Qin Empire

The memorial

formationDrafted from Giles, Gems of Chinese Literature: Prose (1923)

Fourteen years before Qin became an empire, a minister from a rival state argued its king out of expelling every foreigner at his own court — including himself — and the argument he made is the clearest statement anywhere of what kind of state Qin was about to become.

The proscription

Li Si was from Chu, one of the six states Qin would eventually destroy, and he had risen to high office in Qin's service. Around 237 BC the native-born nobles at court combined to persuade the king to expel every foreign adviser and hanger-on on the grounds that such men served their home states' interests rather than Qin's. The edict would have included Li Si himself. He sent up a memorial instead of leaving.

Giles, Gems of Chinese Literature: Prose (1923) · Unknown · Public domain

The argument

He starts with luxury, because it is the easiest case to make.

From the mountains of Tibet your Majesty receives jade; from elsewhere, jewels. Bright pearls, good blades, fine horses, kingfisher banners, triton-skin drums — of such rarities not one is produced at home, yet your Majesty delights in all. But if nothing is to be used in future save local produce, then will rich pearls shine no more at Court.

If the king is willing to prize foreign jade and foreign horses and foreign music because they are good, Li Si asks, why does the same logic not apply to foreign men?

In the choice of men, however, this principle is not to prevail. There is to be no question of capacity or of incapacity, of honesty or of dishonesty. If he be not a native, he must go: all foreigners are to be dismissed. Surely this is to measure men by a lower standard than music and gems!

Then the argument turns from luxury to power, and this is the part that anticipates the empire Qin was about to build.

As broad acres yield large crops, so for a nation to be great there should be a great population; and for soldiers to be daring their generals should be brave. Not a single clod was added to T'ai-shan in vain: hence the huge mountain we now behold. The merest streamlet is received into the bosom of Ocean: hence the Ocean's unfathomable expanse. And wise and virtuous is the ruler who scorns not the masses below. For him, no boundaries of realm, no distinctions of nationality exist.

And finally the practical threat, stated as plainly as a memorial to a king could state it:

It is proposed to deliver over the black-haired people into the power of the foe. For if strangers are expelled, they will rally round the feudal princes... Many things that are not produced here are nevertheless highly prized. Countless men who were not born here are nevertheless loyal of heart. Therefore to dismiss all foreigners will be to make our enemies strong; for those who suffer expulsion will go to swell the hostile ranks.

What it won

The king rescinded the order. Li Si stayed, rose to be chancellor, and was still at the king's side thirty years later when the last of the six rival states fell and his master proclaimed himself the First Emperor.

The principle Li Si had defended — capacity over origin, the state's advantage over any noble's claim of birth — is the same principle Qin then applied to everyone inside its own new borders. The old feudal titles were abolished in favour of an administrative hierarchy staffed by appointment rather than descent. A man's standing under Qin law depended on what he did, registered and taxed and conscripted by the state directly, not on which lord he had been born to serve.

Li Si had asked a king not to throw away useful men because they came from somewhere else. Within a generation the same logic, applied at the scale of a continent, had abolished the entire class of men whose only qualification was where they had been born at all.

A naked sword on the throne

formationDrafted from Boulger, The History of China, Volume I (1881)

From 235 BC the king of Qin sat his own throne with a naked sword across his knees - a plain announcement of how the next nine years were going to go. One by one, the six rival states that had divided China among themselves for two centuries were going to stop existing.

Han, first

Han fell first and easiest. Its ruler, watching Qin's power grow and hoping timely surrender would buy better terms than resistance, gave up his seat and retired into private life inside the conqueror's own territory - a state removed from the board without a battle worth recording.

An assassin's severed leg

It was in the middle of the next campaign, against the state the sources call Chow, that the king of Qin came closer to dying than he ever would again. Insulted at court, Crown Prince Dan of Yan fled home and set an assassin on him - a man named Jing Ke, who had first persuaded the fugitive general Fan Yuqi to kill himself, so that his severed head could be presented to the Qin king as a gift and buy the assassin access close enough to strike. The plan very nearly worked. Jing Ke was admitted into the king's presence and was on the point of drawing his dagger when the movement caught the king's own eye; in the scuffle that followed, the king got the better of his attacker and cut off Jing Ke's leg with one stroke of his own sword. It is hard to find, in any history, a stranger measure of desperation than Fan Yuqi's: a man killing himself on the calculation that his own death would arm his avenger.

Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto · Boulger, The History of China, Volume I (1881) · Unknown · Public domain

What the failed plot bought Yan

The king's response was immediate. He sent his general Wang Ben to overrun Yan outright. The ruler of Yan, trying to avert the coming storm, executed his own son Dan and sent the head to Qin as an apology; he himself fled into the wilds of Liaodong. It did not save him. The same year, Wei's capital was stormed and its ruler sent to the Qin capital for execution - two states destroyed within a single campaigning season, one of them undone by the very plot meant to save it.

Two hundred thousand men, and then six hundred thousand

Only Chu remained among the great principalities, and subduing it proved the hardest task of the whole war. Asked how large an army the campaign required, the general Li Xin - eager to please - offered to do it with two hundred thousand men. The veteran commander Wang Jian said nothing less than six hundred thousand would serve. The king, preferring the answer he wanted to hear, gave Li Xin his two hundred thousand and called Wang Jian a dotard for asking more.

Li Xin's army broke through Chu's border defences and then walked into a surprise attack that destroyed it - more than forty thousand men lost in the battle and the retreat that followed, the whole force driven back across its own frontier in confusion. History does not record what became of Li Xin afterward, only that he never appears again in it.

Hubei Provincial Museum, Wuhan · Boulger, The History of China, Volume I (1881) · Gary Todd · CC0

There was nothing left to do but recall the man the king had just insulted. Wang Jian agreed to take the command, on the one condition he had stated from the start: six hundred thousand men, no fewer. When he raised the question of how such an army would be supplied, the king's answer was direct: "Do not let that disquiet you, I have provided for everything. I promise you that provisions shall rather be wanting in my own palace than in your camp." Wang Jian broke the Chu army in a single decisive battle, garrisoned its cities, and sent its ruling family to the Qin capital to share the fate of every other royal house the war had already ended.

What was left to mop up

Chu's fall cleared the way for the rest. Yan and the small remaining territories of Dai and Qi were annexed in turn, Wang Ben - the same general who had overrun Yan - assisting his own father in the final campaigns. By 221 BC every one of the six rival kingdoms that had once parcelled out China between them had been destroyed, their ruling houses exterminated or exiled, and the king who had sat nine years with a sword across his knees had nothing left standing against him. He changed his own name and style to mark it - from his birth name to Qin Shi Huangdi, the First Sovereign Emperor of Qin - and turned, with the war finally over, to the work of ruling what the war had won him.

Shaanxi History Museum, Xi'an · Boulger, The History of China, Volume I (1881) · Gary Todd · CC0

One axle

expansionDrafted from Giles, The Civilization of China (1911)

In 221 BC the king of Qin finished destroying the last of six rival states and did something no Chinese ruler had done in living memory: he made the whole country answer to one government at once, down to the width of a cart wheel.

The man Giles compares to Napoleon

Herbert Giles's judgement, writing in 1911, is that the First Emperor's best historical counterpart is Napoleon, and the comparison is doing real work: a military genius who ended a fractured continental order by force, remade its institutions from the ground up, and left a legal and administrative framework his successors relied on for far longer than his own dynasty lasted.

He called himself Shi Huangdi — the First Emperor — a title invented for the occasion, because no existing word fit a ruler who had ended not just a war but an entire political system.

Giles, The Civilization of China (1911) · Unknown · Public domain

What he actually did in his first years

Giles's list is worth taking at face value, because each item is a fact about the new empire's reach rather than a claim about its style.

He sent an army of three hundred thousand men north against the Xiongnu — an old and dreaded enemy on the north, recently identified beyond question with the Huns. He sent a fleet to search for mysterious islands off the coast, which some later took to be Japan. He built the Great Wall, largely with convict labour, malefactors condemned to long terms of penal servitude on the works. And he issued a copper coinage of such consistent quality that the old cowry-shell currency disappeared from commerce entirely during his reign.

Shandong Museum, Jinan · Giles, The Civilization of China (1911) · Gary Todd · CC0

The axle

The detail that explains the rest is the one that sounds smallest: Qin fixed a single standard width for cart axles across the whole empire.

Before unification, each of the seven states had built its roads to its own gauge, so that a cart from one state's ruts did not run smoothly on another's. Qin's decree made every cart in the empire interchangeable with every road in the empire — which sounds like a detail of engineering and is in fact a description of what an empire is. A single government that cannot move an army, a tax shipment or an official down every road at the same speed does not yet control the country it claims.

Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum, Lintong · Giles, The Civilization of China (1911) · Gary Todd · CC0

The same principle was applied everywhere at once: one system of weights and measures, so that a bushel meant the same thing in the old Chu lands as in the old Qin heartland; one form of the written script, replacing the regional variants the six states had each developed over centuries of separation; and the abolition of the hereditary feudal titles in favour of a uniform hierarchy of commanderies and counties, each answering directly to the throne rather than to a local lord.

Giles, The Civilization of China (1911) · ReijiYamashina777 · CC0

What that cost the old order

Every one of those reforms took power away from somebody specific — the regional nobility whose titles vanished, the local scribes whose script was declared obsolete, the merchants whose local weights no longer applied — and gave it to a single administrative machine with its centre at Xianyang.

That is the same trade every later Chinese dynasty would make in its own way: a government legible enough to tax, conscript and command as one body, purchased at the cost of every local arrangement that had made the old feudal patchwork livable for the people running it. Qin made the trade first, made it completely, and made it in about a decade — which is also why enforcing it took every instrument of coercion the new state had, including the one the next chapter is about.

Melons in winter

peakDrafted from Giles, A History of Chinese Literature (1901)

In 213 BC the same Li Si whose memorial had once saved his own place at court proposed destroying almost every book in the empire that was not his own government's, and the decree that followed has defined the Qin's reputation for over two thousand years.

The proposal

Giles gives the shape of it plainly: existing literature was to be destroyed, with exceptions only for works on agriculture, medicine and divination, so that history was to begin again with the ruling monarch, thenceforward to be famous as the First Emperor.

Giles, A History of Chinese Literature (1901) · Unknown · Public domain

The penalty for concealment was branding and four years of forced labour on the Great Wall — then still under construction, so that a scholar caught hiding a book joined the same conscripted workforce the wall itself was being built by.

This plan was carried out with considerable vigour. Many valuable works perished; and the Confucian Canon would have been irretrievably lost but for the devotion of scholars, who at considerable risk concealed the tablets by which they set such store.

What survived and why

Three categories were exempted by design: the practical knowledge a state needs regardless of politics — how to grow food, how to treat the sick, how to read the signs the court's own diviners depended on. Everything else — history, poetry, the philosophical schools that had argued with each other through the whole of the Warring States period — was proscribed.

Hubei Provincial Museum, Wuhan · Giles, A History of Chinese Literature (1901) · Gary Todd · CC0

It did not work as completely as the decree intended. Copies survived buried in walls, hidden in the countryside, memorised by scholars who staked their lives on recitation over possession. The recovery of those texts, and the argument over which recovered versions were genuine, became one of the central scholarly projects of the following dynasty.

The tradition Giles reports and flags as a tradition

The scale of the human cost attached to the burning has its own legend, and Giles is careful to mark it as one rather than as established fact.

So many, indeed, of the literati are said to have been put to death for disobedience that melons actually grew in winter on the spot beneath which their bodies were buried.

Said to have been is doing real work in that sentence. Giles is not claiming that hundreds of Confucian scholars were executed and their mass grave produced a horticultural miracle; he is reporting that later Chinese tradition told the story that way, and telling his reader so. The image — melons ripening out of season over buried scholars — is a folk verdict on the event rather than a chronicle entry, the kind of detail a culture invents when a plain death toll will not carry enough horror by itself.

What actually made the burning consequential

Not the fire itself, which — however extensive — did not erase Chinese literature; the Han recovered enough of the canon within a generation that Confucianism became the state orthodoxy it would remain for two thousand years.

What made it consequential was the precedent: that a Chinese government could attempt, by decree, to sever the country's relationship with its own past and begin the calendar of ideas over with the reigning monarch. Every subsequent dynasty that wanted to be seen as legitimate had to define itself against that possibility — by patronising scholarship, endowing academies, compiling the histories of the dynasties before it, and making a public show of continuity with everything Qin had tried to discard.

A decree meant to erase the past instead became the reason every later Chinese government felt obliged to be seen protecting it.

Rivers of quicksilver

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Giles, The Civilization of China (1911)

The First Emperor began building his own tomb the moment he took the throne of a unified China, and the fullest account of what went into it was written a century later by the historian Sima Qian — close enough to the event that people who remembered the construction were still alive when he wrote it down.

The description

Giles gives Sima Qian's account entire rather than summarising it, and it is worth reading the way he chose to present it: as a document rather than as an anecdote.

In the 9th moon the First Emperor was buried in Mount Li, which in the early days of his reign he had caused to be tunnelled and prepared with that view. Then, when he had consolidated the empire, he employed his soldiery, to the number of 700,000, to bore down to the Three Springs, and there a firm foundation was laid and the sarcophagus placed thereon.

Seven hundred thousand men, on Sima Qian's figure, working across the whole of the reign — begun when the future emperor was still a young king of one state among seven, finished only after he had become ruler of all of them.

Giles, The Civilization of China (1911) · Nathan Hughes Hamilton · CC BY 2.0

What was inside

Rare objects and jewels were collected from the palaces and from every official in the empire and stored there in huge quantity. Craftsmen built mechanical crossbows rigged to fire on anyone who entered uninvited. And the centrepiece:

With the aid of quicksilver, rivers were made — the Yangtsze, the Yellow River, and the great ocean — the metal being made to flow from one into the other by machinery. On the roof were delineated the constellations of the sky, on the floor the geographical divisions of the earth.

A working model of the empire itself, its two great rivers running in mercury, under a ceiling painted with the stars above it and a floor mapped with the land below — built to scale, inside a mountain, for an audience of one dead man. Modern soil surveys around the mound have found mercury concentrations well above the natural background level in exactly the pattern the text describes, which is the closest thing to independent confirmation an account like this ever gets.

What happened to the workmen

The Second Emperor, taking charge of his father's funeral, first ordered that the childless concubines of the harem accompany the dead monarch into the tomb rather than be released — and accordingly he ordered them to accompany the dead monarch to the next world, those who thus perished being many in number.

Then came the workmen. Someone pointed out that the men who had built the mechanism and hidden the treasure knew exactly where it was and what it was worth, and that the secret would leak out through them.

Therefore, so soon as the ceremony was over, and the path giving access to the sarcophagus had been blocked up at its innermost end, the outside gate at the entrance to this path was let fall, and the mausoleum was effectually closed, so that not one of the workmen escaped. Trees and grass were then planted around, that the spot might look like the rest of the mountain.

An entire labour force — the same conscripted, corvée-obligated men whose service had built the wall and the roads and the tomb itself — sealed inside the thing they had just finished building, so that the mountain could be made to look, from the outside, like nothing had ever been dug into it at all.

Why the tomb belongs beside the axle and the fire

Because it is built on the same theory as the rest of the reign, taken to its natural end.

Standardising the axle and the script made the empire legible to one government. Burning the books tried to make its intellectual life begin again with one man. The tomb is the same ambition turned inward and downward: not a monument seen by the living, but a complete second empire — its rivers, its stars, its geography, its guards, its labour force — built in secret, for an audience of nobody, and then sealed shut around the men who had made it, so that even the fact of its own construction could be erased.

Giles, The Civilization of China (1911) · Jmhullot · CC BY 3.0

Two men and a dead emperor

endDrafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 1: The Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 BC-AD 220 (1986)

The First Emperor died on the road, in the fifth month of a provincial inspection tour, and the empire's entire chain of authority passed into the hands of two men who had no legitimate claim to move it at all.

(eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 1: The Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 BC-AD 220 (1986) · Unknown · Public domain

The concealment

He died at Shaqiu, in the summer of 210 BC, far from the capital and with his eldest son Fusu absent on the northern frontier, attached to the army of the general Meng Tian — the same general who had built the Great Wall and who commanded the empire's most capable field force.

Fusu was the obvious heir: the eldest son, associated in the sources with the Confucian scholars the burning of the books had targeted, and by implication a critic of his father's harsher methods. He was not present, and the two men who were — the chancellor Li Si and the palace eunuch Zhao Gao, who controlled the imperial seals — chose not to send for him.

They concealed the death. The body was carried back toward the capital in the imperial carriage as though the emperor were still alive, meals still brought to the curtained compartment, reports still received and — falsely — answered in his name. Zhao Gao is reported to have justified the deception on the practical ground that the empire's outlying garrisons were not yet secure enough to risk the shock of an unexplained succession.

The forged order

Then, before the concealment could no longer hold, Zhao Gao and Li Si acted.

A document went out under the imperial seal, addressed to Fusu and to Meng Tian on the frontier, accusing both of failure in their duties and ordering them to take their own lives. Fusu, given no reason to doubt a sealed order from his father, obeyed. Meng Tian hesitated and asked to have the order confirmed — and was imprisoned and then forced to suicide regardless.

The throne went instead to a younger, more pliable son, who took the name Qin Er Shi — the Second Emperor. Li Si had calculated that a compliant emperor and his own continued high office were worth more than honesty to a prince he did not control. He was wrong about which of the two conspirators would end up holding the compliant emperor's confidence.

Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto · (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 1: The Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 BC-AD 220 (1986) · Captmondo · CC BY-SA 3.0

What it cost the state

Within roughly a year, Zhao Gao had moved against Li Si himself, engineering his arrest, torture and execution — the same instrument the Qin legal system had perfected for suppressing dissent among its own subjects, turned on the man who had helped build it.

Hubei Provincial Museum, Wuhan · (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 1: The Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 BC-AD 220 (1986) · Gary Todd · CC0

By the time Qin Er Shi himself was killed, in the final collapse two years later, the throne had already been reduced to a formality: the eunuch who had forged the first succession simply arranged the second one, then contemplated a third before a resurgent claimant of the old royal line and then the rebel armies overtook the capital entirely.

Why one act of concealment did so much damage

Because the entire Qin system depended on a single, unambiguous chain of command running from the throne down through the commanderies to every registered household — the same structure the earlier chapters describe standardising a script and an axle width. That structure had never been tested by a contested succession, because there had only ever been one emperor.

The first test broke it in the space of a single funeral journey. Two men with physical control of a dying man's seal and a closed carriage were able to redirect the succession of the largest state on earth, execute the empire's most capable general and its most legitimate heir, and install a ruler neither of them ultimately controlled — and no institution anywhere in Qin's elaborately standardised government was positioned to stop them, because the system had been built to enforce the emperor's will, not to verify whose will was actually being enforced.

What Han kept

afterlifeDrafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 1: The Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 BC-AD 220 (1986)

Rebellion broke out within a year of Qin Er Shi's accession, spread faster than the dynasty's armies could contain it, and the state that had unified China by force could not hold it for even fifteen years. What survived the collapse is the more interesting story than the collapse itself.

The fall

The rising that began it is remembered for the exchange attributed to its first leaders, conscript labourers who found themselves unable to reach their assigned post on time and facing execution under Qin's own uncompromising law for the failure: if death awaited them either way, they reasoned, they might as well die attempting something larger. Within months the revolt had spread across the territories of the old six states, each of which still had families and local memory of its own former ruling houses.

Two rival leaders emerged from the chaos — Xiang Yu, a general from the old state of Chu, and Liu Bang, a minor local official of no particular distinction. Xiang Yu took the Qin capital and had the surrendered royal family and the last Qin ruler put to death; Liu Bang, who had reached the capital first and treated it more moderately, spent the following four years defeating Xiang Yu in the civil war that decided who would actually inherit what the Qin had built. He founded the Han in 206 BC.

Xianyang Museum · (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 1: The Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 BC-AD 220 (1986) · Gary Todd · CC0

What he did not tear down

This is the fact worth holding onto through the whole of the Qin's brief and violent record: the dynasty that overthrew it kept almost the entire structure that dynasty had built.

The commanderies and counties stayed, administered by appointed officials rather than restored to the old feudal nobility. The standardised script stayed. The standardised weights, measures and axle-width stayed. The road network Qin's conscripted labour had built stayed, and carried Han's armies and Han's taxes the same way it had carried Qin's. The legal codes were revised and softened in their penalties, but their basic administrative machinery — registration, conscription assessed against a household record, a bureaucracy answering to the centre — survived essentially intact.

Shanghai Museum · (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 1: The Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 BC-AD 220 (1986) · Gary Todd · CC0

What Han rejected was not the apparatus. It was the harshness with which Qin had run it, and the political theory that had justified the harshness. Where Qin's legitimacy rested on naked conquest and a Legalist doctrine that treated the population as an instrument of state power, Han's rested increasingly on a Confucian framework of moral government and a claim to Heaven's favour that could, in principle, be withdrawn from a ruler who governed badly.

The verdict every later dynasty repeated

Han court writers spent the following four centuries elaborating a single argument: that the Qin had shown what a unified, bureaucratic Chinese empire could achieve, and had then shown, in fifteen years, what happens to a government that rules such an empire by naked force and calls it virtue.

That argument became the working political theory of every dynasty that followed Han in turn — the machinery is legitimate and necessary, and the moral framing around it is what determines whether the state that runs it survives its own founder. Sui, eight centuries later, would fall in almost the same shape - a short, violent, administratively brilliant reunification exhausted by its own exertions - and Tang would explain it in exactly the terms Han had used for Qin. The verdict outlived every dynasty that had to give it, repeated with the names changed for the next two thousand years.