By DPA
Xian (China) : In modern China with its brutal pace of development, it was a very unremarkable death. Racked with disease and with no money to pay for a visit to the doctor, peasant farmer Wang Puzhi waited until his family were out, slipped a rope around his neck and ended his suffering.
Before his lonely suicide, however, Wang’s life was far from unremarkable. He was one of a seven-strong team of workers who, while digging a well on their communal farm in 1974, stumbled across the most priceless archaeological discovery of modern times – the 2,200 year-old Terracotta Warriors.
It is a discovery that has brought tens of millions of foreign tourists to Xian in north-western China and made many businessmen and, it is claimed, local officials extremely rich. But for the farmers who found the buried army and the ancient village they grew up in, the warriors have proved more a curse than a blessing.
As the biggest ever overseas exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors began at the British Museum last week, we tracked down the surviving men who discovered the stone soldiers and found them bewildered at the greed and destruction the warriors brought to the surface with them.
Their farmland has been claimed by the government, stripping them of their livelihoods, their homes and those of their neighbours were demolished with little or no compensation to make way for exhibition halls, parking lots and gift shops – and their village with its 2,000 year history has all but disappeared.
Within three years of Wang’s suicide at the age of 60 in 1997, the two youngest members of the team who found the warriors – Yang Wenhai and Yang Yanxin – died jobless and penniless at home, unable to pay for a doctor to diagnose their illnesses. Both were still only in their 50s.
Today, the four remaining men – 79-year-old Yang Quanyi, 78-year-old Yang Peiyan and 69 year-olds Yang Zhifa and Yang Xinman – are paid around 1,000 yuan a month ($132) to sit in official souvenir shops and sign photo books for queues of tourists who come to see the army built to protect China’s First Emperor in the afterlife.
“Officials and businessmen have made a lot of money from the Terracotta Warriors but not us,” says Yang Quanyi. “We got nothing for the discovery. It was the days of collective farms and we were given ten credit points by our brigade leader for finding the warriors. That was the equivalent of about one yuan (13 US cents) in our pay packet at the end of the month.”
It was while digging a well in March 1974 when one of the farmers, Yang Zhifa, suddenly hit a warrior’s head 15 metres beneath the surface. “Everyone was afraid to touch it,” says Yang Quanyi. “We thought it was a temple statue – a Buddha perhaps. The women thought it might bring a curse down on the village.”
In fact the farmers had found one of more than 8,000 terracotta foot soldiers, archers and charioteers that had been buried with Qin Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor of China, in the 3rd century BC in a vast mausoleum covering several square miles.
Officials and archaeologists poured into the village. In the years that followed, a huge swath of land that for centuries had provided Yang village with abundant crops of corn, wheat and pomegranates, was reclaimed. Villagers received just 300 yuan for each 600 square metre piece of land and sank deeper into what was to prove fatal poverty for three of the seven discoverers.
“People here are too poor to afford a hospital,” says Quanyi. “Yang Yanxin died of a skin disease that caused his body to rot away. Yang Wenhai died in great pain at his home. Neither of them had any money for medicine.”
Yang Lou Cheng, stepson of Wang Puzhi, who hanged himself in 1997, said: “He had heart disease. He couldn’t bear the suffering and he didn’t want to be a burden to my mother and me. My mother died a short while afterwards. It is very painful for me to talk about this, even now.”
In recent years, as China has opened its doors to tourists, the site at Xian has been expanded, meaning even more homes in the village have been demolished. Families have been forced to move to new homes a mile away and even had to pay for their homes to be rebuilt.
“The government has taken away our land and our livelihoods and left us with nothing,” said one villager. “People in Yang village are simple farmers. Only a few of them, maybe 5 per cent, have made money by selling food or souvenirs to tourists. But 100 per cent of the local officials here have become rich.”
When a group of villagers travelled by bus and train to Beijing to petition the central government for compensation for what they claim is theft of their homes and land, they were sent back home with nothing.
Not one of the group of seven men who discovered the hidden army is named or photographed anywhere within the complex in Xian – they are alluded to only as a band of peasant farmers. As a result, the complex is full of imposters who make money claiming to be one of the seven.
Yang Zhifa, the best known of the original discoverers, earns less signing books for tourists than the young girls who work as shop assistants. “If I ask for more they can easily find an imposter to take my place,” he said.
In 2004, a lawyer from Xian offered his services for free to help the four surviving discoverers gain official recognition. “He wrote to the local government but the government didn’t even respond to the letter,” says Yang Quanyi. “It is unreasonable. But we are weak and the government is strong.”
Asked why the discoverers were refused recognition, a provincial government spokesman said: “It is not important who discovered these relics. Our job is to take care of these relics and to protect them. That is our task.”
Yang Quanyi insists he is at peace and not bitter at his treatment. But back at his simple home, his wife Liu Xi Qin, 70, tells us quietly: “Even today, my husband always worries if they did something wrong by discovering the warriors. He wonders if maybe the soldiers should have been left beneath the ground.”