Early China: A Social and Cultural History

by Li Feng

  Lands in Qin had been taxed since the time of Duke Jian in 408 BC, which is taken by some scholars as a sign of land privatization. In 350 BC, Shang Yang ordered the systematic destruction of the road grids on the state-owned lands, which were mostly re-demarcated as larger tracks to be given to individual families as private property. Certainly lands associated with ranks which soldiers received for their military contributions stayed as their family possessions. It is generally understood that from this time on, private land ownership was the norm in the state of Qin. In 348 BC, Qin is recorded as having imposed a poll tax for military purpose for the first time, separate from the land taxes that were collected according to the area of land a family possessed. Also, liable to such payment were merchants whose income did not come from land and landless farmers who had lost their lands. In order to keep the family size small so as to ensure the tax revenue due to the state, a law was issued that determined that a family with two adult males must be split or pay double the amount of the poll tax, and even a father could not live in the same household with his adult son of tax-liable age.

  There were more specific measures such as the standardization of the units of length, weight, and volume used in the entire Qin state (Fig. 11.4), and more general guiding principles such as the discouragement of commercial activities and the equal application of punishment to all regardless of social status. As a part of the reform, in 349 BC, the Qin state began to construct a new capital on the north bank of the Wei River near present-day Xi’an and transferred its government there a few years later. Xianyang, this new site, then became the political center of Qin and the heart of the future empire.

  Fig. 11.4 Standard volume measurer commissioned by Shang Yang.

  The Han Dynasty historian Sima Qian remarked that in the first three years of the reform, Shang Yang’s policies raised widespread discontent among both the old aristocrats and the commoners of Qin. After three years, the Qin people began to enjoy the new order and security brought about by the reform. Crime rates came down to the lowest level ever as the state’s ruling apparatus was sufficiently improved. Shang Yang had rebuilt the state of Qin strictly along the Legalist path that aimed at strengthening the economic foundation of the state and promoted the rule of law. The reform served to transfer Qin into a new society that might have suddenly appeared dramatically different from the eastern states, causing them to denounce Qin as the “State of Tigers and Wolves.”9 However, when Duke Xiao died in 338 BC, Shang Yang was accused of treason and was forced to rebel with a force he gathered from his own domain in Shang in southern Shaanxi. But he was instantly defeated and captured for execution with five chariots pulling him apart in the market of Xianyang.

  Despite his disgraced fall at the hands of his political enemies, the policies implemented by Shang Yang over a course of some twenty years had taken deep roots in Qin society and political system, creating the foundation of the future Qin Empire. But more immediately, they had set Qin on a trend of rapid territorial growth in the century following Shang Yang, most importantly in two directions. To the south of Qin, the Sichuan Basin, rich in land and natural resources, was home to two indigenous polities, Shu and Ba. In the early fourth century BC, Shu extended its control north into the Han River valley. When war broke out between Shu and Ba in 316 BC, both states pleaded to Qin for help. Qin thus sent troops across the difficult Qinling Mountains, first conquering Shu, and then Ba. In the forty years after the conquest, Qin translocated 10,000 families from Shaanxi into the Sichuan Basin, building the region into a firm economic base for Qin’s future success. The conquest of Shu and Ba not only expanded Qin territory to southwestern China, but also cast new pressures on the state of Chu from the west. In 278 BC, even the capital of Chu in present-day Jiangling was occupied by Qin troops that took the entire middle Yangzi River region under Qin control. In the north, Yiqu was a Rong state with some two dozen walled towns in the upper Jing River region to the north of Qin.10 For centuries, Yiqu had played diplomacy between Qin and its eastern enemies, and had taken advantage of Qin’s military setback to inflect further defeat on Qin. In 272 BC, the queen mother of Qin, who had been having affairs for years with the king of Yiqu, arranged his assassination in her harem, and this was followed by an overwhelming Qin attack to conquer Yiqu. The victory was very important because it enabled the Qin to occupy all of eastern Gansu and southern Ningxia, making a firm first step for incursion onto the northern steppe. In order to fend off the nomadic people on the steppe, Qin constructed a long wall stretching from the Liupan Mountains in southern Ningxia to the Hengshan Mountains in northern Shaanxi (see Fig. 9.1 above). The complete triumph of Qin power in the century following Shang Yang’s fall fully proved the effectiveness of the policies he had implemented in Qin.

  The First Emperor and the Unification of China

  Ying Zheng (259–210 BC), the future First Emperor of China, arrived on the scene in a time when Qin was already an indisputable superpower. The continuing growth of Qin in the preceding decades would have given everyone a sure answer – if China were ever to be unified, it was most likely that Qin would be the one to do the job. The fear for Qin power spread even farther and deeper after the battle at Changping in 260 BC, where as many as 400,000 soldiers from the state of Zhao were captured and reportedly buried alive on the order of the famous Qin general Bai Qi. Bai Qi, who had ruined the capital of Chu a decade earlier, typified the Qin use of terrorism to crush the confidence of the eastern states. Although the eastern states joined their forces to impede Qin power in 257 BC when the Qin armies attacked Zhao’s capital Handan, they could not overturn the historical trend.

  Ying Zheng was born in the capital of Zhao where his father lived in diplomatic captivity. In danger of being executed by Zhao with whom Qin was in constant war, the poor Qin prince met a rich merchant named Lü Buwei who was willing to invest in the prince for his own political future. It was told by Sima Qian that Lü had even yielded to the Qin prince his beloved concubine, and at that point she was already pregnant and afterward gave birth to Ying Zheng. In 250 BC, Merchant Lü eventually arranged for the return of the prince to Qin where he was established as King Zhuangxiang of Qin (r. 249–247 BC). But he died only three years later, leaving Ying Zheng to rule as king at the age of thirteen. Merchant Lü thus assumed the position of Grand Chancellor and became the most politically prominent figure at the Qin court. As the story continues to unfold, Merchant Lü now had everything under his control, met with the queen mother regularly and resumed their sexual relationship. However, as the young king was growing up, Merchant Lü gradually became scared by his own conduct. In order to pull himself out of the relationship, he introduced Lao-ai, a person of low status, to serve the queen mother’s sexual desire. In order to hide from the young king, the secret couple moved their residence to the old Qin capital Yong, where the queen mother got pregnant by Lao-ai and gave birth to two sons. The secret was finally discovered in 235 BC when the king was twenty-four, and Lao-ai was captured for execution, and the Grand Chancellor Lü, because of his connection to Lao-ai, was ordered to commit suicide three years later.

  Seemingly a palace incident, the event of 235 BC indeed put Ying Zheng to the center of Qin power at a young age with full control over the fiercest military machine in all of China. Due to the strange background of his childhood, Ying Zheng was naturally cruel, suspicious, lacking affection, and willing to take risks. But he was also capable of good judgment, enterprising, and determined to pursue his goals (Fig 11.5). In fact, we are unusually fortunate to have a contemporary eyewitness, Wei Liao, a military strategist and the future Commandant of the Qin army, who, after his first audience with the young king, remarked on the king’s personal character with the following words:

  The king of Ch’in [Qin] was born with a prominent nose, elongated eyes, the breast of a bird of prey, and the voice of a jackal; he seldom extends favor and has the heart of a tiger or wolf. When in straits, he can submit to others, but when he has his way,
he can easily eat you alive. I am a commoner. Nevertheless, when he received me, he always humbles himself before me. Once he really has his way in the world, the whole world will be held captive by him.11

  The event of 235 BC had also provided a chance for Ying Zheng to reorganize the Qin government, readying it for the final conquest of China. Wei Liao was appointed Commandant and advised the king on military strategies. Among his advisors was also a hardliner Legalist named Li Si, recommended to the king by the Grand Chancellor Lü Buwei earlier. Li Si was a classmate of the Legalist theorist Han Fei, whom he advised the king to keep in Qin and then to execute. He and Wei Liao together helped the king of Qin to engineer the unification of China.

  Fig. 11.5 A modern portrait of Ying Zheng as the First Emperor of Qin.

  The program of final unification of China was carried out in 230 BC, only five years after Ying Zheng took power, when the Qin troops struck east, first conquering the weakest state Hann as a strategy to terrify other states. In 229 BC, General Wang Jian led the Qin troops on a march north into the Zhao territory and laid siege to the Zhao capital Handan; the following year, Wang Jian’s troops captured the Zhao king and occupied the entire Zhao territory which was made a base for the conquest of Yan farther north. Fearing the inevitable fate of Yan, Prince Dan of Yan devised a plan in the last hope of stoping Qin’s conquest campaign by sending the warrior Jing Ke to the Qin court in Xianyang where, witnessed by the high officials of this most powerful state, he attempted the assassination of Ying Zheng, the future First Emperor of China.

  The Han historian Sima Qian narrates in detail the admirable warrior and his suicidal attack on the king of Qin. Jing Ke was a native of Wey who loved books and music in addition to the life of a swordsman. Prince Dan of Yan first discussed his plan with a respected old warrior of Yan named Tian Guang, patron to Jing Ke, to whom the prince requested the concealment of the secret. Considering himself too old to carry out the plan, Tian Guang committed suicide to demonstrate his determination and recommended Jing Ke to fulfill the mission. Arriving in the Qin capital with two presents for Qin, the head of a defected Qin general whom the king hated most and a territorial map of Yan important for Qin’s upcoming campaign, Jing Ke was soon invited to an audience with the king. As the scroll of the map became fully revealed in front of the king Jing Ke suddenly took up the poisoned short sword there and stabbed the king seated across the table. Having survived the first strike the king of Qin stood up and fled around the pillars, chased by the assassin, but no official or the royal guards could come to the king’s rescue (see Fig. 14.4 below). They could act only on the king’s order which he was too busy to give. But it was fortunate for the king that his doctor happened to pass behind the scene and quickly threw his medical box right at the head of Jing Ke. This moment allowed the king to pull out his long sword and cut the assassin into pieces.

  This was certainly one of the most breathtaking moments in ancient China, which could have effectively reversed the course of Chinese history. As the assassination failed, the Qin troops moved north swiftly in 226 BC and completely crushed the Yan army and captured Prince Dan. With the land to the north of the Yellow River completely pacified, the Qin troops soon descended on the state of Wei and laid siege to its capital Daliang, where a century earlier Mencius had discussed philosophy with King Hui of Liang. In order to subjugate the enemy the Qin broke the bank of the Yellow River and flooded the Wei capital. The king of Wei saw no hope but to leave the capital and surrender to the Qin army. Now with most part of the Central Plain under control, in 224 BC, Ying Zheng sent the old general Wang Jian to take more than half of the entire Qin military forces south to conquer the vast and marshy territory of Chu. The next year, the Qin troops captured the last Chu king and forced his supreme commander into suicide. Finally, in 221 BC, the Qin troops crossed the Yellow River from the north and occupied the state of Qi, the last of the warring states except Qin.

  One is only left to wonder why these states that had coexisted for more than five hundred years in an inter-state system marked by war and balance, or eight hundred years if counting from their establishment in the early Western Zhou, could suddenly be altogether destroyed by the single state Qin in only nine years. This was doubtless one of the most dramatic epics in human history and the most thorough change in the political landscape of Early China. The political and military preparation that Qin had undergone in the previous decades was key to its eventual success. But the political vision and determination of Ying Zheng, and the effectiveness with which his officials executed their jobs were also critical to ensuring a process that could not be reversed. After more than five centuries of political fragmentation and incessant warfare, China was finally brought under one power, the Qin Empire.

  The Consolidation of the Qin Empire

  Although the term “Empire” was derived from the Roman imperium with a semantic history usually traced through the European and Mediterranean experience, few have ever doubted that Qin China, brought about through conquest by Ying Zheng, would qualify as an empire.12 And although scholars have had a hard time agreeing on a definition of “Empire,” there are factors that seem to be common to most if not all empires understood as super social–political organizations – immense territorial size, a high degree of heterogeneity in terms of population and culture, absolute power invested in one hand (usually the emperor), a unitary political–administrative order to achieve direct rule, a history of conquest, and perhaps more importantly, an imperial ideology. The Qin Empire typified the organization of empire in all of these aspects.

  The Qin Empire, as we have learned above, was the enlargement of a “Territorial State” through expansion over a century during which lands were added to its state core piece by piece. At the death of the First Emperor, the Qin Empire not only ruled the lands and populations of the six former territorial states, but had come to rule areas to the south of the Nanling Mountains inhabited by the various Yue groups, the Liaodong Peninsula in the east inhabited by the proto-Goguryo groups, and the Ordos Plateau in the north, the former base of the Xiongnu nomads.13 The empire was, at least in the north, demarcated through the construction of the Great Wall which was partly rebuilt and partly connected the pre-existing walls of such northern states as Zhao, Yan, and Qin itself (Map 11.2). The complete wall runs 4,160 km from the mouth of the Yalu River to Longxi in the upper Wei River valley in southeastern Gansu, and it must have cost tremendous manpower. It thus was perceived by later historians as a source of resentment of Qin’s harsh rule. Within the empire, a complex road system which had an accumulated length of some 6,800 km was constructed and was further integrated with the river system to connect the capital with the central city of every commandery. The most important was a superhighway called “Straight Road” which ran 800 km along the Ziwu Mountain ridge in north Shaanxi (Fig. 11.6), with various postal and military facilities built along it, connecting the Qin capital with the Ordos Plateau, the base of as many as 300,000 troops under command by the general Meng Tian.14 The foundation of the road can still be seen even in modern times, and has been under archaeological investigation in recent years. Throughout the empire, all chariot axles were made to match the standard length of Qin in order to run on the empire’s highway system.

  Map 11.2 The Qin Empire

  Fig. 11.6 The “Straight Road” of Qin in Fuxian, northern Shaanxi (arrow: excavation trenches, 2007).

  In the process of Qin expansion, the administrative level of “Commandery” (Jun) was created in regions close to the front line so as to convene military coordination and to draw on local resources. After the conquest, the entire empire was divided into thirty-six commanderies. In this way the structure was transferred into a system of civil administration. The commanderies had under their jurisdictions as many as 900 counties of which about 300 are known by their names, according to a modern study. Each commandery was governed through a triumvirate structure comprising a Protector, a Commandant, and an Inspector. All countie
s were governed by a Magistrate, assisted by a Secretary and a Commander in civil and military matters respectively. All of these officials were appointed at the imperial court in Xianyang and paid from the imperial treasury, and could be removed anytime on order of the central government. Clerks and minor officers in the county level and below, e.g. district and village, were in principle appointed locally. Further studies based on the legal strips from Shuihudi show that standard procedures were developed to govern the process of appointment and dismissal, as officials were strictly prohibited from stepping into a matter without an official appointment and, when facing a transfer, from bringing their assistants and scribes to the new post.15 The Qin Empire was ruled through a carefully designed and closely supervised bureaucracy in which none was related to others or to the emperor in any other way except through the bureaucratic machine.