QIN SHI HUANG

Qin Shi Huang unified China, created one of the ancient world’s most powerful centralized states, and built an enormous mausoleum complex guarded by the Terracotta Army. Yet more than two thousand years after his death, the chamber believed to contain the First Emperor himself has still not been opened.QIN SHI HUANG: THE TOMB THEY STILL HAVEN’T OPENED explores the life, death, and extraordinary burial mystery of China’s First Emperor. Ancient historian Sima Qian described a vast underground world filled with palaces, treasures, mechanical crossbows, and rivers and seas of mercury. For centuries, those accounts seemed almost impossible. Then archaeology began uncovering the scale of the mausoleum complex, including thousands of terracotta warriors, bronze weapons, imperial chariots, and evidence of unusually high mercury concentrations around the burial mound.But the central tomb remains sealed.Did ancient looters ever reach the emperor’s burial chamber? Could his remains still survive inside? Were the stories of mercury rivers based on fact? And what else might still be hidden beneath the mound?James P. Patterson separates archaeological evidence from legend while examining Qin Shi Huang’s rise to power, his obsession with immortality, the construction of his underground empire, and the scientific reasons modern archaeologists have resisted opening the tomb.For readers interested in ancient China, Qin Shi Huang, the Terracotta Army, lost tombs, archaeology, ancient civilizations, and unsolved historical mysteries, this book examines one of the most extraordinary unopened tombs in the world.