After the recent announcement that some of China’s Terracotta Warriors will soon be coming to London, Lord Boston of Faversham’s letter (February 13) about the earlier visit of seven figures to the Royal Horticultural Hall in Westminster will have reminded some readers of another curious episode, now more than a quarter of a century ago.

The warriors had been revealed only in 1974 near the third-century BC tomb of China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang Di, east of Xi’an.

Early in 1981 China’s overseas trading corporation did a deal with two department stores, one in Paris and Selfridge’s in London: in exchange for a substantial display area for Chinese goods, a group of warriors and horses from the Terracotta Army would be brought over and put on show as well.

The vast hangar that covers the 6,000 infantry and archers in Pit 1 had been opened to visitors only in October 1979, so the attraction was a hot ticket, a first chance for most people to see these legendary figures.

Since the show was going to Paris first, Selfridge’s invited The Times and the BBC, among other media, to fly over there for the official opening; we noted at the time that “the Chinese are using archaeological finds to stimulate interest in their modern handicrafts” (The Times, February 24, 1981).

The Paris Métro was plastered with huge posters of a kneeling archer and the message “The Chinese Warriors are Coming!”.

At the opening we were kept well away from the roped-off figures, but the BBC man and I remarked to each other how clean and fresh the figures were, compared with the photographs of them in their burial place in central China. “They could almost be new . . .”, said the BBC man, off-mike, “but they couldn’t have . . .”.

A few weeks later, just before the London opening and with my article already written, I had an alarmed call from the Selfridge’s publicity man: somebody at the Chinese Embassy in Paris had said that the figures were “replicas” — could I as an archaeologist tell the difference from the real thing?

If I was allowed to inspect them closely, I thought yes, I said. Next morning, I contemplated the interior of an indubitably new plaster cast, with fresh string set into it for lifting, painted a nice shade of taupe on the exterior.

The publicity that Selfridge’s garnered was rather different from what it had anticipated, but no less satisfactory: the deception caught the public imagination, and the publicity man reported to me several weeks later that the crowds had been far larger than the store had expected for the real thing.

Now the real thing will be here, and we will wonder once more at the colossal power and overweening imagination of Qin Shi Huang Di.

City’s boundaries were frozen in time

Generations of Cambridge students remember Robert Sayle’s department store opposite Emmanuel College, and more recent ones the Lion Yard Car Park which squatted behind it in concrete brutalism: few were aware that below them ran the King’s Ditch, the medieval city boundary, and a series of boundaries that had not shifted for centuries.

Recent excavations before the Grand Arcade redevelopment have uncovered the long history of Cambridge’s Middle Ages, just south and east of the university and its colleges.

“Remarkably, the layout and general appearance of the town seem to have changed relatively little between the 12th and the 19th centuries,” a report in Current Archaeology says.

The original settlement was around the Roman fort of Durolipons, on Castle Hill, but by Saxon times the level ground across the Cam was settled, and under the Normans it became first a monastic centre and then a seat of learning: the ancient colleges lie along what in Saxon times were the two roads forking from the river crossing, one to the south towards London along what are now Trinity Street and King’s Parade, the other southeast past Christ’s and Emmanuel.

The Grand Parade site includes the area just across the King’s Ditch along the latter road, where a new suburb grew in the 11th century.

Some of the plot boundaries line up with the walls of standing buildings along St Andrew’s Street, where the historic facades have been preserved in the new development.

“The later features often explain the medieval features,” the report says. “Often the same boundary is in use for a thousand years: the 20th-century boundary can show you the line of the 16th, 13th or even 11th-century boundary. The stability of boundaries was one of the big discoveries: often this is not revealed in documentary evidence, because many of the city’s archives have been lost, partly during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 when rebels burnt the city.”

The Cambridge Archaeological Unit team, which has carried out the work, say: “We’ re probably the only archaeologists to have recorded a 1970s multi-storey car-park.” The investigation of Sayle’s store gave “a picture of Edwardian shop-life, evidence for the self-contained community of shop-workers known to have been accommodated behind the shop in the early years: Sayle’s represents the middle-class consumer city Cambridge had become.”

Current Archaeology 208: 22-31

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