The First Emperor of China

by Jonathan Clements

  ‘If only,’ Ying Zheng is supposed to have said, ‘I could once catch sight of this man and meet with him, I should die without regret.’

  ‘These words were written by Han Fei,’ was the sullen response from Li Si.11

  Ironically, it was Li Si’s resentment that was to lead to Han Fei’s brief success in his homeland. As Qin’s project to dominate Han entered a period of open assault, the king of Han needed a diplomat as a last-ditch attempt to hold off invasion. Perhaps hearing of Ying Zheng’s unexpected love of Han Fei’s writings, the king of Han sent Han Fei himself.

  Ying Zheng was delighted. Much to Li Si’s disapproval, he genuinely seemed to be looking forward to a visit from the famous scholar. The transcript of Han Fei’s memorial to Ying Zheng, On Preserving Han, shows a cunning mind at work as the philosopher pleads his case, outlining a series of reasons why an attack on Han would be a bad idea. Since the planned invasion was the responsibility of Li Si himself, we can only imagine the icy atmosphere in Li Si’s part of the throne room, as his sovereign listened with obvious glee to a personal performance by the great Han Fei, much of the content of which was aimed at discrediting Li Si’s own work of the last few months.

  Han Fei’s argument was a masterpiece. He reminded Ying Zheng that Han performed a valuable role as a buffer state, and one that had never given Qin any trouble. In fact, on several past occasions, when Qin had embarked on one of its earlier conquests, troops from Han had formed part of the entourage of its ‘ally’, incurring the wrath of several other states, but to Qin’s eternal benefit.

  Han Fei suggested that if Qin wanted someone new to fight, it was looking in the wrong place. He dared to imply that whoever was planning on attacking Han (i.e. Li Si) was doing his king a disservice, as a more likely enemy was actually Zhao, the Land of Latecoming. Han Fei admitted that his state was small, but warned ominously that its cities were well fortified and supplied. The taking of Han would not be an easy, symbolic skirmish like the battles of old, where the outcome was determined after a gentlemanly chariot-fight by a handful of nobles. Instead, the armies of Qin should expect a siege in every well-defended town, and a slow process of conquest which would threaten to exhaust the Qin invaders before they could achieve their aims. Han Fei was sure, he said, that Qin would win eventually, but at what loss of reputation when plucky little Han would fight so hard and so well?12

  Han Fei had more for the king to think about. He pointed out that Qin’s problems would not be over even when Han was conquered, since a revolt in Han would distract Qin armies from other conquests, and cut off supply lines in the likely event that Qin found even more excuses to advance beyond its borders. Han Fei spelled it out for him – Han was not the enemy. Qin’s ultimate enemy was its greatest rival Qi, the Land of the Devout, and to get there Qin would need a clear strike at Zhao, the Land of Latecoming, and to make sure that that would go according to plan, Qin’s biggest problem was actually the vast state of Chu to the south.

  Such a comment was another indirect attack on Li Si. Chu, of course, was Li Si’s birthplace, and Han Fei had now cunningly managed to imply that the entirety of Li Si’s efforts were directed at distracting Ying Zheng from an attack on Li Si’s own homeland. So soon after the threat to expel ministers, and the realisation that the Zheng canal had been a time-wasting exercise, Han Fei’s words cannot had gone down well.

  Li Si had devoted months to planning his operation in Han, yet here was his old classmate suggesting that only an idiot (or a traitor) would waste his time on such an enterprise. In fact, Han Fei went further, implying that the state of Han was the pivot around which all the era’s politics now revolved. Insignificant though it might be, an act of aggression against Han would galvanise the massive Alliances into action, and force a prolonged conflict. Nor were Han Fei’s words an idle critique – he had come to Qin with an alternative proposal.

  Han Fei outlined a programme of intrigues, bribery and hostage exchange with Chu and the minor state of Wei, in order to assure them of Qin’s friendship, but also of the treacherous intentions of Zhao.

  Li Si was livid, but in his reply, he made sure to mention that Han Fei was a foreigner and a late arrival. Han Fei’s home state, he said, was already part of Qin’s problems, sitting in Qin’s metaphorical stomach like something bad the state had eaten. Demonstrating palpable distress with the credence Ying Zheng was giving Han Fei’s words, Li Si reminded him that he was only seeing the public-relations side of Han Fei’s plotting. Just as Han was pivotal to Qin, it was also pivotal to the other states. And if the state had seen fit to send its famous son to talk to Ying Zheng, it was banking on using him to sway the star-struck king. Said Li Si:

  [His] coming here can have no other purpose than, by succeeding in preserving Han, to gain an important position in Han [for himself]. He makes dialectical speeches and well rounded phrases, and utters falsehoods and invents cunning plots, all [supposedly] for Qin’s great benefit, while [actually] he spies on Your Majesty for Han… This is a plan for his own profit. I have observed [his] words and writings. His vicious speech and extravagant arguments show extreme cunning. I fear lest Your Majesty may become infected by [his] arguments and listen to his harmful mind, and therefore not examine matters clearly.13

  Li Si had a counter-proposal, that Han Fei should be retained as a hostage, so Li Si himself could pay a visit to the Han court. He would do so at a time when the Qin armies made an extravagant show of deployment on the borders, although their aims should remain tantalisingly unconfirmed. He hoped thereby to scare other states into pre-emptive strikes against each other, each persuaded that the Qin forces were acting in concert with their rivals. Li Si proposed, to steal a phrase from Lord Chunshen, that the other states should be the fighting tigers, and Qin itself should play the part of the slow dog.

  With Han Fei held under house arrest in Qin, Li Si undertook his mission. However, he was refused an audience with the king of Han, and forced to submit his own arguments in writing. With nothing to show for his mission, Li Si returned to Qin, where his hated rival Han Fei was now enjoying the ear of the king himself.

  The Intrigues of the Warring States claims that Han Fei pushed a little too hard during Li Si’s absence, accusing a fellow adviser, Yaojia, of embezzling funds, and doing so in a snooty manner that played upon their relative births. Han Fei’s opinion, it seems, was that it was the business of nobles to advise kings, whereas upstarts like Yaojia (and, by association, Li Si) had forgotten their place. Han Fei objected not only to Yaojia’s low birth, but also to his criminal record, saying to the king:

  Examine it, Your Majesty, for he was once a gatekeeper in Liang and stole from that state. He was an officer in Zhao and was driven from that state. To choose the son of a gatekeeper who stole much in Liang, and a minister who was driven from Zhao with whom to share the policies of your state, is not an action calculated to encourage the rest of your officers.14

  But Yaojia had the opportunity to defend himself, and did so with a speech that, to Han Fei’s embarrassment, mirrored many elements of Han Fei’s own Difficulty of Advice. He noted many previous historical incidents where kings had murdered their most faithful ministers, and avoided criticism of his past by discounting its relevance to his present service to Qin. He argued that enlightened rulers should focus on results, not gossip, and in a final sting aimed directly at Han Fei: ‘if a man has a towering name yet not one shred of accomplishment [a king should] not reward him.’15

  However, although the Record of the Historian mentions the argument with Yaojia, it also implicates Li Si himself. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the personality clash, Li Si himself returned angry from the failed mission to Han Fei’s homeland, and seized upon the chance to remove his rival once and for all. When Han Fei was already discredited by his failed attack on Yaojia, Li Si delivered the coup de grace in a second meeting with the king of Qin.

  Li Si pointed out the state of limbo in which Han Fei now found himself – discredited at c
ourt and no longer permitted to advise the king. He also noted that Legalist principles made it clear what needed to be done:

  Han Fei will always work for Han… This is the nature of human emotions. Yet now Your Majesty does not employ him but allows him to linger here for a long time, and then return. This is simply leaving yourself open for trouble. It would be better to punish him for breaking a law.16

  If Han Fei was only going to return home to benefit the state of Han in its struggle, then it was too dangerous to allow him to leave. But since his attitude had singularly failed to win him any friends in Qin, it was too difficult to allow him to stay. And now that Li Si was back from his mission, Qin had no need of this particular noble hostage.

  Li Si took his chance and sent agents to Han Fei bearing poison. Han Fei begged for an audience with the king to explain himself, but Li Si made sure he never got the chance. By the time Ying Zheng reconsidered, Han Fei was already dead. The Historian himself, Sima Qian, later wrote that he was ‘saddened that Han could write The Difficulty of Advice, but could not extract himself from his own plight.’

  Someone who enjoyed considerably more success in escaping the clutches of the king was the Red Prince from the Land of Swallows, who had arrived in Qin during the last days of Lü Buwei’s ministry. If the vague allusions of ancient chronicles have any foundation in truth, it would appear that the Red Prince was one of Ying Zheng’s oldest acquaintances. Although Ying Zheng now enjoyed a higher rank, the two men had first met when Ying Zheng was a child, when both had been hostages in Handan.17

  It might seem strange that the heir to the throne of Yan was a hostage in two potential enemy countries, but such exchanges were common at the time. In spirit, at least, they have some relationship with the ‘fostering’ exchanges of medieval European royalty, establishing ties of understanding with foreign powers by ensuring that some family members were raised abroad. According to the Record of the Historian, Qin had been hanging onto rival heirs since at least the time of the Bright King, using them as bargaining chips with each succession. After conquest, the Qin state liked to invite its former guests back, permanently. In at least one case, it had conquered a nation by the expedient method of holding its entire royal family prisoner.

  If the Red Prince had not been the heir to the throne of Yan before, he was now – it was a sign of Qin’s ascendancy that the Yan ‘guest’ was no minor noble as Ying Zheng’s father had once been, but the heir to the throne himself. However, if they had been playmates as children, adulthood and politics seems to have soured their relationship. With Qin’s military activity continuing unabated, the Red Prince’s time in Qin was very difficult – if the Land of Swallows ever went on the offensive, his life would be forfeit. But if the Land of Swallows became too friendly with Qin, it might find itself drafted into a war against the state that sat in between them, the luckless Zhao, Land of Latecoming.

  During the Red Prince’s sojourn in Qin, Ying Zheng’s diplomats secured a treaty with Zhao guaranteeing mutual non-aggression. The Red Prince’s father sent an ambassador of his own, supposedly to ‘congratulate’ Ying Zheng, but in reality to ascertain his plans. After a difficult journey to Qin, in which he escaped arrest at the hands of Zhao officials, the ambassador gained an audience with Ying Zheng, at which he presented him with a thousand pieces of gold.

  Ying Zheng was perplexed – he had made no secret of the fact that he had promised the Land of Swallows to its neighbour. The ambassador, however, pointed out that the Land of Latecoming was a mere shadow of its former self, greatly reduced in size and wealth after fifty years of disputes and conflicts with Qin. In the ambassador’s opinion, Ying Zheng was playing with fire if he allowed Zhao to attack Yan, as once conquered, the territory would give Zhao new strength and resources. In fact, the combined might of Zhao and Yan might be enough to turn on Qin itself.

  ‘Out of respect for your majesty,’ said the ambassador with bold sarcasm, ‘I am distressed at the thought.’18

  The story, from the often-unreliable Intrigues of the Warring States, reports Ying Zheng’s sudden agreement with the ambassador, and a reversal of his previous plan. Instead of supporting an attack on the Land of Swallows, he determined that his power was better used further weakening the Land of Latecoming that sat between his domain and that of the Red Prince’s father.

  But one Gan-luo, a ‘minister’ of Ying Zheng who was purportedly still in his teens, was then dispatched to meet with the king of Zhao, and offered an alliance with him so they could both attack the Land of Swallows. The king of Zhao gratefully handed over part of his own border region to Qin as a ‘gesture of friendship’, and renewed his plans to attack Yan. With the Yan alliance facing dissolution, the Red Prince was ordered out of Qin – there seemed little point in keeping a hostage to ward off an attack, when one was planning an attack of one’s own.19

  Even though the account of the specific intrigues seems to have been garbled and confused, the events presented out of order and sometimes contradictory, it is undeniable that the Red Prince left Qin in a state of anger. But the exact circumstances of his departure from Qin are even more confused, since we have another account that claims he was not ‘returned’ at all, to use the term employed in the Intrigues, but rather forced to flee in fear of his life.

  In an openly fictionalised account post-dating the Qin period, the story of the Red Prince instead begins with his adult stay in Qin, and a series of unspecified insults and slights delivered by Ying Zheng. Perhaps the Red Prince, and by extension, his entire homeland, had presumed to hope that his childhood association with the king of Qin would lead to some form of favouritism. Considering the Lao Ai Affair and the ongoing purges against immigrants at the time of the Red Prince’s arrival, it was probably the worst possible time for a foreign associate of the king to expect any special treatment.

  Whatever passed between the Red Prince and the king of Qin, it was enough to make the man from the Land of Swallows seek to leave. In a reversal of the account form the Intrigues, the alternate version has the Red Prince begging to head home, only to have his entreaties cruelly refused by Ying Zheng. The king, it is said, told the Red Prince that he would not leave until:

  The sky rains grains of corn

  The raven’s head becomes white

  And the horse grows horns.20

  With the predictable surprise of so many other fables, the three incidents somehow came to pass (the tale does not specify how), and, sensing displeasure in the heavens, the king reluctantly allowed the Red Prince to go. His consent, however, was only a ploy. He ordered for the Red Prince to meet with an accident on his way home, a project that somehow involved a bridge over a deep gorge, rigged with a trap door set to plunge the prince to his death. By some fluke of fate, the trap failed, and the Red Prince made it to the border under cover of the night, only to discover the gate in the wall shut. Unable to raise the guards without calling attention to himself, and unwilling to lurk on the wrong side of the border until sunrise, the Red Prince supposedly imitated a cock’s crow, thereby waking the real animals in the neighbourhood. On hearing the answering calls of the other roosters, the guards opened the gate, as was customary at dawn, and the Red Prince was able to make his getaway. Whether the tale of the Red Prince’s remarkable flight has any basis in fact, his later acts in setting up the assassination plot testify to his annoyance.21

  At first glance, the assassination plot of the Red Prince, as detailed in this book’s introduction, might seem desperate or fanciful, but Qin’s designs on conquest were obvious. After decades of posturing and intrigues, Qin was able to break tradition with impunity in 230, when a Qin army marched into the state of Han and captured the king who had once relied on Han Fei to plead his case. With Han’s king now a ‘guest’ of Ying Zheng, the once-proud state was no more, rebranded as a Qin commandery, fit as nothing more than a staging post for further conquests.22

  North of Han, across the Yellow River, stood Ying Zheng’s birthplace, the Land of La
tecoming, unluckily stricken by a drought in 229. A three-pronged Qin assault charged over its borders, only to be faced by overwhelming resistance. The city of Handan was put under siege again, while defenders fought off Qin attacks on several occasions. Faced with strong opposition, Qin’s general Wang Jian used methods in the spirit of Li Si, using bribes to plant slander close to the king of Zhao that his generals were planning to switch sides. The enemy king fell for it, replacing the generals with inferior underlings, and eventually killing one and exiling the other. Within three months, the change in leadership had taken its toll on the Zhao armies, and Wang Jian was victorious.23

  The fall of Zhao is one of the few incidents alluded to in the tale of the Red Prince that allows us to date the progress of events. By the time Wang Jian smashed the Land of Latecoming with military might and slanderous intrigues, the Red Prince’s project was already well underway: the infamous attempt to smuggle the dagger in the map.

  Jing Ke and his accomplice made their attempt on the life of the king of Qin in 227. In failing, the assassination attempt also presented Ying Zheng with an excuse to punish the Land of Swallows. Fresh from conquering the Land of Latecoming, Wang Jian was sent up to the southern border of Yan. The Red Prince made a bold attempt to hold off Wang Jian, but his army was defeated, the Yan capital was razed to the ground so completely that it was uninhabited for a thousand years.24 With great reluctance, the Red Prince’s kingly father ordered for his son to be executed, presenting the plotter’s head to Qin as an attempt to buy some time. The embarrassment of the Red Prince’s plot now dispelled, the king hoped to live on as ruler, although the bulk of the western part of his kingdom was now Qin property. The ‘free’ portion of the Land of the Swallows now comprised nothing more than the eastern marches of the Liaodong peninsula, up near what is now the Korean border.25