hundreds or even thousands of years later.  The great tomb is not built for the imaginary world but for us tourists of the future time!  And it is meant to send this message:  “Behold, there lived here the king of kings, so mighty he compelled his subjects to make thousands of terra-cotta warriors and not to perform functions useful to themselves. Compared to myself the mighty one, their lives and deaths are of no account. People of the future behold the mighty one who laid others low.”  We have some evidence of this line of thinking in the many obsequies written by courtiers, that recount the numbers and types of slaves laid low by great men which only went to support accounts of their greatness. In that case the emperor’s preparation for the next world is for us in our world. Shelley’s poem Ozymandias  comes to mind. “My name is Ozymandias king of kings; Look to my works, ye mighty and despair!”

The largest tomb in the world and terra-cotta warriors, were built by slaves. The same goes for the pyramids of Egypt. The Egyptian pharaohs knew they were not gods, yet built their own mighty structures for our benefit here in the twenty first century or Napoleon or whatever person might wish to uncover them, but in no way for their own oppressed populace.  Imagine how many miserable slaves  perished  in the hot sun making these works. It suggests Peter the Great’s mud carriers sinking into the swamp where they would forever lay, as the great czar built the magnificent monument to himself which was to be St. Petersburg. Later Catherine the Great had built a palace full of the greatest art in the world to be seen only by her own privileged eyes.  I was amused to hear German tourists call the three Chinese kings in their language Dei Drei Kaiseren. King, Pharaoh,,emperor, Caesar, Czar, Kaiser, are the same in any language. It is all about masters and slaves.

Plenty of public works of the past are available to us tourists of their future. The Great Wall of China is so massive is the only major structure that can be seen with the naked eye from space. At least it was cobbled together by many rulers but the Wall is a false Maginot of protection from invaders.  I spent some time touring the Three Gorges Dam project, the largest dam in the world. Government signage about the structure brags that the project came in under budget. I can only imagine the rigor of taskmasters as the “workers”  were driven to produce, or maybe not. You can’t believe any of their accountant’s numbers since no one made any effort to report or check on these there being no free press. I considered what future archaeologists one thousand years hence might think of the Three Gorges Dam. We have the Ming Temple of he Sun and Forbidden City,  Tiananmen Square, Olympic Stadium all works built to benefit whom? Maybe future tourists.

Solomon’s Temple may have been magnificent. There are no sure remnants of it today as other structures were built over it and it might be complicated and downright dangerous to tear them down. The Temple was built for that time and is unavailable to the current future generation. But we have some evidence in Biblical literature that the people of the time resented taxes and labor devoted to such as public display of Kingly power. In fact the King’s public works and taxes lead swiftly to the collapse and division of the kingdom within two generations. All of this is a commentary on public works. How much is for the public or for the workers who are made to slave over them. What is their purpose?

We need to think of that for ourselves and we do so too infrequently. In the US we have massive public works projects. I can name tons of them. Many start with the words, “War on” something, war on poverty, war on drugs, war on cancer and as Eisenhower warned us, our military industrial complex, Eisenhower’s own interstate highway system, Robert Moses’s and New York’s famed parks and roads master plan in the mid twentieth century,  which I count myself as a beneficiary of and came to admire as a true Project for the common man,  the space program, the NIH, we need to ask,  who they are for? They are not built with slave labor.  But it behooves us to take a second look at our wars on programs most of which were public opinion ploys, and ended up benefitting no one, but politicians and profiteers.  Seeming useless boondoggles include most of our recent military type real wars and Wars on Poverty and Drugs. The jury is out on our war on terror. I tend to like scientific projects such as our CDC and NIH and space program which have helped us maintain our place as science leader of the world and have demonstrably benefitted many. I tend to like big science programs too like the superconductive supercollider and the Human Genome project though I fully understand people’s objections to these. I was wary of us sending our military to Africa to quell the Ebola epidemic, though we certainly landed with our feet on that one, and undoubtedly saved many lives. The point is in our ow society is an oligarchy benefitting the few. It seems not to be an overt kleptocracy as are many countries in the modern world. Most of history seems sole for the Czars and Emperors and their ilk,  Some super-wealthy Americans have donated large parts of there fortunes with moneys distributed only too long after their deaths, when they were most unlikely to enjoy advantages of wealth but at least the cash in these cases is not kept in some vault for the sole purposes of furthering the interests of some kingship or a church.

The Qin emperor and the Egyptian Pharaohs had in common creation of large works as legacy for the next world. I was saying that unless these persons were very stupid they knew themselves, unlike their naive subjects, they weren’t headed for another world,  but for the future in our world.  I have talked about this previously in these pages being personally attached to an eternalist view of time as enunciated by Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five’s Tralfamadorians and recently came upon a nice brief discussion in the Smithsonian Magazine of January 2015 by physicist Sean Carroll. I mentioned in my last essay here Carroll’s book about time, From Eternity to Here. Time is extremely basic and thinking humans have a natural interest in it,  but the one reason for my personal obsession with time is the fear of death, which we have seen is a concern for all humankind small and even the mighty like emperors, Peter the Great, the pharaohs and Ozymandias. As we have shown leaving great works seems not at all to solve the problem of mortality.

What I’ve come to believe now is that we humans have been set up. We see our fellows die and know death is inevitable. We see that nothing lasts and all is bound to come to naught with the passage of time. Our precious human body and every little and great thing will one day perish. Even the earth and sun will die. The burial of our fellows in the ground and the rotting of the corpse is an elaborate show which may be fooling us. We have come to accept our coming into and exit from the world and the time in between as a fact, and the majority of us, even those who fervently look forward to paradise after death like popes and priests, if given the choice, will opt for continuation of their mundane earthly existences, being unwilling to give up heroic medical measures that preserve earthly life. The thought of moving on to another world is the Grand Illusion, especially now after the twentieth century when we have explored all manner of worlds and found none after mortal life.

The idea of Time, I’ve come to believe, is a part of this grand illusion. We understand time as we grasp everything, given the limitations of our given brain. We are capable of picturing time as the flow of events from past to future. But what if time isn’t as we picture it at all, that is, as  a commodity that flows only forward into the future and is used up. Time might just be closest to that experienced by Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians, like the three spatial dimensions  we live in, merely existing, suspended in a space-time continuum. In that case all that happens in our life or even the life of Ozymandias is simply existent as it always has been. In that case the flow of events, the experience of our lives, is merely an illusion and experience and all else seems suspended as part of the fabric of spacetime. Life is as it always was and ever will be before during and after the illusion of a lifetime. Then as we desire, when the opportunity arises, we may always come back to ourselves, like a record needle lighting on a groove or a hard disk finding an engram. Perhaps the content of our lives is on someone’s universal memory medium as in the Mind of God. None of us can know. But as long as time is an illusion or at least a misapprehension for us, we need not fear death, which depends on an erroneous misapprehension or incomplete understanding of time.