Clay and witchcraft: who created the "Terracotta Army"

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In 1974, an incredible archaeological find was made in China - while drilling an artesian well, workers found several thousand clay statues. Archaeologists confidently stated that this is the tomb of the founder of the Qin dynasty, erected in the third century BC.

But in the same year a book was published in Japan, the authors of which - Japanese Sati Kanyoka and Chinese Liao Yujie - presented a completely different version of the origin of the so-called "terracotta army". Unfortunately, their book "The Fury of Clay" has not been translated from Japanese even into English, so it remains very little known outside of Japan.

I will take this opportunity to give you a brief summary of its contents.

But first, a few words about the authors. They both took part in the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945, and for two days in 1937 they fought on the same sector of the front, against each other - in fact, this is what the book they wrote is about. Sachi Kanioka was a sergeant in the Third Infantry Division, ended the war as a lieutenant, having fought in China for all eight years. His colleague Liao Yujie started the war as a captain as deputy commander of a militia brigade. After the communists came to power, he fled to Taiwan and then to Japan.

The incident on the Marco Polo Bridge, which happened in July 1937, was the reason for the outbreak of full-scale hostilities between Japan and China. A trained and well-trained Japanese army quickly began to crowd out the numerous but poorly armed Chinese units.

The militia brigade in which Liao Yujie served was located in the small village of Wuponientu in northern China.

Three thousand hastily trained militias with one single old field howitzer were to engage in battle with four Japanese divisions moving south in a few days. The brigade commander, Colonel Kang Weyong, decided it would be wiser to retreat - but first he wanted to evacuate the population of the village to the mountains. Unfortunately, the passage to the mountains was to the north of Vuponientu - that is, the Japanese units had to be distracted by fighting for the village so that the civilians could get to the mountains.

This is what Liao Yujie writes: Our commander immediately said: "My boys can only detain the Japanese for half an hour." And for the elderly and women to reach the trail to the mountains, we needed at least a day. And I didn't want to die either - we are saving them so that we can see them later. He didn’t walk on his own, then he took out a volume of Sun Tzu and didn’t sleep all night, reading. In the morning he ran to me: "There is a plan, let's go to collect women."

It must be said that the name of the village is Vuponiento (巫婆 粘土) literally translated as "Witch's clay". And there were the most compelling reasons for that - throughout the province, the village was famous for its ceramics, as well as for the manufacture of medicinal drugs. There was no shortage of clay - the village was located in a kind of clay crater under the Lishan Mountain.

It was several days before the approach of the Japanese army. Weyong ordered every villager to mold at least one, and preferably two, soldiers from clay. It was an easy task for the born Vuponiento potters - the first thousand clay fighters were ready by evening. Meanwhile, the scouts, who know very well the surroundings of the village, bypassed all the springs, hammering linen bags with crushed ergot, which was often used for medicinal potions, deep into each one.

To enter the village, the Japanese would have to cross the chain of hills that encircle Vuponiento. On the northern slope, where the Japanese advance was expected, Weyong placed several dozen braziers. All the militia fighters were dressed in brown sackcloth and thoroughly smeared with clay. And in addition to ordinary clay soldiers, the women of the village fashioned several six-meter giants, which they set on wooden strips and dragged up the hill to the braziers. The clay soldiers (of whom over ten thousand were eventually created - a whole division!) Were laid in the grass in such a way that each militia, using levers and cables, could alone bring two clay figures to a vertical position.

Liao Yujie: I asked the commander - what are we doing? He answered me: “The doctrine of completeness and emptiness tells us that deceiving the enemy is the most important part of tactics. Let the Japanese think that there are many of us. Let them think that they are fighting not with people, but with spirits, with a product of their own reason. The enemy will conquer himself, having lost the battle in his soul. " When I asked him how to do this, he showed me the herbs and powders that were cooked near the braziers. "And the wind always blows north this time of year," he added

The Japanese attacked the village at night. Before the attack, Weyong ordered the braziers to be lit, and the valley where the Japanese troops had arrived was covered with a wave of narcotic smoke from the burnt seeds of Tibetan bindweed, mountain hemp, crushed fly agarics, false ginseng and, of course, ergot. On command, the Chinese fighters, hiding on the slope near the very ground, so as not to swallow the smoke, raised the clay statues. The effect exceeded all expectations.

Intoxicated by the smoke and poisoned water from the springs, the Japanese soldiers saw before them thousands of revived clay fighters. The battle formation of the Japanese infantry was mixed, the soldiers stopped disassembling their own and foes and began to shoot at everything that moves. The militias in sackcloth, smeared with clay, easily shot hundreds of opponents who had lost their sense of reality. Meanwhile, the only Chinese howitzer spoke, and clay giants were lowered from the mountain on wooden carts.

This is how Sachi Kanioka describes the battle: “I could not believe my eyes, but what was happening looked so real! Thousands of living statues descended on us from the hill. I discharged the entire clip into the nearest one - but it only bounced off a piece of clay. And then huge creatures appeared, also made of clay. They were completely real, I could feel the earth shaking from their heavy steps. One such time crushed a whole column of our soldiers. It was awful, a nightmare."

The fight lasted until the evening of the next day, until the effect of the drug stopped. The Japanese lost almost ten thousand people killed, and the same number were wounded. Weyong easily managed to ferry the villagers to the mountain pass, and then withdraw his troops and retreat deeper into Chinese territory.

The losses of the Chinese were very modest, so when the narcotic intoxication dissipated, the Japanese faced a valley littered with the corpses of their own soldiers and clay debris. A little later, Japanese scouts approached the village and saw only abandoned houses and clay figures frozen in the empty streets. Japanese commanders requested air support, and a bomber wing was sent to the abandoned village. The first bombs fell on the side of Mount Lishan, causing a landslide that hid Vuponienta from prying eyes for almost forty years.

In the Japanese historiography of the Sino-Japanese War, heavy losses in this sector were explained by the activities of the communist divisions (because, naturally, no one believed the reports about the battle with the clay soldiers). Mao Zedong's government willingly supported this version, claiming an extra victory for itself.

Archaeologists who discovered the clay soldiers in 1974 were quick to name them part of Qin Shi Huang's tomb. A more detailed analysis (and, of course, the publication of Kanyoki and Yujie's book) showed that they were wrong, but the archaeologists did not want to admit that they were wrong - moreover, in this case, the Chinese authorities were deprived of a valuable tourist attraction. The figures were “fine-tuned”, and additional statues, such as horses and chariots, were sculpted from local clay. The history of the "Terracotta Army" was moved two thousand years into the past, and the battle for Vuponienta became an insignificant episode of a distant war.

P. S. In 1985, Kanyoka's daughter turned to Hayao Miyazaki with a proposal to film the story of the battle with Vuponientu and even offered her own version of the script (where the statues came to life for real). But the Japanese government put pressure on the famous director and he had to give up filming.