THE FIRST

EMPEROR OF QIN

(Qin Shihuang)

THE CHINESE always have seen their history as full of lessons, of good and bad examples. For all but a few premodern Chinese, the First Qin Emperor was the greatest of bad examples, demonstrating that totalitarian enforcement of law, repression of dissent, and heavy burdens of taxes and forced labor will lead swiftly to the collapse of the government that seeks to impose them.

Bad examples often make good stories. Lao Ai and the dowager queen, Jing Ke, sent off with a song, the emperor's decaying corpse being hurried toward the capital, village conscripts claiming the Mandate of Heaven the story of Qin bursts with coarse will and individuality. This is not just the story-teller's art; today one can sense some of the same energy in the army of life-size terra-cotta soldiers and horses made to guard the emperor in his tomb. Every one is individual, the faces returning our gaze boldly.

The Qin state was a product of and a reaction against the anarchic vigor of politics, commerce, and thought that characterized the Warring States period. One of the most important foundations of the basic changes in all these spheres was the rapidly expanding use of iron, already visible in Confucius's lifetime and continuing all through this period. Once the higher temperatures needed to smelt iron ore were attained, iron was much more abundant than the copper and tin that made bronze. Probably because they already were expert in firing fine pottery, the Chinese skipped the forged-iron stage and went straight to cast iron, using kiln-heated molds, two thousand years ahead of Europeans. One result was an immense increase in numbers of metal weapons. But weapons are useless unless soldiers can be fed and clothed, and the appalling war-making capacity of the great states of this period depended on their vigorous economic growth and on efficient methods of taxation. Iron made iron plowshares and axes for clearing forests, tools for craftspeople, kettles for preparing dyes, drugs, salt, and

food, as well as weapons. Large cities developed with specialized quarters for various crafts.

States contributed to economic growth by building roads and by digging canals both for transport and for irrigation. Interregional trade made it possible for various regions to produce their own characteristic products in larger quantities for wider markets-a situation probably reflected in the "Tribute of Yu" text-and produced for the first time some very wealthy and powerful merchants. Private individuals bought and sold land; states still bestowed on great men grants of land and the families who farmed it, but this no longer was the only way in which rich people held land. A-s a result, systems had to be devised for taxing land regardless of who owned it, so that part of the product of privately owned fields still would go to support the government, and a bureaucracy had to be developed for this complicated task. Confucius himself in his last years had opposed the introduction of a land-tax scheme in Lu. Rulers and political thinkers also worried about ways of taxing the growing wealth of artisans and merchants. In a world of competing states and mobile people, rulers had to balance their need for tax revenue against their desire to attract, not repel, wealthy merchants and productive artisans and farmers. Confucius had advised the governor of She to "ensure that those from far away are attracted."

Rulers also were eager to attract wandering shi to their states. Shi sometimes is translated "knight," and many of the wandering shi were excep-

tional archers, swordsmen, strongmen, tacticians, or simply those crazy suicidal "war-lovers" who have their uses in every military establishment. Others sought employment as bureaucrats, by their numbers and skills making possible the organization of huge public works projects (canals, roads, walls), the administration of big cities and complicated tax systems, and the gradual spread from one state to another of the practice of administering outlying areas as xian, direct dependencies of the central government under appointed salaried magistrates, not hereditary feudal lords living off the revenues of the areas they ruled. In the records of this period, it is amazing how securely centralized these states seem, how rarely local divisions appear to affect their politics, and how interchangeable their officials were; men moved from state to state at all levels, sometimes even as prime ministers, and no one seems to have reproached them for disloyalty to their native lands. Here as in so many other ways, Confucius can be seen to have anticipated a theme of Warring States politics, acting out in his years of exile a singularly high-principled version of the wandering shi searching for a prince who would employ him: "While the gentleman cherishes benign rule, the small man cherishes his native land" (Analects, IV,II)

There were seven great states: Yan in the northeast, Qi, Chu, Qin, Wei, Han, and Zhao-the latter three states formed by the breakup of Jin. Wu, in the lower Yangzi area, was a rising power on the edge of the world of Chinese culture. Shifting alliances and cynical betrayals were the order of the day, as political intriguers moved from state to state seeking office and offering new strategies, new tricks. There were major invasions and battles almost every year. Each of the seven states could put in the field an army of 100,000 or more. Slaughter of defeated armies was the rule. No one paid any attention to the Zhou high king; all the rulers of the great states now called themselves kings (wang). Everyone involved in politics seems to have expected that out of the chaos one of the states would emerge supreme and impose some kind of new order, but no one expected it to be a re-creation of the Bronze Age order of the early Zhou. A wide variety of formulas for political success seemed plausible.

It was this sense of a total breakdown of the old order and of the many possibilities of a new one that made the years of the Warring States the years of the "Hundred Schools," the most vigorous, creative, and varied period in all of Chinese intellectual history. Some wandering shi were less swords for hire or would-be bureaucrats than wandering scholars-again like Confucius-offering to the rulers of their time a remarkable variety of ideas about man, nature, government, and the good life. Rulers of the states listened with interest to any scheme that might improve their pros-

pects for survival and ultimate victory. They also gained prestige as patrons of culture by supporting scholars at their courts, listening to their debates, and encouraging their efforts to compile ancient texts, histories, and the writings of various schools. By the end of the period there was even one great merchant playing the culture-patron game.

Some of the thinkers of the Hundred Schools produced writings longer and more connected in argument than the Analects of Confucius and matching them in depth and uncanny beauty. There is quite a lot of intelligent discussion of them in Western languages, excellent translations are available, and several of them are worth repeated readings or even a lifetime of study. Here I shall discuss them only as the background to the rise of Qin and to anticipate a few ideas developed in later chapters.

In some of these thinkers the focus on politics and ethics is obvious. This is true of the two great followers and developers of the teachings of Confucius, Mencius (Meng Zi) and Xun Zi. Mencius emphasized the potential goodness of human nature, and the way it could come to realization under selfless rulers and institutions like those of the early Zhou. Xun Zi, much less optimistic about human nature, still thought it could be disciplined and socialized by moral effort and ceremony. The political focus also is easy to see in the teachings of Mo Zi, who shared the Confucians' moral approach to politics and opposition to the extinction of small states and other abuses of the power of rulers, but deplored the expense and waste of time of elaborate funerals and other ceremonies. Mo Zi condemned the drift of the Confucian school away from concern with the spirits and belief in a Heaven that intervened in human affairs, believing that people needed to be motivated by the hope of supernatural benefits and rewards.

The political element is also there, but harder to find, in the wonderful texts of the Daoist masters, so called from their frequently cryptic, metaphorical, elusive exaltation of the harmony of the individual with the Way (dao) of Nature. In the book called the Dao de jing (Classic of the Way and Its Power), also known as the Lao zi after its mythical author, the Way is described as "nebulous yet complete, born before Heaven and Earth, silent, empty, self-sufficient and unchanging, revolving without cease and without fall," while the followers of the Way have their own kind of political and moral insight:

For these reasons,

Thus,

His rule is universal.

Similarly, the magnificent text called the Zhuang zi, full of the richest imagery of the changes and wonders of nature, showing with dazzling wit the relativity of all knowledge, also makes its anti-Confucian message clear:

Once Zhuang Zi was fishing in the Pu River when the king of Chu sent two of his ministers to announce that he wished to entrust to Zhuang Zi the care of his entire domain.

Zhuang Zi held his fishing pole and, without turning his head said: "I have heard that Chu possesses a sacred tortoise which has been dead for three thousand years and which the king keeps wrapped up in a box and stored in his ancestral empire. Is this tortoise better off dead and with its bones venerated, or would it be better off alive with its tail dragging in the mud?"

"It would be better off alive and dragging its tail in the mud," the two ministers replied.

"Then go away!" said Zhuang Zi "and I will drag my tail in the mud!

In an age of much construction and many new tools and processes, it is not surprising that there were some very influential thinkers who shared the Daoists' preoccupations with the Way of Nature but were much more optimistic about the possibilities of naming and explaining natural phenomena and exploiting knowledge of nature for human economic or political ends. The classifying and explaining of natural phenomena also appealed to wandering shi trying to relate what they saw in new places to the mountains, rivers, weather, and plants of their native places. Some thinkers elaborated a dualism of yin and yang-female and male, passive and active, dark and bright-that has been influential throughout the Far East down to the present.

Others developed a scheme of five powers or movers-earth, wood, metal, fire, water-that looks a little like the Greek four elements but conceives the fundamentals less as substances than as dynamic configurations that succeed one another in a predictable order. Various classes of natural phenomena were classified according to the five powers. Correlating and contrasting are basic functions of the human mind, and much good observation of nature came to be organized in terms of the five powers theory. Rulers wondering how to succeed or survive and which among them would manage to shape a new unified order to replace the Zhou were especially attracted by one branch of this kind of correlative thinking:

When some new dynasty is going to arise, Heaven exhibits auspicious signs to the people. During the rise of the Yellow Lord, large earthworms and large ants appeared. He said, "This indicates that the Power of Earth is in the ascendant, and our affairs must be placed tinder the sign of Earth.... During the rise of King Wen of the Zhou, f leaven exhibited Fire, and many red birds holding documents written in red flocked to the altar of the dynasty... Following Fire there will come Water. Heaven will show when the time comes for the Power of Water to dominate. Then the color will have to be black, and affairs will have to be placed under the sign of Water.

In addition to whatever guidance or reassurance these theories gave to rulers, they seem to have had a poetic fitness; it is not hard to see Qin as an implacable black flood.

The five powers theory developed especially in the eastern states of Yan and Qi. In the same area, sometimes loosely allied with it, traditions developed of esoteric arts that would put the human body through some kind of metamorphosis so that it stopped aging and decaying and became immortal. Some believed that a drug of immortality could be obtained from the mysterious eastern islands of Penglai, which were said to be inhabited by immortals, but no one had ever gone to those islands and come back. Some passages in the Daoist texts referred to such immortals, and eventually the quest for physical immortality became a basic feature of an elaborate Daoist religion.

world into a new type of political order took place entirely within the years

of rule of the man who became the First Emperor; its collapse occurred

just four years after his death. These decades mark one of the most impor-

tant turning points in Chinese history. Their shifts and contradictions are

baffling until we view thent in light of the long trends and many-sided

cultural developments of the Warring States period; then almost every-

thing falls into place. It still can seem surprising that it was Qin, not Qi or

Chu, that emerged supreme, but even that can be made comprehensible with the help of a map and a bit of chronology.

The future rulers of Qin seem to have had their origins as herders of cattle far out on the northwest frontier of the Chinese cultural area. In the wake of the "barbarian" attacks that forced the Zhou kings to move from the Wei River valley out onto the central plain, the Qin suppressed the "barbarians," established their capital near the old capital of the early Zhou, and were recognized by the Zhou high kings as feudal rulers of that area. It may be that they were in fact among the "barbarian" attackers, and that after driving out the Zhou they emerged supreme and began to adopt Chinese ways of ruling. Their neighbor and rival to the east, across the Yellow River, was Jin, the most powerful and politically creative state of the 6oos. The Qin rulers already were sending troops to intervene in the struggles of the central plain and were dreaming of achieving recognition as the supreme feudal lords and protectors of the Zhou kings. But Jin, closer to the central plain and more highly developed politically and economically, was far more successful in such interventions. Nevertheless, Qin, inferior to jin in population, wealth, and political sophistication, won as many battles between the two as it lost in the 6oos and 500s. jin was the only dangerous neighbor Qin had, while Jin faced danger in all directions. Jin's greater wealth, better-developed and more complex government, and older and more entrenched nobility made its internal politics less stable than Qin's. Qin manipulated the quarrels of the jin court, and losers sometimes fled to take service in Qin. Then in the 400s the internal conflicts led to the break-up of jin into three states, Han, Wei, and Zhao. The basic strength of Jin had been so great that each of these fragments still was a powerful contender among the Warring States. Qin now frequently was able to play them off against each other or to shift its military pressure from one to the other, and it continued to attract talented defectors from their courts into its service.

One such defector from Wei, named Shang Yang, is associated with a series of great reforms in the mid-300s that set Qin on its road to supreme power and anticipated many of the features of the regime it would impose on the entire empire. A closer look at the records of Qin in the early 300s reveals many anticipations of Shang Yang's reforms, but the whole pattern of the new order is best seen as it was brought to completion under him. Feudal inheritance of rank and office, never highly developed in Qin and weakening everywhere, was abolished; henceforth rank and honors were to be given only for merit in battle. Vestiges of feudal restrictions on the buying and selling of land were wiped out. The common people were to be rewarded for productive activity in farming, weaving, and other crafts, and punished for nonproductive activity, such as trading. The whole state was

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divided up into centrally administered xian. Whereas the old order had little use for written law and exempted nobles from its jurisdiction, Qin now established a single, strict, detailed code of laws that applied to everyone in the state. To make sure that the common people obeyed the laws, they were organized into groups of five families, all of which would be punished if any one among them broke the law. The whole purpose of this new order, reflected in a work that may be of later date called the Shangjun shu (Book of Lord Shang), was to "enrich the state and strengthen the

military" so that Qin could defeat its rivals and emerge supreme; whatever civilian activity contributed directly to equipping and feeding the army was good, military inerit was the only kind of merit that counted, and the whole state was under something approximating military discipline. The idea of a rigid and unambiguous code of law applied to everyone in the state was so central to this form of statecraft that later Chinese called it the School of Law (fa jia), and Western scholars call it Legalism.

Shang Yang's reforms had many parallels in the other Warring States, but they seem to have been unique in their thoroughness, coherence, and ruthlessness. Qin, already a rising power, was from the 340s On the great power of the Chinese world. Would-be experts in diplomacy went from state to state presenting elaborate schemes for accommodating with Qin and taming it-"détente" or "appeasement" in twentieth-century terms or for uniting all the other states in containment of its menace. Many of them were tried at least briefly; none had much success or was followed for very long. Cavalry warfare developed rapidly among the "barbarians" of the northwest frontier and their Chinese neighbors, especially Zhao and Qin; Qln does not seem to have had much trouble controlling its border regions, and it probably was able to draw some excellent cavalry from them into its armies. In 3 16 it took advantage of its geography in another way, marching south across difficult mountain country to conquer the small, half-Chinese states of Shu and Ba in the great Sichuan basin-rich in iron ore and agricultural potential, and easily defensible-giving Qin an excellent strategic position upstream on the Ymgzi from its great rival Chu. In z88 Qin and Qi put forward a claim to divide sovereignty over the Chinese world between themselves, taking for their kings the new title of "Lord," A Qin's enemies forced Qi to back down, and Qin was not yet strong enough to claim sovereignty for itself alone, so it too backed down. In 26o a huge Zhao army surrendered to Qin and was massacred; the standard account gives the scarcely credible fig-ure Of 400,000 men buried alive. Two branches of the Zhou ruling house were wiped out in 256 and 249, and no one was left to claim succession as the Zhou Son of Heaven.

In 246 B.C.E., soon after the last Zhou Son of Heaven was pushed from his throne, the future First Emperor became king of Qin, but he was only

thirteen years old, and the real power in the state was in the hands of the prime minister, LU Buwei. Lii was an immensely wealthy merchant and an important patron of scholars; an important book of philosophy and speculation about nature and government, entitled the Lü sbi cbunqiu (Spring and Autumn of Mr. Lü), was compiled under his patronage and has been preserved. The story of his rise and fall told by the great historian Sima Qian portrays him as a clever and totally unscrupulous persuader, and the regime he served as morally decadent and illegitimate. These stories must have been widely known and very welcome at the court of the Han, who succeeded the Qin and of whom Sima Qian was a loyal minister. Lü Buwei, it is said, found in the capital of Zhao a Qin prince, Zi Chu, kept there as a hostage for the good behavior of Qin toward Zhao. Since the two states were often at war, Zi Chu was badly treated. One of more than twenty sons of the crown prince of Qin, he had little prospect of succeeding to the throne there. Lii, who saw in him a "precious commodity" of which he could make good use, treated the miserable young prince with great generosity. Lfi had a magnificent troupe of dancing girls; when Zi Chu saw them and was particularly attracted to one of them, he asked Lü to give her to him. She was Lü's personal favorite, but he would do anything to keep his "precious commodity" happy and dependent on him, so he agreed. He and the girl managed to conceal from Zi Chu the fact that she already was pregnant by Lü, and when a boy baby was born Zi Chu accepted him as his own son. Thus, Sima Qian relates, Lü Buwei was the real father of the future First Emperor.

The favorite concubine of the crown prince of Qjn was childless. When Lü Buwei went to her with rich presents and praise of Zi Chu, she adopted Zi Chu as her heir, and when the crown prince succeeded to the throne Zi Chu in turn became crown prince. Three days later the new king died, Zi Chu became king, and Lü Buwei became prime minister. Lü's power grew even greater three years later when Zi Chu died and his son-or rather Lü’s son, if the story is true-succeeded to the throne of Qin. Lü was granted an estate of 100,000 households as well as supreme power. The only difficulty was that he had resumed his sexual liaison with his former concubine, now the dowager queen of Qin, and feared discovery and disgrace. Seeking to get out of this situation by diverting the lady's avid attentions to someone else, he organized a lewd entertainment at which one Lao Ai appeared with his outsize penis thrust through the center of a wooden wheel. Sure enough, the dowager queen heard about it and summoned Lao Ai. A fake condemnation to the punishment of castration was arranged, so that Lao could have free access as a eunuch to the women's quarters of the palace. He became the constant companion of the dowager queen, and eventually she secretly bore two children by him. He became

more powerful than Lü Buwei, deciding all affairs of state and maintaining huge troupes of retainers. When the king eventually learned of all this, Lao Ai was pushed into revolt, and he and all his relatives were exterminated. Two years later, in 2 3 7, L6 too fell from power as a result of his role in the Lao Ai affair, and in 235 he took poison.

All this scandal and disorder at court does not seem to have seriously slowed the Qin war machine or threatened the unity of the state. Qin, with little entrenched nobility or educated elite, always had been the most hospitable of the states to men from other states seeking high office. Another newcomer now rose to power, a man from Chu named Li Si who became the real mastermind of the final unification and the transformation into centralized imperial institutions. Li Si was not an abstract thinker, but the extant examples of his arguments on policy are clearly and powerfully written. He had studied under the great Confucian advocate of discipline and hierarchy, Xun Zi.

One of Li Sis fellow students under Xun Zi, Han Fei Zi, did not serve Qin but became the greatest and most articulate theorist of the new centralizing Legalist statecraft. In long, coherent essays, he argued against the Confucian delight in the examples of ancient times; little could be certainly known of those times, and in any case times had changed, especially as the population had become more dense and the struggle for survival harsher, so that ancient examples were irrelevant. The intelligence of the common people was not to be relied on; the government had to force them to do what was in their own best interests. Neither should scholars be listened to who had no practical contribution to make to the wealth and power of the state but used their stories of ancient times to gain fame and office for themselves and to oppose the rulers. The state of Han sent Han Fei Zi as an envoy to Qin in 234; Li Si had him thrown in prison, where he soon died.

In addition to the focus of its rulers on wealth and strength, Qin, giving land as rewards for military merit and having no feudal limits on landholding, seems to have been unusually successful in attracting immigrant farmers who increased its food supply and were available for its armies. It also made as good use as any state of the new technology of the time. An immigrant engineer designed a superb irrigation system for the Qin homeland in the Wei River valley that made it much more productive. Across the mountains in Shu, the Qin official Li Bing built a magnificent irrigation system, parts of which are still in use 2,200 years later.

Nothing, it seemed, could stop Qin. In 227, with Qin's territory already reaching to the frontier of Yan, a plot was hatched in Yan to send a great swordsman named Jing Ke to assassinate the king of Qin. The king was very we] I guarded, but Jing Ke could gain entry if he brought along maps

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of strategic regions of Yan and the head of a general who had defected from Qin. So great was the general's hatred of Qin that he slit his own throat so that his head could be used in the plot. The crown prince of Yan and all his associates saw Jing Ke off at the river that marked the frontier, all dressed in white, which is the color of mourning in China. Jing Ke sang:

Winds cry xiao xiao,

Yi waters are cold.

Brave men, once gone,

Never come back again.

Then he shifted to a military tune, and his companions stopped weeping and their hair bristled inside their caps as he drove off, He did manage to gain access to the king of Qin, bearing a casket containing the general's head and a roll of maps with a sword concealed inside it. But his first lunges at the king failed, and although he pursued the panic-stricken king around the pillars of his throne hall and eventually threw the sword at him, he missed and eventually was cut down by Qin soldiers.

Qin conquered Yan in 226, Wei in 225, Chu in 223, Qi in 221. Now, in 221, it ruled the entire Chinese world and was ready to make that world over in the image of the state of Qin. Already in 288 it had demonstrated that the old title of king would not be enough for its rulers; now it added huang, "sovereign," to the word "lord" it had previously proposed, and it proclaimed that henceforth its rulers would be huang-di, "sovereign lord," which is usually translated as "emperor." The old custom of a successor king granting a posthumous tide to his father was condemned as an unfilial practice of the ' younger generation passing judgment on the older; henceforth each ruler would simply be known by his number in a succession that was to have no end. The king of Qin thus became the First Emperor or First Sovereign Lord, Shihuangdi; his successor would be the Second Generation Emperor, and so on. In the five powers theory water extinguished fire, which was the ruling agent of the house of Zhou. Qin now emphasized that it ruled under the power of water, changing some terms and names and changing its flags and court robes to black, the color of water.

Some officials proposed that the emperor make his sons princes over some of the newly conquered outlying areas, but on Li Si's advice he rejected this proposal and divided the entire country into xian administered by magistrates appointed by the central government. Several xian were combined into a commandery jun). There was no single official in charge of a commandery; control over it was divided among a civil governor, a military commander, and an inspector. A similar three-way division of power among civil, military, and supervisory or inspecting arms was developed in the central government. The fundamentals of this pattern of

bureaucratic government persisted, with many permutations, down to the end of imperial rule in 1911 and have echoes even in the party-army~ ministry structure of power in the People's Republic. In its combining of firm central control with a system of checks and balances that made it very hard for any one official to accumulate enough power to challenge the ruler, the Qin order was a work of political genius. We can see clear anticipations of parts of it in the governing of the state of Qin. Some aspects of it had been developed in the course of the military occupations of the various states- others may be the inventions of Li Si. Chinese historians see this change from a long-dying feudal (fengfian) order to one of bureaucratically administered commanderies and prefectures jun xian) as the central feature of the great transformation Of 2 2 1.

Qln statecraft since before the time of Shang Yang had been oriented to the greatest possible mobilization of the resources of the state against its enemies: high burdens of taxation, labor service, and military service; uniformity of laws; implacable punishment of lawbreakers. When the rival states had been swallowed UP, the mold was not easily broken. Taxes remained high, laws detailed, punishments severe, and about one man in ten was drafted for military or labor service. For several years a large part of this power and wealth was devoted to consolidation the actual and sym-

bolic dominance of Qln over its former rival states. Their elite families were forced to move to the Qin capital. All metal weapons were confiscated, melted down, and cast into great statues set up in the palace and great bells. A replica of the palace of each conquered state was built near the Qin capital. From 220 on, the emperor made great journeys to many parts of his empire, which allowed the court to live off the resources of areas richer than the old state of Qin, inspect the other areas at first hand, and receive the homage of local leaders. On these journeys the court constantly asserted its sovereignty and legitimacy, paying homage to sacred mountains and setting up stone tablets bearing inscriptions that justified his rule in quite traditional ways:

corncrs of the earth. His enlightened laws spread far and wide as ex-

amples to All Under Heaven until the end of time. Great is he indeed!

The whole universe obeys his sagacious will; his subjects praise his

achievements and have asked to inscribe them on stone for posterity.'

It was on one of these expeditions that the emperor had a thousand

divers search the bed of the Yellow River for the great bronze vessel symolic of Zhou sovereignty that supposedly had been thrown in the river

when the Zhou royal house was overthrown; his failure to find it was taken y later generations as a sign that Qin was not really the legitimate succesor to Zhou. Stories also were told of the emperor's terrible rages against inything human or natural that caused him trouble; when a windstorm on ~he Yangzi was blamed on the goddess of a certain mountain, he had all the xees on that mountain cut down.

These "Irrational" actions should not surprise us. The First Emperor and his court were not guided solely by Li Si's drive for systematic central control or by Han Fei Zi’s relentless logic and contempt for the past. They were heirs to almost every strand of Warring States culture. We already have seen some quasi-Confucian moral elements used in the inscriptions to Justify Qin's subjugation of the other states, and Qin's use of the five powers theory in symbolizing and legitimizing its succession to Zhou. Ideas that political power could be assured and personal health and longevity sought through correspondence with the forces of nature also lay behind the continual building of great complexes of palaces, ceremonial halls, and the emperor's future tomb.

But what if the emperor could cheat death entirely? The magicians of Yan and Qi had long insisted that a man could make himself physically immortal by the right food, the right bodily regimens, the right herbs and fungi. On one of his journeys to the east the emperor heard of the Penglai Islands out in the ocean where immortals lived off divine herbs. Men and boys were sent off to find them, and every report of herbs and fungi of special power was followed up. But no one returned from Penglai, and no herbs or fungi of immortality were found.

About 216 B.C.E., as the quest for herbs of immortality intensified, the Qin state also turned its immense resources of revenue and manpower outward, beyond China's northern and southern frontiers. All through the Warring States period the northern states had been worried by conflicts with nomadic peoples of the steppes to their north, moving about following their herds, perfecting their skills in mounted archery and cavalry warfare. A people the Chinese called the Xiongnu developed large-scale polit-

' Translations from the Basic Annals of the First Emperor are taken, with slight modifications, from Li Yu-ning, ed., The Politics of Historiography: The First Emperor of China (White Plains, N.Y., 1975), pp. 261-96.

ical organizations under great warrior kings; they were the great power on those steppes for about four hundred years and may have been the "Huns" who descended on Europe thereafter. After the establishment of the Qin Empire, Meng Tian, son and grandson of Qin generals, led a force of as many as 300,000 warriors and transport workers into the grasslands. The Xiongnu were driven out of the borderlands and withdrew far to the north, beyond the G obi Desert. Meng Tian then directed the building of a great road leading north and west from the capital into the steppes. That road was used to move laborers and food supplies north for more great construction works, in which defense walls that had been built by the various states were linked together. Traditionally this has been seen as the first time a single structure was built to divide the realm of the nomads from the agri cul rural- bureaucratic Chinese Empire; that is, the first Great Wall of China. We now understand that the modern Chinese and Western concepts of a millennia] and unchanging Great Wall are complex myths, and that for most of Chinese history there was no such unified structure of walls. But the Qin wall was real; traces of the road and of the wall still can be seen. It was much farther north than the present Great Wall, much of which dates from the Ming dynasty, and was built of pounded earth, a much more modest structure than the Ming wall. It seems clear that the Qin rulers were altogether the equals of their Roman contemporaries as builders of roads and other public works.

The Qin rulers also sent troops and colonists south from the Yangzi valley, establishing their domination over local peoples all the way to the area of modern G uangdong and Guangxi provinces. More roads were built to the south and southwest. A canal was cut joining the headwaters of a tributary of the Yangzi to one of the West River in Guangxi; it still is in use today.

The removal of the Xiongnu menace for several decades and the building of roads and canals in the long run should have been beneficial to the general population and especially to the merchants whom Legalist theory despised. Qin centralization also led to thoroughgoing standardization of weights, measures, and the writing system, potentially of great benefit to interregional trade within the empire. But in the short run it seems that the burdens of harsh administration and heavy taxation and labor service were more apparent, and there was much resentment. It must have intensified as the emperor used conscripted labor to build more and more palaces and the massive tomb. In a few years these resentments would explode in the rebellions that would bring down the Qin. Trouble for Li Si and his emperor came first, however, from a quite different kind of problem.

The great Qin bureaucracy would have been unthinkable without an abundant supply of would-be officials. Loyalty to native land or moral conviction was no barrier to many from conquered states and many whose

principles of political morality were completely at variance with Qin's taking service under it. Qin was ready to accept all kinds of would-be officeholders, confident that its rigorous legal and administrative system could control them; in this way Legalism did not reject the Way of the Ruler and Minister but accepted its basic structure while denying the moral autonomy of the minister. No doubt many officials simply hoped to survive until the Qin collapsed and to give themselves advantageous positions in the struggle that would follow. Others, however, had that Confucian penchant for criticizing tyrants to their faces as a matter of principle, regardless of the consequences, seeking to change their minds solely through reason and moral fervor. This was especially obvious and the consequences especially dire in a famous debate in 213 in which a scholar named Chunyu Yue cited the precedents of Shang and Zhou feudal decentralization to argue that feudal lords with a vested interest in the survival of the dynasty would support it if it faced a military challenge; the emperor, he said, should abandon Qin's basic principle of total bureaucratic centralization and institute hereditary feudal rulers in some outlying areas. Li Si replied:

The Five Emperors did not emulate each other nor did the Three Dynasties adopt each other's ways, yet all had good government. This is no paradox, because times had changed. Now Your Majesty has built up this great empire to endure for generations without end. Naturally this passes the comprehension of a foolish pedant. Chunyu Yue spoke about the Three Dynasties, but they are hardly worth taking as examples. In times gone by different barons fought among themselves and gathered wandering scholars. Today, however, the empire is at peace, all laws and order come from one single source, the common people support themselves by farming and handicrafts, while students study the laws and prohibitions.

Now these scholars learn only from the old, not from the new, and use their learning to oppose our rule and confuse the common people. As prime minister I must speak out on pain of death. In former times when the world, torn by chaos and disorder, could not be united, different states arose and argued from the past to condemn the present, using empty rhetoric to cover up and confuse the real issues, and employing their learning to oppose what was established by authority. Now Your Majesty has conquered the whole world, distinguished between black and white, set unified standards. Yet these opinionated scholars get together to slander the laws and judge each new decree according to their own school of thought, opposing it secretly in their hearts while discussing it openly in the streets. They brag to the sovereign to win fame, put forward strange arguments to gain distinction, and incite the mob to spread rumors. If this is not prohibited, the

sovereign's prestige will suffer and factions will be formed among his subjects. Far better put a stop to it!

I humbly propose that all historical records but those of Qin be burned. If anyone who is not a court scholar dares to keep the ancient songs, historical records, or writings of the hundred schools, these should be confiscated and burned by the provincial governor and army commander. Those who in conversation dare to quote the old songs and records should be publicly executed; those who use old precedents to oppose the new order should have their families wiped out; and officers who know of such cases but fail to report them should be punished in the same way.

If thirty days after the issuing of this order the owners of these books have still not had them destroyed, they should have their faces tattooed and be condemned to hard labor at the Great Wall. The only books which need not be destroyed are those dealing with medicine, divination, and agriculture. Those who want to study the law can learn it from the officers.

The emperor approved this proposal.

In the later Chinese tradition this incident has become the most famous of the bad examples of Qin. The "burning of the books" has come to stand both for repression of principled dissent and for impiety toward the past, and the rapid collapse of Qin has been taken to prove that no government that behaves in this way can expect to endure.

In the years that followed, the emperor's interest in immortality and in avoiding assassins seems to have intensified. New palaces were built, mod-

eled on the symmetries of the heavens, linked by walled roads. Remembering Jing Ke and several other would-be assassins, and informed by a scholar that he would be more likely to avoid evil spirits and to encounter immortals if he moved his residence regularly, the emperor built more and more palaces and moved restlessly among them. The penalty for revealing his whereabouts was death. His great tomb also seems to have been planned to provide for extraordinary power and wealth beyond the grave. Its chamber contained a relief map of the empire in gold and silver, its rivers and seas flowing with mercury, a chart of the heavens sparkling above. Nearby were vast armies of terra cotta soldiers and horses to guard the emperor in death. But resentment of the vast levies of supplies and labor continued, and no immortals or divine herbs were found, so that new openings emerged for elite protest. Sima Qian tells the story as follows:

Even the emperor's eldest son and heir protested, but he was ignored and sent off to the northern frontier to "supervise" Meng Tian's armies.

In 210 B.C.E. the emperor went on another great tour, this time to the southeast. He paid homage at the mountain where the Great Yu was supposed to have been buried. Still obsessed by reports of isles of immortals, he traveled along the coast. He dreamed that he fought with a sea god, and later he killed a great fish. But then he fell ill and soon died. His chief

eunuch, Zhao Gao, conspired with Li Si to put their favorite son of the emperor on the throne, but in order to do so they would have to get back to the capital without anyone, especially the heir apparent off in Meng Tian's camp, knowing that the emperor was dead. The body was kept in the emperors great enclosed traveling carriage, and trusted servants continued to go in with meals at the proper times. But after a few days it was obvious to anyone downwind from the carriage that all was not well. The plotters then had a cart of salt fish drawn along behind the imperial carriage, so that anyone smelling a bad smell would think it was bad fish, not a very dead emperor. They succeeded in their plot, set their candidate on the throne as Second Emperor, and killed many princes and high officials. In the next year revolts broke out, and in the year after that Zhao Gao had the great LI Si executed.

The revolts against the Qin spread rapidly, and by 2o6 it had been completely overthrown. Many of the rebels were commoners and aristocrats who hoped to restore the old separate states; this kind of sentiment was especially strong in Chu. But the first revolt is supposed to have begun in perfect retribution for the excessive rigor of the Qin code of laws: a group of conscripted laborers had orders to report for duty on the construction of the Great Wall on a certain date, and the penalty for reporting late was death. When they became bogged down by heavy rains and flooded rivers and could go neither backward nor forward, some bold spirits among them decided that if their lives were forfeit in any case, they might as well risk them in the "Great Enterprise" of revolt.

Turning its back on the lessons of antiquity, exalting the rule of law, silencing high-principled scholars, imposing heavy burdens on the common people, the Qin was seen by most later Chinese political thinkers as the antithesis of good government. For them and for many Western students of China, the "Legalism" of Shang Yang, Han Fei Zi, and LI SI was the polar opposite of "Confucianism." Some Chinese scholars always have realized that this contrast was much too stark, and have acknowledged the permanent contribution of the Qin to Chinese history. As we follow the development of "Confucian" roles and ideas in the political order founded by the "Legalist" Qin, we will find many ways in which these two strands of statecraft needed each other, completed each other, and many ways in which the melodramas of Qin continued to echo in the Chinese imagination.