ROME, ITALY.- The Scuderie del Quirinale presents China: Birth of an Empire, on view through January 28, 2007. Qin Shi Huangdi, First August Emperor of the Qin (221-210 BC), completed his military conquest of a vast territory in 221 BC, realizing his dream of creating a single empire that united all the settlements and cities that had been linked by extensive trade and warfare since the Neolithic Age and had already seen the expansion of Shang and Zhou domination during the Bronze Age.

The exhibition Cina. Nascita di un Impero (China. Birth of an Empire) presents the Chinese culture of precisely that period, which extends from the Zhou, the last pre-imperial dynasty (1045-221 BC), to the two imperial dynasties of the Qin (221-206 BC) and the Western Han (206 BC-23 AD) in a vast, compelling fresco spanning over ten centuries.

The exhibition features over 320 extremely refined and striking artefacts from 14 Chinese museums, some of which have never left China before. Among them are splendid jades and majestic ceremonial bronzes found both in central and northern China, home to the Qin culture, and in southern China, where the Chu culture predominated.

Bronzes from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng (433 BC), a painted lacquered wood coffin in which one of his concubines was buried and a famous ‘drum stand’ in the shape of a bird, with deer’s antlers in bronze, which is unique of its kind, are visible in Italy for the first time. Inlaid bronze and glazed ceramic vases, celadon ware, lacquer work and jewels are also on display.

A life-size jade-suit from the Han period is featured. It is composed of more than 4,000 small pieces of the highest quality white jade of varying size and thickness, sewn together with hundreds of yards of gold thread. At the time the Chinese believed that jade prevented corpses from decomposing, thus enabling the corporeal soul to survive. This belief gave rise to the custom, which lasted some centuries, of encasing the dead person’s body in an actual suit of sewn jade that took expert craftsmen years to produce. The jade-suit in the exhibition is one of the finest of the 40 or so discovered to date.

The major attraction, however, is certainly the famous terracotta soldiers of the First August Emperor, an imposing army composed of thousands of life-size warriors, horses and war-chariots, all different, discovered in a number of pits located near the Mausoleum, still intact, at Lintong (Xi’an, Shaanxi), not far from the ancient imperial capital.

After Qin Shi Huangdi, others emperors wanted terracotta armies as part of their burial furnishings. Some of the grave goods of the first Han emperor (Gaodi, 206-195 BC) and also the fourth (Jingdi, 157-141 BC) are on display for the first time at the Scuderie del Quirinale. They are composed of more than 160 painted terracotta statues, approximately 70cm tall, from Xianyan and Yangling: foot soldiers, horses, riders, servants and domestic animals, found in thousands of satellite tombs and pits located near mausoleums which, like that of the First August Emperor, are still intact.

The exhibition is curated by Lionello Lanciotti, Professor Emeritus of Chinese Philology at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”, and by Maurizio Scarpari, Professor of Classical Chinese Language at the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari, with the collaboration of Attilio Andreini, Tiziana Lippiello, Sabrina Rastelli (Ca’ Foscari) and Roberto Ciarla (Museo d’Arte Orientale "Giuseppe Tucci" in Rome). The exhibition is designed by Luca Ronconi.