Qin China is the focus of the camp to be held at the GWGC Pavilion from Monday August 19th to Friday the 23rd. This particular site is a recreation of a small part of the famous mound discovered outside the city of Xian where Qin Shih Huang Di’s mysterious army has been under excavation since the early 1970s. The scale of the recreation is suitable for kids but is not the same as the real thing. Nevertheless much can be learned from its contents, first and foremost about one of the most terrible and dazzling epochs in human, let alone Chinese, history, marking as it did the end of the Warring States Period and the ushering in, for the first time, of a state that resembled in multiple respects what China became for next two millennia and, perhaps, what it remains to this day. In this camp students will have the opportunity to learn what was entailed by the Qin state’s conquest of the other state entities of that time, such as Yan and Han, Zhou and Shu, and perhaps most mysteriously Li and Chu. The building of the first Great Wall, the beginning of the Grand Canal, and the fate of the great literary corpus which had until that time thrived in what China had been. The artifacts and structures involved will fascinate and motivate the diggers as they come to appreciate the terrible events and attitudes that account for much of what happened in the Qin and in the succeeding civil war and the triumphant Han Dynasty which emerged from it. Once you have got involved in this highly revealing dig you will not be able to tear yourself away: rarely has archaeology
preserved such a record of the basic forces that drive human creativity and its relation to an overwhelming will to power. It is possible that the events of Ancient China have as much to teach us about the world today as they do about the realm of the Qin. Interested? Find out. Your instructor has spent a lot of time in, and studying, China. A learning experience simply. Not. To. Be. Missed.