Lord Shang’s reforms created a machine of conquest, but they also made him many enemies. The peasantry he could deal with – after thousands of commoners protested at his reign of terror, he had them deported to the border regions, and opposition ceased. However, he had greater difficulties with the nobles, particularly when a transgression by the heir to the throne caused Shang to order the mutilation and tattooing of his teacher and assistant.
Although Qin enjoyed great military successes, Lord Shang only escaped his enemies at court through the patronage of the Educated Duke. When the Educated Duke finally died in 338 BC, the new ruler was the Graceful Duke (r.337-311 BC), the crown prince whose excesses Lord Shang had once contested by punishments dealt out to his tutors. The Graceful Duke had nursed his resentment for many years, and Lord Shang took the hint. Even as the Graceful Duke was installed as the new ruler of Qin, Lord Shang bolted.
Upon presenting himself at an inn near the border, he was refused a bed for the night because he was unable to provide a valid identification. The innkeeper was diligently adhering to a law that Lord Shang himself had passed, and the ousted bureaucrat left in a state of high irritation. He had even less luck across the border, in a neighbouring country so afraid of Qin reprisals that it refused to harbour a refugee. Eventually, Lord Shang was left with no choice but to return to Qin, where he led an abortive coup attempt, and ended his days a captive of the regime he had helped create. The Graceful Duke ordered that Lord Shang be pulled apart by chariots, and that every member of his family should be executed.15
Although Lord Shang’s policies did not lead to a happy end for him, his schemes had over a decade to take effect, and by the time of his demise, crime had been wiped out all over Qin – or rather, any belligerent sorts had been steered onto the frontlines of Qin’s many battles. Later writers would point to the contradictions in Lord Shang’s policies, and the terrible climate of poverty and betrayal that his laws forced upon the population.16 Although he died long before the time of the First Emperor, it was Lord Shang who created both the environment in which the First Emperor would flourish, and also the grasping engine of acquisition – of surplus manpower, wealth, and territory – that would supply the First Emperor with his brief, unprecedented, and unrepeated opportunity for forging China into a single state. Although later dynasties would often note their arch disapproval of Lord Shang and his callous policies, many arguably owed their existence to him.
Even the Graceful Duke, the man who had Lord Shang killed, seemed to have been tainted by his policies, invested with a love of dirty tricks and the brutal science of the possible. Lord Shang had the last laugh from beyond the grave, as the Graceful Duke continued his policies, enforcing the rule of the state with ever greater severity. Qin’s quest for lebensraum continued unabated, and in the first years of the Graceful Duke’s reign, Qin armies seized a portion of land north of the Yellow River that belonged to the neighbouring state of Wei. The duke initially gave it back, but changed his mind, reoccupied it and forced the Wei natives to move out.17 He followed this conquest with a far more ambitious expansion to the southwest, into the fertile basin of what is now known as Sichuan, completely subjugating the sophisticated local civilisation, and making its last king a ‘marquis’ within the Qin aristocracy. The territorial gains more than doubled the size of Qin’s lands, affording access to rich and fertile lands, and opening up routes further to the south back towards the centre of China. Most crucial of these were the upper reaches of the Yangtze river, which brought Qin into more direct contact, and ultimately, conflict, with the vast Land of the Immaculate, Chu.18
There are signs in the Record of the Historian that the warring states were not merely fighting, but also negotiating. Although there were plenty of rivalries to keep them busy with one another, they also shared a growing universal contempt for the kings of the Zhou dynasty. Qin followed suit, and after the performance of elaborate royal sacrifices, the twelfth year of the Graceful Duke was renamed as the first year of the Graceful King.
Qin’s eminence as a state was rising. But its people still had a reputation for rough ways and uncultured behaviour; the Graceful King’s eldest son, the Martial King (r.310-307), died after over-exerting himself in a drunken competition to see who could lift a massive bronze cauldron.19 Once a small river valley held by minor nobles, Qin’s borders now extended far to the south and west. Thanks to its conquests beyond the traditional borders of civilisation, Qin now rivalled the largest states in size, but did not have to share all its borders with other civilised rivals. Although Qin still endured occasional barbarian attacks, its flanks were reinforced with long defensive walls, and held at mountain ranges. Now, Qin exchanged high-level hostages with other states – the distant east-coast nation of Qi, Land of the Devout, sent its Crown Prince himself to be a ‘guest’ at the Qin court.
The Zhou overlords still claimed to be the nominal rulers of the world. The state of Qin, however, was enjoying much better successes with its own barbarian neighbours, and put its many enslaved and criminalized citizens to work on the construction of a western wall to define a boundary which the nomads could not cross. The wall was completed around 300 BC, during the reign of the weight-lifting ruler’s younger brother, the Bright King (r.307-251).
The 280s saw Qin and Qi striving to outdo each other. In 288, it was the kings of these states who proclaimed themselves to be universal sovereigns like the rulers of legend. The other countries, however, were still strong enough to resist such a claim, and imperial ambitions were quietly shuffled away and forgotten. Capitalising on contacts made when he had been a princely hostage in Yan, the Land of Swallows, the Bright King took part in a coalition against the Land of the Devout in 284, lending troops to a general from the Land of Swallows, alongside his former enemies in Wei and Zhao, forming a multinational invasion force.
The coalition soon fell apart as other Qin armies gnawed at the border regions of Qin’s one-time allies, but the brief union had served its purpose. The Land of the Devout had been the greatest potential threat to Qin’s imperial ambitions, now it was a shadow of its former self.
There was a belief among the people of the time that the world was truly doomed. The decreasing power of the Zhou kings was obvious even to their supporters, and it was thought that the opportunity to find a worthwhile replacement had already passed. It was only after the death of Confucius that his disciples began to discuss the possibility that he had been an ‘uncrowned king’, and that the world had failed him by not making him its ruler. Matters were not helped by the discovery that a particular planetary conjunction, thought to herald the birth of the world’s saviour, had only retrospectively been identified as occurring in the year of Confucius’s birth, and would not occur again for another five hundred years.20 If Heaven had withdrawn its mandate from the kings of Zhou, the ideal candidate to replace him had died long ago.
Such a claim had its most vocal supporters among the scholars themselves, who as the intellectual inheritors of Confucius stood to gain the most from his recognition as the perfect statesman. But Confucius had only seen himself as the interpreter of tradition, not as the establisher of anything particularly new, and his successors were often at odds over how he would apply his teachings to the world in which they found themselves.
In the time that would see the birth of the future First Emperor, the pre-eminent Confucian expert was Xunzi. Xunzi came from a small state, but pursued his education in the Land of the Devout. In the course of his career, he became a noted philosopher, and enjoyed three terms as the leader of the Jixia Academy, the highest-ranking institution of learning in the eastern world.21 The academy took its name from the ancient Chinese god of grain, and while it may have encouraged debate and produced many great minds, its presiding deity also encouraged a sense of the real and the possible. Grain was of central importance. Politicians worked to keep their people from starving, to protect themselves from diplomatic predators, to ensure that the farmers were able to tak
e in their harvests without distraction.
Xunzi’s interpretations of ancient teachings took a similar no-nonsense approach. In fact, he took the secular attitude of Confucius even further. He dared to suggest that the stories about the gods might be simply that – nothing more than stories. An arch cynic, he asked if it would really make all that much difference if the ruler did not perform the correct ceremonies during an eclipse. Was a dragon really eating the sun, or was it perhaps the shadow of the Moon? And if it was just the Moon, then surely it made no difference at all whether human beings banged gongs to frighten it, or prayed for deliverance?
Xunzi had little time for the fairy stories of days gone by, since he saw no evidence around him of these supposed gods and their magical conflicts. Like Confucius before him, Xunzi discounted notions of the paranormal and supernatural, preferring instead to concentrate on observable phenomena. He instilled in his pupils a ruthless intellectual rigour, throwing out any arguments that rested on the myths of ancient times. Instead, he insisted that his students pay attention to that which they knew, particularly the books of history left to them by Confucius. A thousand years of real politics, wars and treaties was available to study, compiled by scholars with a view to educating their descendants about the past.
Confucius’s work, particularly the Spring and Autumn Annals apocryphally attributed to him, had been deliberately assembled to teach through example. Xunzi agreed wholeheartedly. Whoever had compiled the Spring and Autumn Annals had hoped that their accounts of earlier mistakes and diplomatic incidents would demonstrate that only the rule of the just would prevail in evil times. Xunzi wasn’t so sure about that. Xunzi saw in such histories a single, unwelcome truth, that the only thing that really worked was punishment. Confucius had concentrated on ritual, hoping that by repetitive actions and solemn ceremony, mankind would appreciate its responsibilities and duties. Xunzi saw ritual as only the pinnacle of a much more compelling force – law. Confucius believed that righteousness created more righteousness, and that the most important of all the virtues was simply to treat others as one would like to be treated. He had valued human goodness, and, in fact, placed a great amount of faith in it. Xunzi was more of a realist, and emphasised in his classes that some humans would need to be guided towards the right path. Such guidance would, regrettably, involve rather more of the stick than the carrot, leading Xunzi to instil his own pupils with a respect for rituals and correct behaviour. Ultimately, this would mean an increased emphasis on the law, particularly penal law. Xunzi demanded that a sage ruler be tough on crime, and on the causes of crime.
These, then, were the things that had gone wrong. In times gone past, people had contended with the laws handed down to them. They had disobeyed their rulers. The rulers had allowed too many defiant acts to go unpunished. Like the Zhou dynasty, they had continually redefined defiance in order to avoid having to deal with it.
As he taught at the Jixia academy, Xunzi drew his students’ attention away from the airy debates of gods and immortals, and fixed their minds on the real world. He pointed out that, despite the supposed authority of the ruler of the Zhou dynasty, very few graduates of the academies sought employment with him. Why? Because the state was a spent force; it was useless, it accomplished nothing. Wealth, and power, and influence, all these things waited elsewhere, among the more dynamic dukedoms, and indeed, beyond.
The people of Qin inspired a sense of unease among the other states, but warfare was a horrific business for all. Surviving details of officers’ quarters from the period suggest that the temple of the war-god and the interrogation area were one and the same, and that prisoners-of-war were dismembered in honour of each nation’s deities. Ancient records contain the cryptic phrase ‘blood for the drums’, a chilling allusion to an unknown ritual that formed part of ancient Chinese military life.22
Where Confucius had encouraged states to be run along the lines of a stern yet loving family, the circumstances of Qin led its rulers to exert much greater control. The constant threat from the wilderness had kept the country on a permanent martial footing. Xunzi called the situation of Qin ‘a narrow defile’ – he may have meant the thin strip of fertile land that reached out from the Wei river, but it is more likely that he was referring to the harsh realities of life on the border:
The people are coerced with authority, restricted to a narrow life by deprivation, urged on with incentives and rewards, and intimidated with punishments and penalties. Persons in subordinate and humble positions are made to understand that only by success in combat can they seek benefits from their superiors.23
Xunzi regarded nations like Qin as a threat to peace, but he argued that the true Confucian way would always win out over barbarism. As he got older, and the Qin nation continued to conquer the regions around it, Xunzi’s words began to gain a hollow note. It was one of Xunzi’s own pupils, Han Fei, who first proposed the unthinkable, that maybe the way of the Qin government was not an anomaly to be addressed, but a practise to be emulated.24 In a sense, the people of Qin took the irreligious attitude of Xunzi to extremes; when the dying mother of Qin’s Bright King announced she would like to be buried with her living lover, a wily courtier persuaded her to admit that such a gesture would not be necessary, as there was no such thing as an ‘afterlife’ into which her spirit would need to be accompanied.25
True enough, there were rationales that could be employed to save face, since Confucius himself had refused to discuss the supernatural, preferring instead to concentrate on the here and now. There were enough passages in the works of Confucius that might be used to support a few draconian schemes for the greater good, and Xunzi, like many scholars, knew much theory but little practise. When his position in the Land of the Devout was further undermined by political opponents, he began to consider invitations to visit other countries. One such invitation had come from the prime minister of Qin, and some time around 265, Xunzi decided to see for himself.
His visit there is fraught with contradictions. Records of his meeting with the prime minister show predictable flatteries in abundance. Xunzi had previously written off the people of Qin as a bunch of ignorant brutes in a distant mountain valley, and yet on his arrival in the state, he saw fit to praise its ‘unique geographical position’ and the overbearing politeness of everyone he encountered.26 But it would seem that Xunzi was only sucking up to get past the prime minister to the Bright King himself. Once in the presence of the ruler of Qin, Xunzi was notably less complimentary, retaining his deferent air, but pushing home the point that Qin would never be truly civilised until it had learned how to achieve its aims without the use of military force. The Bright King listened politely to Xunzi as he reiterated his theories of good government, but the Bright King had ruled Qin for almost 40 years, and had little time for guesswork, no matter how noble its intentions. Despite Xunzi’s reputation for enforcing harsh truths, his grasp of reality was not enough for the Bright King. Xunzi stayed for some time in Qin, during a period when the country’s borders expanded even further, but he never gained public office in the state.27 He eventually returned to his native Zhao, where he became a voice of increasing panic about the power of Qin. Little did he know that Qin’s next ruler lived in Zhao itself, a forgotten noble hostage in the city of Handan.
Long reigns are good for the stability of a country, but not of its heirs. The Bright King ruled long enough for his nominated successor to predecease him. It took two further years for a replacement to be confirmed, but eventually, it was announced that the king’s second son, Lord Anguo, would be the new Crown Prince. Such a decision, however, merely postponed another succession crisis, since Lord Anguo himself had no legitimate sons. Although, claims the Record of the Historian, he was deeply in love with his principal wife, Huayang, the Lady of Glorious Sun, if they had any children at all, she had only given him girls. But Lord Anguo had over 20 male children by his concubines, including one, Yiren, born of the troublesome Xia, Lady of Summer.
The Recor
d of the Historian is reticent about the Lady of Summer; she was not highly regarded. Her son was also considered a minor irritation, and, as was the fate of many princelings of the day, Yiren had been sent as a royal hostage to another country. His name, which simply means ‘the Outsider’, gives some sense of his isolation.
The presence of such hostages was supposed to prevent the states from initiating wars against each other, but the state of Qin held life notoriously cheap. Yiren was sent to Handan, the capital of Zhao, the Land of Latecoming, a state whose name could be used to imply an unwelcome dawdler at the close of a party. The state had been founded on the ruins of an earlier, larger country in the region, which had been torn apart by the constant warring of the previous century.
Life in Handan could be tense for the hostages. Only a single other state acted as a buffer between Zhao and Yiren’s homeland, which meant that the possibility of a war between the two countries was constantly high. Yiren dwelt in Handan in a constant state of concern about his fatherland’s politics, in the company of several other princelings from other states. He could be forgiven for feeling abandoned; he had been sent to Handan with very little in the way of servants or resources, and could expect to meet with a gruesome fate if ever diplomacy between his host-nation and home nation turned sour.
There were, however, those who regarded Yiren’s situation as one with considerably more potential. Most notable among them was Lü Buwei, a merchant in Handan who saw in the abandoned princeling a sound investment. Chinese tradition holds that the canny Buwei ran the figures with the help of his own father:
On reaching home, he said to his father: ‘How much return can a man expect from farming?’
‘Perhaps ten times the investment.’.
‘And how much of a return on precious stones?’
The First Emperor of China Page 4
