The First Emperor of China

by Jonathan Clements

  If the Lao Ai affair were the first signs of Ying Zheng exerting his own authority, he was still hobbled by tradition. He could prevent direct attacks on his mother, but diplomacy soon forced him to bring her out of exile. He initially called for Lü Buwei’s execution, but was forced, once again by diplomatic concerns, to temper his anger. It would seem that Ying Zheng had a new adviser, who showed him that there were many ways to get what he wanted.

  Although we can see tiny elements of Ying Zheng’s personality shining through his decrees, there are also signs of a more ruthless voice. Li Si, the maverick pupil of Xunzi, who had so boldy turned his back on popular wisdom to work for a nation that was going places, finally had his chance.

  So soon after finally gaining an opportunity to run a state of his own, Li Si was now faced with the very real prospect of banishment. Accordingly, he risked his very life by standing up to the king, and arguing against the banishment policy, in a masterful memorial seemingly designed to tug at the heartstrings of every possible interest group who might hear it in the court.

  ‘Your unworthy servant,’ said Li Si to the king, ‘considers that this would be a mistake.’ Carefully and logically, Li Si pointed out the value that immigrants had brought to the state. Without the organisational genius of Lord Shang, Qin would never have pulled itself out of semi-barbarism.

  Ironically, Li Si’s argument was not as logical as it appeared. He made several claims that were untrue. Contrary to his assertion, the Sichuan region had not been conquered through the intrigues of a foreign adviser, but by a gung-ho Qin general who rejected the aforesaid advice. Similarly, Li Si claimed that the era of the Bright King was greatly benefited by the advice of another foreign minister – this was not true at all, and the minister to which Li Si referred had split the Qin royal family into a feud. But Li Si kept talking, perhaps safe in the knowledge that the only people who would notice his poor grasp of history would be his fellow foreign philosophers and historians, unlikely to speak against his general argument. Although he did not mention it in his memorial, there were many in the courtroom who would offer silent support – the Meng family, whose late general Meng Ao had been a faithful servant of the king’s father, and whose grandsons were companions of the king, originally hailed from the Land of the Devout. Zhao Gao, another of the king’s inner circle, came, as his name implied, from the Land of Latecoming, where his father had given his life to save that of the king’s father. Foreigners were not the enemy of Qin, but its very saviours.

  Moving swiftly on, Li Si appealed to more materialist concerns, likely to strike closer to home with the Qin royals. Much that the king himself held dear, said Li Si, came from abroad. Ying Zheng treasured fine jade from the distant Kunlun mountains, far beyond the western borders of Qin. On his belt he wore a legendary giant pearl, supposedly presented to a foreign ruler by a wounded snake that he had caused to be cured. As his personal seal, he used a hefty chunk of jade so large that former kings had regarded it as a fake; but it was genuine, and came from the foreign state of Chu.

  The king’s sword, always at his side, was a priceless antique, the Taia blade, forged by the smith of the same name for an ancient king, once again beyond the borders of Qin.20 Li Si’s rhetoric touched, fleetingly, subtly on the accoutrements of war itself – the fastest horses and the crocodile skins that adorned the war-drums, before moving into the most convincing argument of all:

  If they must be products of the state of Qin before they become permissible, then these jewels that make bright the night would not ornament the court, and there would be no utensils of rhinoceros horn and ivory as delightful playthings. [Beautiful] women… would not fill the rear palaces, and good horses and rapid coursers would not occupy the outer stables. The gold and tin of Jiangnan [south of the Yangtze] would not find any use, and the cinnabar and blue of [Sichuan] would not be utilised for painted decorations.21

  Li Si’s argument dwelt far longer on luxuries than on the acts of past ministers, but there was method in his madness. Wily as ever, he had silent persuaders whose help he could enlist – the ladies of the court itself, the king’s concubines and wives drawn chiefly from foreign lands in dynastic alliances. How would they take to a sudden import ban on anything from abroad, including themselves? Before he finished, Li Si posited a Qin court where only local girls remained, their hair no longer fixed by pearl studded hairpins from the coast, their earrings missing, their clothes unadorned with embroidery save that which could be sewn together by locals. If depriving the girls of trinkets was not enough to strike fear into their hearts, Li Si added that life would become decidedly more boring. He reminded the court that it was not too long in the past that the music of Qin was little more than animal cries and the clashing together of bones and jugs. Ban immigrants, argued Li Si, and the king of Qin would also be obliged to ban sophisticated instruments, complex dances and harmonious ballads, in everything from love songs to the bronze chimes of pious court ritual.

  After such a reduction to the absurd, Li Si threw the argument back in the faces of the anti-foreign cabal, reminding them that, of all the supposed unpleasant immigrant influences, it was only the people that the king was throwing out, while the trinkets of the court were safe, for now at least:

  Feminine charms, music, pearls and jade… are held as weighty, whereas human beings are esteemed lightly. Such is not the policy by which to straddle [what lies] within the seas and to rule over the feudal lords.22

  In a final flourish, Li Si compared the king and his country to the holy mountain of Mount Tai, which did not turn away the dust that blew upon it, adding ever further to its stature. He pointed to the land’s mightiest river, which never turned away a raindrop. And, in a final, supremely sneaky move, he reminded the king of the forces that had originally brought so many of the immigrants to Qin in the first place. If Qin turned them away, then these smart men, these rich men, these spurned yet beautiful women, would only find new homes among Qin’s enemies, with a thirst for vengeance.

  With that, Li Si was gone. He had not survived a decade of Lü Buwei’s intrigues without knowing the risk he was taking. If his memorial angered the king, and it was very likely to do so, Li Si preferred to be on his way somewhere else. However, he was pursued by agents of the king, and brought back to the palace. There, he was informed of Ying Zheng’s reply.

  He was persuaded. Li Si was reinstated and the order to expel the immigrants was rescinded. It is a mark of Li Si’s victory that the full text of his argument occupies a sizeable part of his biography in the Record of the Historian. Although he was soon promoted to Minister of Justice, and eventually Grand Councillor, his biography is silent on his further deeds for 17 more years.

  The crisis was averted and the position of foreign advisers was protected at the Qin court – with the notable exception of Lü Buwei. Li Si had waited ten years for his moment, so seemed untroubled by only a few months more. Lü Buwei probably hoped to continue to influence matters by calling in favours with the many hundreds of officials he had appointed during his career. Perhaps realising this, an order in the king’s name sent Buwei to his personal fief out of immediate contact with the palace. Before long, the king sent his ‘Second Father’ a spiteful letter:

  What have you done for the state of Qin that merits your rule over 100,000 households south of the river? What relation are you to Qin, that We should call you ‘uncle’?23

  There was no answer to such questions; if the king had forgotten Lü Buwei’s accomplishments, he was in no mood to be reminded of them. In a time when loyal Qin generals were winning real battles, Buwei’s sinecure command during the conquest of Zhou probably did not impress the aristocracy, nor did his occupation of the heartland of the Zhou rulers. As for his role as the king’s guardian, family ties were a sore point in the aftermath of the Lao Ai debacle. The letter ordered Buwei and his family (he was clearly no longer welcome among the royals) to relocate to Sichuan, that same southern borderland where so many of Lao Ai’s sta
ff had been forcibly exiled.

  The decree might be in the king’s name, but it bore all the fingerprints of a Legalist like Li Si. Instead of assembling with swordsmen and soldiers like Lao Ai, the king had removed Lü Buwei in small degrees, first from the palace, then from the capital, and now from the heartland. Lü Buwei suspected, rightly, that further orders would reach him on the frontier, until his every achievement and possession was stripped away and he was left with nothing. Sensing that the letter was a death sentence in all but name, Lü Buwei took the hint, and drank poison.

  3 The Fighting Tigers

  The purges went on even after Lü Buwei’s death. Agents of the king spied upon the old minister’s funeral and later issued further orders to anyone who had been foolish enough to attend. Any mourner of foreign extraction was deported. Any citizens of Qin so bold as to mark the passing of the king’s former regent were exiled to the borderlands.1

  Li Si’s long plan was paying off. The old order of amateur politicians like Lü Buwei was on its way out, and the nations that Qin had not already conquered were trapped into inferior positions. Qin’s advancement continued, with manufactured excuses and supposedly humanitarian intercessions, often invading one ‘ally’ at the request of another, and occupying increasingly large areas of land.

  After decades of ascendancy, the time was now ripe for Qin to fill the vacuum left by the departed Zhou dynasty. The story of Qin is best known to posterity simply because it was the ultimate victor, but many of the other nations had their own contenders. Remarkably, most of them knew each other – the hostage-exchange policy of the times ensuring that many of the players had spent time comiserating with each other as fellow foreign ‘guests’.

  The Red Prince’s land was more interested in survival than hegemony, but other nations fancied their chances of defeating Qin and attaining supremacy for themselves. Qi, the Land of the Devout was in disarray in the aftermath of its late king’s failed bid on the emperorship, but it still stood a chance of trying again – if it could unite all the other countries in a new coalition against Qin, then the leader of the alliance would stand a chance of taking the emperorship for himself.

  To the south, Chu, the Land of the Immaculate boasted a prime minister whose bravery and intelligence could have been more than a match for Qin. In the days of Ying Zheng’s grandfather, the Bright King, it was this Lord Chunshen who had organised a treaty between the two major kingdoms, advising him that ‘if two tigers fight, even a slow dog can catch them when they’re worn out.’2 It had been Lord Chunshen, in 261, who had masterminded an elaborate rescue, smuggling the Chu heir out of Qin, where he had been held as one of the king’s hostage/guests. Moreover, Lord Chunshen had been bold enough to look the Bright King in the eye and tell him of his defiance, and charismatic enough to get away with it. When the rescued heir became the king of Chu, Lord Chunshen became his trusted prime minister, in a tenure that saw him leading the Chu army that broke the siege of Handan in 259, and in a career high point, his appointment as the leader of an anti-Qin coalition force in 241. It is likely that, without an enemy as great as Lord Chunshen, the ruler of Qin might have become China’s First Emperor a generation earlier.

  However, Lord Chunshen’s luck ran out in 238 when he was double-crossed in a succession struggle. In a story that bears a remarkable resemblance to the Lao Ai Affair in Qin, Chunshen was dragged into the intrigues of his young lover, who planned to pass off their child as the infant heir to the dying (and childless) king of Chu. Chunshen was killed in the violence that followed. He placed far too much trust in his lover’s brother, who had him killed in an attempt to hide evidence of the deception. In a double disaster, Chu lost its best politician and gained an infant ruler of unsure provenance, ‘advised’ by power-grabbing ministers.3 To the calculating Legalist minds of Qin, the time had come to take advantage of their weakened rivals. It was now or never.

  The stress of the planning was taking its toll on Ying Zheng. Li Si reported that his king ‘no longer finds his drink and food sweet, nor takes pleasure in his strolls.’4 Observations of comets and meteor showers, common in the Record of the Historian before the year 233, shut down for the next two decades as if the administration lost interest in omens and portents, or astronomers were too fearful to report them.5 The king had other things on his mind, delegating the grand plan to a series of ministers, each charged with the job of furthering Qin’s conquest in a different region. The ministers responsible are largely unnamed, although one is already known to us. Following his successful pleading on behalf of foreigners after the Lao Ai Affair, Li Si was given a great new responsibility. He was put in charge of the Qin state’s not-so-secret project to completely subjugate the neighbouring land of Han. This would involve the commission of intrigues, assassins and bribes, the preparation of soldiers and materials for a conquest, and the manufacture of any excuses that might be required for it. It would also pit Li Si against his greatest living rival, a thinker against whose talent he nursed a lifelong resentment. For the state of Han was also the homeland of Prince Han Fei, Li Si’s former classmate from Xunzi’s academy.

  Although Li Si had achieved much in the Qin government, he still had issues with his old school colleague. Whereas Li Si had clawed his way up to a leading position in a foreign government, Han Fei had enjoyed an easier, albeit slower rise in his native land.

  Han Fei took his surname from the Han state, of whose royal family he was a member. In the previous centuries jockeying for power and influence, most other small states had been incorporated within the larger players. Han, a relatively minor land, probably only survived so long because of its relative insignificance.6

  The prognosis for Han Fei’s political career was not particularly good. He was not a man of action and sought no military commission. He had a stutter that made diplomacy an unlikely option, and instead threw himself into the study of philosophy, at which he excelled. Li Si had the wily charm and the freedom to head abroad, whereas Han Fei was obliged to stay in his homeland, trapped in a doomed nation by the very family ties that had led him to an easy life in the first place.

  Like his former classmate Li Si, Han Fei took his teacher’s realistic philosophy to Legalist extremes. Where Xunzi saw an unfortunate observation, that men were evil by nature, Han Fei saw a challenge for the institution of stern laws to control this nature and use it to the benefit of the state. Where Xunzi tried to imagine a state that served its people, Han Fei dreamed up policies that would force the people to serve the state. It was, perhaps, an entertaining diversion for the privileged prince, but it was one that his classmate Li Si took to heart. After Li Si departed for Qin, Han Fei was forced to recognise that Li Si was now working for the very state whose intimidation was keeping his homeland in such a low position.

  Since his speech impediment made it unlikely he would be taken seriously, Han Fei was forced to use written memorials to persuade the Han king. During the ascendancy of Qin, he sent a number of them, carefully outlining ways in which the king could be seen to be behaving in a manner detrimental to the state. Han Fei became increasingly frustrated at his lack of effect, and eventually wrote an allegorical memorial about a man whose attempts to present his ruler with a piece of unpolished jade met with cruel punishments.7

  There were now two main power blocks among the six kingdoms. One was the so-called Horizontal Alliance, an east-west axis dominated by Qin. This was opposed by the north-south Vertical Alliance, which included Yan, the Land of Swallows, and Qi, the Land of the Devout. Much of the Han political debate of the time centred on which of these groups the people of Han should join – the Qin-appeasers of the Horizontals, or the brave resistance of the Verticals. Although Qin presented the most obvious danger, Han Fei did not regard either alliance as a good prospect – it was no secret that the ruler of the Land of the Devout also had designs on proclaiming himself emperor. Han Fei would prepare his own country to be strong enough to remain neutral.

  However, the written nat
ure of Han Fei’s memorials allowed them to be preserved and circulated. Although the prince may not have appreciated it, he had readers in high places, not merely his old classmate Li Si, but Li Si’s boss, king Ying Zheng himself. The perturbed prince continued to rail against the injustices of his position, particularly in the essays Frustrations of a Loner and Five Parasites, in which he attacked the sycophants who kept him from steering his king in the right direction.

  Han Fei argued that an average man, presented with the opportunity to make off with a humble piece of cloth would take it, particularly if he doubted his theft would be discovered. Conversely, the greatest and most covetous thief in the world would think twice about touching a ton of molten gold, because he would be sure that the moment he did so he would cause injury to himself. Such was the underpinning of Legalism itself, that severe punishment would achieve more in the interests of the state than optimistic Confucian humanism.8

  Tired of palace politics, and only recently surviving a coup attempt of his own, Ying Zheng greatly enjoyed reading Han Fei’s works. When he dismissed Lü Buwei, he had done so in direct adherence with one of Han Fei’s most famous pronouncements, that ‘high officials are not exempt from punishment for crimes, while the common people are not denied rewards for good deeds.’9 He realised, perhaps, that many of the innovations brought in at the hands of Lü Buwei and Li Si actually owed their origins to the thought of this foreign thinker.

  In another essay, The Difficulty of Advice, Han Fei railed against the problems faced by the counsellors of an all-powerful king, ever having to choose between flattery and insult. Han Fei’s complaint, informed no doubt by his own lack of influence in his homeland, was that the processes of a Chinese court, particularly one in which a monarch could enforce such draconian punishments, encouraged ‘advisers’ to only tell a king what he wanted to hear. This, to Han Fei’s mind, was not ‘advice’ at all. Han Fei’s observation, which would have been a criticism to a Confucian and a handy tip to a Legalist, was that ‘tasks are accomplished through secrecy, and counsel fails when it is revealed.’ 10