Curio Cabinet

They might be terra-cotta, but don’t accuse them of having feet of clay—they’ve been loyally guarding their Emperor for over two thousand years. On this day in 1974, Chineses farmers in the Shaanxi province in northwest China discovered the long lost tomb of Qin Shi Huangdi, the self-proclaimed first emperor of China. It’s one of the most significant archaeological finds in modern history, and it was completely by accident. The farmers only happened upon it while desperately digging a well during a drought. Emperor Qin probably didn’t want his tomb to be found, and who can blame him? He was buried alongside hoards of treasure in a vast underground complex guarded by his faithful army of clay soldiers. The most famous artifacts within the tomb were the terra-cotta warriors. This army of eight thousand soldiers is sculpted in lifelike detail. No two are completely alike, and each is adorned in a wide array of hairstyles and facial features. They were once painted in vibrant colors, though the pigments broke down long ago. Each soldier is so intricately sculpted that it’s possible to deduce each man’s rank by their uniform. The soldiers are also accompanied by horses, just in case they get tired of marching. This army has spent a lot of time on the move, recently. Since their discovery, they’ve been displayed in museums around the world (not all at once, of course), and even after nearly five decades, there are still unexplored sections of the vast tomb they emerged from. Archaeologists have excavated around 600 pits in the tomb, but much of the 22-square-mile complex remains untouched. There may be hidden dangers that lie in wait for them, should they dig too much. Legends about the emperor that rose after his death state that his tomb is filled with rivers of mercury to mimic the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, and soil analysis has revealed that there is a dangerously high level of the heavy metal. Something else that has archaeologists hesitating is that after two millennia underground, suddenly exposing the buried artifacts to light and air will damage them. Progress on the site remains slow, but hey, it’s not like the army’s going to march off.

 
[Image description: A close-up photo of rows of terracotta warriors.] Credit & copyright: Gary Todd from Xinzheng, China, Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

This action star’s year is off to a great start. Michelle Yeoh recently became the first Asian woman to win Best Actress at the 2023 Academy Awards. She received the Oscar for her role in the unconventional sci-fi film Everything Everywhere All at Once, in which she shows off her martial arts skills while playing an everyday woman on a multiverse-trekking adventure. Yeoh’s acting career had unconventional beginnings. In fact, the famously tough actress, known for performing her own fighting stunts, had a passion for ballet long before she developed a taste for theater or martial arts.
 
Born Yeoh Choo Kheng in 1962 in Ipoh, Malaysia, Yeoh showed a childhood passion for dance and studied ballet throughout her childhood, beginning at age 4. After her family moved to the U.K. during her teenage years, she continued studying ballet in boarding school and then at the Royal Academy of Dance. Unfortunately, during an otherwise normal practice session, Yeoh injured her back, suffering a herniated disk. Doctors told Yeoh that, while she would recover from her injury, she would no longer be able to practice ballet rigorously every day, thus ending her dream of becoming a prima ballerina.
 
But Yeoh was still drawn to the stage. She went on to study acting in college and received a BA in Creative Arts with a minor in Drama. Her break into the acting world began when she co-starred in a television commercial for luxury watches alongside none other than martial arts film star Jackie Chan…though Yeoh had no idea, at first, that Chan would be there. The job listed Chan’s Cantonese name, Sing Long, as her co-star, and the part was offered to her via a phone call in Cantonese, which Yeoh could partially understand but not speak. After that role, Yeoh made it a point to learn Cantonese, in addition to the Malay and English she already knew.
 
Her commercial caught the eye of D&B Films, a film production company in Hong Kong. The company suggested that Yeoh use the name Michelle Khan for her acting roles, saying that the name would be more marketable to a western audience. By 1985, Yeoh was starring in martial arts films for D&B under the name. In an interview with NPR, Yeoh recounted how she came to do her own action scenes under unconventional circumstances: “My first movie, I played a social worker. And we were bullied by, you know, the juvenile delinquents who took great pleasure in teasing us and giving us a hard time. And then the guys who were the martial arts experts were the ones who would rescue us constantly. So when I watched them, I went to my producers, and I say, you know what? I would love to be able to try to do martial arts. They looked at me and thought I was insane…But then they thought, well, what do we have to lose?”
 
Yeoh excelled at action scenes, which helped her make the leap to Hollywood in 1997, with her role as Wai Lin in the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies. Pierce Brosnan, who played Bond at the time, described Yeoh as a “female James Bond” because she didn’t use a body double for her action scenes. Yeoh would go on to say that her tolerance for pain was something she learned from ballet. However, it was Ang Lee’s 2000 martial arts hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that truly catapulted Yeoh to international fame and even earned her a BAFTA nomination. Though she didn’t yet speak Mandarin when she got the role (she had to learn her lines phonetically) she went on to learn the language after filming, bringing the number of languages she could speak to four.
 
Over the next decade, Yeoh starred in action movies (and racked up some painful injuries from doing her own stunts), founded her own production company, and became the face of several brands. In 2018, she starred in the widely acclaimed Crazy Rich Asians, and in 2021 she made her way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with her role as Ying Nan in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Then, in 2022, Yeoh starred in Everything Everywhere All at Once. In her role as laundromat owner Evelyn Wang, she travels the multiverse in a surreal, comedic, sometimes heart-wrenching attempt to connect with different versions of her daughter. The role earned her a multitude of awards, including a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award and, to top it all off, the Academy Award for Best Actress. At 60 years old, Yeoh has become one of the most iconic female action stars in Hollywood, and her career only seems to be ramping up. Who knows what movie set she’ll be smashing her way through next!

 
[Image description: Michelle Yeoh speaks at a conference in Burma.] Credit & copyright: Wikimedia Commons, William Ng, Public Domain per 17 U.S.C. section 101 and section 105.

Pirates weren’t the only seafaring raiders to leave behind buried treasure. In 2018, archaeologists began excavating the remains of a viking ship near the Oslo Fjord, in Norway. After years of salvaging and cataloging, they’re finally announcing what they’ve found. It may seem surprising, but historians and archaeologists don’t actually have a lot of accurate information about viking culture. Despite their fearsome reputation and their persistence in popular imaginations for centuries, vikings left very little record of their existence. Even their portrayal in paintings, books, and recent media like the TV show Vikings contradicts what little is known about them—they weren’t even known to wear horned helmets or fashionable leather armor. That’s why finds like the Gjellestad Ship are so important, and it’s proving to be a treasure trove of information. It’s the first viking ship excavation since 1904, and it’s yielded around 8,000 fragments of different artifacts in various states of decay.
 
The ship as a whole couldn’t be raised, but the wood in the keel dates to around the 8th Century and reveals that the ship saw action sometime in the following centuries before it was buried. There’s also evidence that the ship’s contents were picked over by grave robbers. And yes, the ship likely did serve as a grave. Important figures were buried in ships filled with valuables as a sign of power and wealth. Among the buried hoard was a large amber bead that may have once been attached to jewelry or even a weapon. Then there are items that might have been added for the deceased to make use of in the afterlife, like a comb and a whetstone for sharpening their weapons. The variety of items is important because it helps historians understand the vikings’ customs. It also gives them an idea of what their trade network might have been like in its heyday. While vikings are best known as raiders who terrorized the coasts, they were, in fact, big players in the commerce of early medieval Europe. These mysterious people did it all: they were raiders, waders and traders.

 
[Image description: A viking-style boat sails between mountains.] Credit & copyright: WFlore, Pixabay