Qin Shi Huang was the first emperor of china and he left to posterity his immense and monumental Qin Mausoleum. Near it, the famous terracotta warriors were found, but always documentaries mention that the mausoleum is intact and never explored or opened! Not even the revolution that disdained the empire was curious to open the place?
Are they saying that Chinese grave robbers were all incompetent?
All those hundreds of years! While in Egypt robbers got to raid all the tombs of the pharoes, the Chinese were the only ones that got scared of curses? (Tutankhamen in Egypt was the only exception, but even there, robbers got close and then the tomb was forgotten, China’s first emperor tomb was never lost or forgotten)
FWIW that site does mention that there is evidence that robbers did indeed try to get in but their efforts were in vain (?) I am dubious!. But going back to the current era: Are Chinese archeologists still afraid to get in? If so, why? What is the dope on this?
My best guesses as to why they might be hesitant to open it are as follows:
1.) Opening things that old can be risky in the sense that things which have managed to survive for a long time can suddenly begin to rapidly decay and the Chinese may not be able to round up enough resources to ensure that doesn’t happen.
2.) The Chinese are very sensitive about their history and certain leaders might find it, uncomfortable if the opening of the tomb disproved some widely accepted “facts.”
3.) China has over 3000 years of history as a nation in one form or another. There’s a hell of a lot of historical stuff lying around there and even the Chinese don’t have enough skilled people to to process it all quickly. As for why they don’t import expert help from the rest of the world, they do to some degree, but also remember that significant portions of Chinese artifacts were hauled away by outsiders during periods of occupation and the Chinese are no doubt worried the same thing might happen again.
4.) They’re still busy with the terracotta warriors and won’t get to opening the tomb until they’ve finished with them.
In any case, I’m sure China Guy or some other China based Doper will come by with better reasons.
Also, I think his tomb was forgotten over the following years. I may be wrong about this, but I’d heard that the discovery of the terra-cotta warriors (and the subsequent re-discovery of the tomb) around 1976 came as a complete surprise. From outside, it just looks like another big hill.
I think this is one of the coolest - untouched in modern times- archeological sites on earth. re the robbers portion of the OP My understanding is that the Han despoiled all the Qin tombs, indeed the main history on the building of the tomb records it so:
In modern times, believe the Chinese don’t want to open yet partially due to the whole rivers of mercury thing and partially because of no.1 & 3 outlined by Tuckerfan : they want to run it and preserve it and don’t have the technical expertise There are probably other reasons as well.
Sublight is right too: it was forgotten and a surprise find in 1976
Many archeological sites in China have been despoiled by grave robbers, that’s why it was such an important find.
Nowadays with ariel photography, ultrasound and other modern tools, it’s a lot easier to locate these sites.
China has a huge number of untouched archeological sites waiting to be “discovered.” Seriously, there is a very long list of known sites where the archeological work has not even begun to be started. There are enough that it would take centuries to really go through them and fully document/preserve each and every site.