The First Emperor of China

by Jonathan Clements

  After long years of service to his king, the aged Wang Jian retired, handing over the command of the army to his son Wang Ben. The new general immediately embarked on the next object of Qin conquest, Zhao’s southern neighbour Wei. In one of the rare moments in the Record of the Historian where the words of Ying Zheng himself are noted down, we have Ying Zheng’s own comments on the series of conquests, framed as a wholly defensive exercise:

  The king of Han offered Us his territory and his royal seal, and begged to become Our subject. But then, he betrayed Us, forming an alliance against us with Zhao and Wei, compelling Us to form a punitive expedition and capture him. This was fortunate, as it caused hostilities to cease. The king of Zhao sent his minister Li Mu to pledge alliance, and We willingly returned his hostage prince. But then he turned on Us and revolted… so We formed a punitive force and captured the king. [One of his nobles proclaimed himself king of part of the remaining territory] so We sent troops to destroy him. The king of Wei first promised he would surrender, only to plot against Qin with the people of Han and Zhao in a surprise attack. The Qin soldiers and officers dealt out punishment and defeat.26

  However, it was not possible to stop there. Now that Qin had begun its conquest, it could not afford to stop.

  The forces of Qin invasion were not only military. Bribes in high places ensured that the bravest and noblest of their rivals were discredited. Thanks to whispers from Qin agents, many battles were won before the first arrow was shot, since incompetent generals had been put in charge. But Qin allies went even further than military might and spies – the army also utilised the elements themselves. Ying Zheng had decreed that as the preceding Zhou dynasty had been ruled by the element of Fire, the rising power of Qin was dominated by the power of Water. Water, the reasoning went, was flexible and mighty, like the Yellow River that surged through the Qin heartland. Water was also the element that could extinguish Fire, and what better proof was needed of the Qin dynasty’s superiority to its forerunner? Water, in less mythical form, was also to form a major component of Wang Ben’s assault on Wei in 225. The new general ordered for the destruction of the dykes that protected the Wei capital from the Yellow River. Three months later, after a decidedly soggy siege, the city surrendered, and Wei’s ruling dynasty was no more.

  The next country on Qin’s hit list was the vast Chu, Land of the Immaculate and birthplace of Li Si. Chu’s sheer size made it likely to be a tough opponent, particularly since it was a relatively young kingdom like Qin, still sporting the vitality and boldness of its recent barbarian days. The threat posed by Chu was such that not even the Legalists wanted to hear about it – when the retired general Wang Jian was asked for his estimate of the forces required, he informed the shocked war council that it would take 600,000 Qin troops to conquer Chu. Ying Zheng was not in a mood to listen, particularly since there were other generals, younger and keener on winning reputations, who disagreed.

  Meng Wu, scion of another family of military men, and his colleague Lixin ignored Wang Jian’s warning and led Qin armies into the Land of the Immaculate. Lixin’s forces had initial victories, but met with disaster outside a Chu city that, at first sight, appeared to be deserted. So, at least, goes the folklore version, that with the men tired after a long march, and with no obvious enemies in sight, Lixin told his men not to bother with standard protocols, which would have involved setting up minimal camp fortifications of brushwood and barricades. Such an oversight allowed for an ambush, as black-clad Chu soldiers fell upon the camp, setting fires, freeing horses and supposedly banging gongs to fake greater numbers.

  Instead of defending the obvious targets of the Qin, the Chu armies went on the offensive, marching straight for Qin territory. Without the numbers to head off the unexpected assault, Lixin’s army was obliged to change direction and defend the commandery, or risk a cut in communications. Lixin’s forces ran into the Chu army led by one Xiang Yan; as the aging Wang Jian had predicted, the Qin numbers were not enough. After suffering a crushing defeat, Lixin’s army ran for three days, pursued all the while by the victorious forces of the Land of the Immaculate. According to popular Chinese legend, the victorious defenders made a virtue of their low numbers and their knowledge of the terrain, reversing traditional methods of warfare by resting during the day and attacking only at night. Unable to set up camp, and forced to guard during uneventful days, and wake to defend unpredictable night assaults, the Qin army was soon winnowed down. But on the third day, when Meng Wu arrived with a weary relief force, the Chu defenders melted away again. Having lost not only face but also an army, Lixin committed suicide, leaving a note that admitted his shame to both Ying Zheng and, notably, the old general Wang Jian whom he had so cavalierly underbid for the job in the first place.27

  Wang Jian was called out of retirement to clean up the mess. He reached Chu with considerably higher numbers of troops, and embarked on a long, arduous process, capturing town after town. The Chu hero Xiang Yan eventually fell in battle, and after over a year of sieges and slow progress, Wang Jian’s men captured the king of Chu. Areas of the Land of the Immaculate held out until 222, but it was finished.

  Wang Jian was, finally, permitted to retire, and his son Wang Ben was sent north to deal with the remnants of Yan, the Land of the Swallows. Wang Ben’s army made short work of them, capturing the father of the Red Prince and announcing an end to the rule of his dynasty. On the way home, Wang Ben also found the time to drop in on a pocket of resistance in the Land of Latecoming, and shut down another royal house.

  Now Qin ruled every scrap of land except for Qi, the Land of the Devout. Although Qi had once presented a strong threat to Qin, it was no longer in a position to resist, its last hope of mounting a defence ruined by the careful positioning of a Qin agent as its leading minister. In 221, Wang Ben’s victorious army marched towards Qi, where it found only a token resistance. The last of Qin’s enemies was defeated not with some dreadful Armageddon, but with an exchange of treaties and memorials. With the fall of the Land of the Devout, the Qin dynasty and its ruler was acknowledged as the overlord of all the lands known to the ancient Chinese. Ying Zheng had become the king of kings, and deserved a new title in recognition of that fact. A surviving memorial of Ying Zheng evokes his weary summation of his achievements, shortly before his 40th birthday:

  The king of Chu offered Us land in the west [of his country], but then broke his word and attacked… We sent troops against him and captured him, and with him, the lands that had been his. The king of Yan succumbed to foolishness, allowing his son the Red Prince to send Jing Ke to kill Us. Our officers and men visited punishment upon them, and destroyed their state. The king of Qi took the advice of [his minister] Hou Sheng, and cut off relations with Us, so we punished him and captured him, and with him his land.28

  Ying Zheng could tell the biggest lies he wanted, since nobody would dare to disagree. It seems obvious that the attack on Chu was manufactured on the thinnest pretext, and that the Red Prince’s suspicions had been entirely justified, and yet now Ying Zheng presented his own behaviour as a wholly defensive act. The minister Hou Sheng, whom he blamed for the fall of the Land of the Devout, had been the self-same minister who Qin agents had been bribing!

  However, it was too late. All resistance had been quashed, and exercising the prerogative of the conqueror, Ying Zheng rewrote history to paint the kings as ‘rebellious princes’ in need of discipline.

  ‘Thanks to the sacred power of Our ancestors,’ he added, ‘all six kings have been chastised as they deserved. All under heaven is brought to heel.’29

  Li Si and two other ministers debated the constitutional implications. Ying Zheng was clearly no longer a king in the old sense, nor could he purloin the titles of the old Zhou rulers, since he had surpassed them in his achievement. After long debate, Ying Zheng’s advisers decided to combine a series of old terms for the all-highest, including huang, the old term for the rulers of the world, and di, an archaic word for the supreme being of a de
parted dynasty. The final term, huangdi, means Emperor in Chinese to this day.

  But Ying Zheng and his advisers would take things even further. One of the first recorded acts of his new imperial majesty was the renaming of his father. This was quite standard in Chinese dynasties, where deceased family members were given new titles in the afterlife, and posthumous appellations designed to memorialise their greatest deeds. However, this attitude soon ground to a staggering halt, with an edict from Ying Zheng that swept away the traditions of history.

  Ying Zheng decided that his father’s regnal name would be the last. He himself would not require one, nor a posthumous honour, nor any of the time-wasting distractions of traditional nomenclature. Instead, he declared that only one name would be necessary. He would, now and forever, be known simply as the First Emperor of the Qin – Qin Shi Huangdi. In the event of his death, his successor would simply be the Second Emperor, his successor the Third, and so on, for ‘ten thousand generations.’

  4 The River of Power

  The First Emperor’s refusal of anything but the most simple of titles was met with surprise by many, although tellingly not by Li Si. As the First Emperor’s tutor, Li Si was better prepared than most for the strange directives that began to arrive. While other ministers seem to have expected business as usual, simply on a larger scale, the First Emperor soon put them right.

  One minister brought up the subject of administration. Since the First Emperor now had many thousands of square miles of conquered territory, he would need to delegate local rule. The traditional way to do this, as practised by the former dynasty, would be to install the First Emperor’s children in fiefdoms all over the empire.

  The First Emperor already had a number of children, although it is impossible to discern how many. His eldest surviving son, Prince Fusu, was either in his late teens or early twenties at the time of the First Emperor’s accession. He had grown up in Xianyang, untroubled by the usual hostage-exchange that threw into upheaval the lives of so many other young nobles. In his childhood, he had instead enjoyed the company of other Qin nobles – asides in the Record of the Historian imply that he was a long-time friend of the younger generation of the Meng family, and may have even been a childhood playmate of the great general Meng Ao’s grandchildren. There is, however, little other information available on Fusu. When he appears in ancient chronicles, it is as a truly fine, upstanding statesman in the making – despite the likelihood of a lifetime of Legalist education, he appears to have remained a stoic Confucian, determined to do what was right by his loyal subjects. This, of course, was wholly inappropriate in a Legalist leader. Fusu was liked, but not feared, but there was plenty of time to drum his softer elements out of him. One day, it was hoped, he would make a fine Second Emperor, although any discussion of the First Emperor’s demise was taboo.

  Fusu was not the only son. Nothing is known of the First Emperor’s wives and concubines, but he is likely to have had dozens, from chaste political alliances to one-night bedmates. He had the pick of all the women in China, and sired at least 20 children in the course of his life. It would be, suggested the traditionalists, ideal for him to start preparing these many princelings for government. The princesses should be married off to the most trustworthy of ministers, so that they, too, would be linked by family ties to the throne. Then all the sons and sons-in-law could be dispatched to the farthest corners of the empire, there to rule in the name of their lord.

  Li Si disagreed. He pointed out that the same tradition everyone was hoping to resurrect had been one of the reasons for the unrest that had plagued the world for so long – in terms of the great question asked by every philosopher since Confucius, it was one of the things that had gone wrong. If the First Emperor installed feudal lords, then he would simply be repeating the mistakes of the past. At some unknown future date, a group of over-confident, disrespectful descendants would proclaim themselves dukes, then kings, and then eventually fight among themselves. Meanwhile, the central authority of their supposed leader would be gradually undermined, until some future descendant of the First Emperor would find himself as luckless and friendless as the last of the Zhou.1

  Li Si instead suggested that the empire be divided into 36 provinces, and that each province should be managed by a government appointee. Such people were not to be chosen for their relation to the Emperor, but for their suitability for the job. They should also be removable, subject to veto by a local political officer, and to have powers separate from that of the local military commanders.

  Now that the First Emperor had unified the realm by force, he also began to take steps to ensure that it remained united. As part of the process, weapons were confiscated. Officers ran amnesties all over the empire, and the quantities of bronze thus obtained were melted down and turned into a dozen massive statues in the First Emperor’s capital

  With such vast responsibilities, the Qin government made the maintenance of agriculture one of its central priorities. Officials were expected to keep careful reports of variances in climate and rainfall, and how the fields might be affected. Punishment awaited those who allowed the granary roofs to leak, or who permitted vermin to flourish – three mouseholes found in the walls or floor regarded as equal to one rat hole. Retiring officers were expected to collaborate with their successors in conducting an audit of available stores. Careful notes were to be taken of the condition of tools, and losses and breakages had to be accounted for; this latter command was particularly important, considering that farming implements were a likely source of weaponry for rebellious peasants. Farm workers were discouraged from consuming alcohol – buying or selling it was considered a crime.

  Prior to the time of the First Emperor, each state had issued its own coinage. Qi, Yan and Zhao had used ‘coins’ shaped like small knives, terminating in a round pommel with a hole in it in order to thread the money on a piece of string. But Zhao had another kind of coin, shaped like a shovel, which was also used in its neighbouring states of Han and Wei. In Chu, the local coinage was shaped like a seashell. Only a few places used coins as we might recognise them, circular metal discs with holes in the middle were used as currency in the old royal domain of the Zhou people, a few minor states and in Qin itself. By decree of the First Emperor, all regions under heaven were now obliged to use the Qin coinage.

  Not all prices were defined in coins. The size of a ‘unit’ of gold was also standardised, along with other weights and measures. The Qin government issued domed lumps of metal stamped with a seal of authenticity so that units of weight would be the same all over the empire. It also ensured that whenever a buyer or seller checked his merchandise, he would see the engraved reminder of who was the ruler of all under heaven. Similar decrees established units of volume, with Qin-approved scoops issued to merchants. The immediate benefit to the state came in the ability to establish taxes and tithes all over the empire – fairness for the tax payer was of lesser consideration than ease of access for the tax collector. The unification of weights and measures also streamlined communications across the old borders, encouraging the former Warring States in trade with each other and with their conqueror. More trade, of course, would also mean more tax.2

  The First Emperor’s Legalist background also showed in one of his most important changes, which established basic points of agreement for the Chinese language itself. Legalism placed great value on the naming of things, since categorisation allowed for the enforcement of laws. A passage in Lü Buwei’s Annals on ‘The Right Use of Names’ established that legal waters could easily be muddied by questions of interpretation and jurisdiction.3 The Qin reforms fought this by rationalising the writing system itself, demanding that all states write the pictographs of ancient Chinese in the same way.

  Li Si was one of the prime movers of the project to unify the Chinese script, along with Zhao Gao, now promoted to Keeper of the Chariots, and a historian called Humu Jing, overseeing the writing of three administrative volumes that used approved characters based
on an ancient Zhou dynasty model. The script was considerably simplified – many of the more complex Chinese characters were shorn of their unnecessary adornments. It is still possible, in modern times, to discern pictographic elements in Chinese characters – the Chinese word for ‘horse’ still retains the four legs and the head of its original pictogram, for example. Li Si’s ‘Small Seal’ script was a large step in making Chinese easier to read, and in aiding the disparate peoples of the Qin conquest to communicate with as much ease as they now traded. A word might be pronounced differently in different parts of the empire, such that a man from what was once the Land of the Immaculate might have had trouble understanding a man from the Land of Swallows. But once written down, the word they were trying to use would be clear to both.

  Other sources imply that Li Si’s simplification scheme went in two phases, and that in the later years of the Qin system it was subject to further simplification, by legal clerks frustrated with a script that was still too complicated – certain terms, it seems, were being written over and over, by legal officers who wished they were simpler. Whatever the process, within a few years of the conquest, the inhabitants of the empire were strongly encouraged to use the new approved characters, and before long, many of the pre-imperial texts were incomprehensible to the non-specialist.4