The First Emperor of China

by Jonathan Clements

  The nature of Qin punishments is also the cause of some debate. The severity of a punishment increased in cases of premeditated crime, and was particularly severe if the individual were in a position of responsibility. Officials were fined for losing their seals or documents, and the money would not be returned if the items were later rediscovered. Wardens and thief-catchers in particular were singled out for heavy punitive measures if they abused their position.18 In one of the more entertaining test-cases to be found among Judge Xi’s books, two burglars meet by chance when both accidentally rob a house at the same time, and hatch an impromptu plan to cooperate. When they are caught during their escape, the Qin officials must determine if they have conspired beforehand. If they have, then each is sentenced for the theft of the entire amount; if they have not met before, then each is to be sentenced based merely on the amount he was carrying.19

  The Qin definition of ‘theft’ stretched beyond the commission of an act itself. A crime of breaking and entering was considered to have been committed the moment a lock was forced, regardless of whether the criminal actually opened the door. In the eyes of the Qin official, breaking a lock constituted proof of intent to commit burglary, and that itself was punishable by a fine. The interest of Qin officials lay in the smooth running of the Qin state, not in the acquisition of wealth for its citizens. If a man’s goat was stolen, he was expected to be grateful for its return, and not to cause a fuss if it was missing its leash.

  The punishment for perjury or false accusation was the same as that which the perjurer was claiming – falsely accusing someone of murder would lead to one’s own execution. Different rules applied to criminals introducing false accusations as part of a plea-bargain. If they were found to be telling lies, they were not executed, but given an extra six years’ hard labour.

  Since voluntary reporting of others’ crimes was such a central part of Qin legal processes, rules were strict on aiding and abetting. In the case of petty crime, leniency was granted to one’s neighbours, but an expectation that someone ought to have noticed accompanied increases in the level of severity. Neighbours were expected to take note of sudden, suspicious increases in wealth, and were steered into reporting it before they shared in it. Such orders even applied to a wife – if her husband suddenly appeared with a 100 coins out of nowhere, she could be charged with holding stolen goods if she did not question their origin. If she did so and was told that they were stolen, then she would share the same charge as her husband unless she reported him. Sharing in any way in the profits of the crime would immediately make someone liable to bear the same punishments as the original criminal. In extension of the Qin dynasty’s own sternly paternalistic attitude, different rules applied for parents: it was not considered a crime for a father to steal from his children.20 Slave masters were obliged to sell mothers into slavery along with their children, until such time as the children were able to work for themselves and become less of a burden upon future owners.

  The close-knit nature of communities can be seen in the law’s demand for sponsors or ‘guarantors’ for any criminal. A criminal on remand or probation was obliged to provide associates or family members as collateral. If he absconded from his punishment, his sponsors were expected to endure it on his behalf – few criminals would be a flight-risk if their actions threatened the lives of several relatives.21 Bystanders within one hundred paces of any altercation were expected to intervene or face a fine.

  Qin legal statutes also contain precise calculations for leniency, based partly on criminal intent, but also on the means by which the state might benefit most from the convict’s labour. It was a crime to kill a healthy child, but not a crime to kill one that was deformed or disabled. The murder of a law-enforcement official was considered to be premeditated, even if the criminal killed in the heat of the moment. Officials who allowed the guilty to go free were subject to serve the same punishment as the man they should have sentenced. It can be seen that in many cases of Qin law, it was best to err on the side of the overly harsh, rather than risk the punishment one might face for being too lenient.22

  While the punishments applied to all present, any protective elements in the laws only seemed to apply to Qin citizens. Immigrants endured a lower status – if a Qin citizen got into a fight with a foreigner, he would be able to redeem himself with a small payment. Slaves were only partly complicit in the actions of their masters – Qin law acknowledged the difficult line between obedience to one’s owner and obedience to law, especially in cases where an unwitting slave was ordered to carry out a relatively blameless act that facilitated a master’s crime. Where slaves or citizens were duped by another into criminal acts, such as receiving stolen goods, they were to be let off without charge so long as their innocence could be established.23

  The currency of many fines was not money, but armour, the better to streamline the process of supplying more material for the ongoing war effort. Since the Qin aristocracy relied so heavily on rewards for military prowess, false claims of achievements in battle were harshly punished, and even officers of rank were partly responsible for their men’s performance. Great care was taken with horses, as befits Qin’s origins as a pasture. There was a fine for not unharnessing horses after a journey, and the law takes great care to specify where unruly stallions might be located in a team of horses. Sergeants were fined if their crossbowmen were unable to hit a target to an accepted degree of accuracy, and charioteers who could not drive properly would also cause punishment to be passed upon to their teachers, and to reimburse the state for the cost of their training.24

  For learned men who knew the system, there were other ways of manipulating it. During periods of amnesty, Qin officials were instructed to enforce the letter of the First Emperor’s decision – it was feasible to steal a thousand coins, spend the profits and get away scot-free, so long as one confessed to the crime during a period of amnesty. However, men who openly abused a position of responsibility were to be sentenced as if they were impostors who had forged their credentials.25

  In times of particular hardship, Qin citizens might be so bold as to steal food from sacrificial altars. Qin lawmakers were obliged to come up with statutes defining the values of meat stolen from temple ceremonies. Parts used in a sacrifice were considered more valuable than the leftovers from the sacrificial animal. For as long as a sacrifice was in progress – while the sacred vessels were awaiting the divine presence, or while the temple music continued to play, theft of sacrificial meat was considered to be not only criminal, but also blasphemous. Lesser charges awaited scavengers who lifted cast-offs, botched sacrifices and leftovers from waste pits.26

  Qin penal codes included several grades of execution, of which decapitation was perhaps the most benign. Other crimes required the executioner to cut his victim in half at the waist, or for an individual to be torn apart by four horse-drawn chariots, one attached to each extremity. Some crimes called for a subject to be ‘dishonoured’ while still alive, presumed to be tattooing, castration or some form of torture, followed by execution. If the convict was a leper, the executioner was spared prolonged contact and permitted to push the victim into water to drown. The fate of a victim’s corpse after execution was also a part of the punishment – the more shameful the crime, the greater likelihood that the convict’s corpse would be further mutilated or exposed.

  Many sentences contained a combination of the above punishments. The Qin legal statutes make offhand mention of ‘palace watchmen’, who appear to be convicted criminals so crippled by their punishments that they could only function as glorified door openers. As with other ancient societies with surprisingly high levels of technology, it is often easy to forget that many tasks now carried out by machines were instead carried out by slaves shorn of all vestiges of humanity. The Qin state had no place for the disabled – deformed children were killed at birth, and mutilated adults were expected to work in the ‘hidden offices’, out of sight of the able-bodied. For the disabled, life in Qin was
the epitome of Legalism’s desire to turn people into mere cogs in the engine of the state; some of them, quite literally must have been forced to crouch in alcoves and behind partitions, to carry out the most banal functions.27

  Criminals were readily identifiable by their red clothing – perhaps a snide gesture of disrespect to the fire-themed colours of the preceding Zhou dynasty. Male criminals were also relieved of their beards and, perhaps, eyebrows. Tattooing was a common sentence, although human skin has not been so well preserved over 2200 years as bronze and terracotta, so it is unclear what a punitive tattoo looked like. Tattooing, however, was regarded as the lightest of the ‘mutilations’, bodily punishments that extended to include the hacking off of a convict’s nose, or the removal of one or both feet. The nature of the maiming is thought to be the removal of the toes and front part of the foot, leaving the heel intact – otherwise it is difficult to see how certain mutilated workers would be able to carry out hard labour sentences.

  However, where possible, the manpower-hungry Qin government preferred its convicts to be sentenced to work details. Some crimes called for total enslavement of the perpetrator, while others set a mandatory period of service. Sentences of hard labour are concealed beneath euphemisms that allude to earlier punishments. Men could be ‘sent to gather firewood’ for the spirit altars, a series of jobs from chopping wood to stoking palace furnaces. Female convicts were sentenced to ‘pound and sift rice’.

  Once again, fortune favoured the wealthy or well-educated – officials were encouraged not to give menial tasks to skilled artisans or convicts whose abilities could be better used elsewhere. The lightest form of labour punishment was simple bond-service, in which a worker was obliged to perform their occupation without remuneration. At the end of a hard labour term of service, a convict might hope to have his workload downgraded to wood gathering. For particularly good behaviour, some convicts were able to serve their last couple of years as guards or overseers.

  There was one punishment, however, that was regarded as the harshest of all, for which a convict could expect to have his head fully shaven, to be sent to the furthest edges of the Qin empire, perhaps never to return, often accompanied by his equally doomed family. It was a backbreaking task that killed many thousands of labourers, forced to shovel, hammer and lift in all extremes of weather, from the tearing sands of the desert to the snowy heights of the mountains. On the statute books, this most terrible of sentences could be identified by a single word: Wall.

  5 The Longest Cemetery

  Wall building had long been a regular occupation of ancient Chinese states. Wooden palisades, earth ramparts, ditches or stone walls were used to define borders, although many of them grew out of more agricultural concerns. Qin had its northern and western borders to defend against barbarian influence, but much of the technology of wall building had its origins not in defence, but in farming and communications.

  After a Qin army conquered a region, it was soon joined by colonists and workers. Pardoned criminals, undesirables and the disenfranchised were transported to new regions, many of them given the harsh choice between slavery on the new frontier or death back home. All roads, so the saying might have gone, led to Xianyang, fanning out from the Qin capital towards newly conquered regions, mainly to the east, with little road development westwards. This was most obvious in Sichuan, one of the first provinces to fall under Qin control, where many decades of public works had forged strong links with the Qin centre. Qin engineers had circumvented the towering mountain regions by constructing a wooden terrace that clung to the mountainside and created a large enough flat area to permit horse-drawn carriages to speed over to Qin’s new conquests. A horseman from Xianyang would be able to gallop around perilous mountain passes on wooden terraces, cross rivers on long bridges suspended on lines of boats, and travel some stretches on convoys of linked ships. But none of these developments were there for the tourist. As in other empires, they were built to afford swift passage to troops in times of trouble, and to move resources around Qin’s conquests. The roads and canals south to Sichuan linked the Qin capital to one of China’s richest area for iron- and salt-mining, north they afforded passage to the horse plains that supplied Qin’s beasts of burden, and east to the conquered nations of China proper.

  From the earliest times, state organisation in China had been largely based on water monopolies – the need to tame the unpredictable rivers, many of which had wide or non-existent flood plains. This became increasingly important in the centuries preceding the First Emperor as the ancient states embraced rice agriculture. From 1000 BC onwards, the ancient Chinese constructed ever greater numbers of rice paddies, a process that involved levelling the ground, pounding the porous undersoil until it would not drain dry, and then walling in each field with a barrier and drainage ditch. It was backbreaking labour, but it also multiplied food resources by a factor of ten, and turned every peasant in the eastern world into someone with basic knowledge of wall construction and irrigation.1

  One of the main achievements of the states of pre-Qin China lay in its successful construction of dams and levees to control local water supplies. Such projects were also a large source of local tension, since they required workers obtained through compulsory corvee service, or suitable numbers of slaves and captured soldiers from rival nations. The dam schemes were also notoriously parochial, since state borders often followed natural features. A mountain was a difficult object to move, but a river was unpredictable. There are many cases in early Chinese history of a state protecting itself from flood by unleashing ruinous torrents onto a neighbour. The danger of such unnatural disasters made the the construction of water defences a vital part of ancient Chinese statecraft – many of the ‘walls’ that marked state borders did not begin as walls at all, but dikes designed to steer floodwaters.2

  As the states jostled for supremacy, wall building took on a new character. In the four centuries before the ascendancy of the First Emperor, the states had put their criminals, war captives and dispossessed to work. Chu, Land of the Immaculate had been the first, and the others followed suit. Qi, Land of the Devout, marked its border with a network of short walls linking river defences to impassable cliffs. As in many other countries around the world, the wall did not even need to be particularly high, merely high enough to prevent horsemen jumping it or running off with the local livestock that often constituted the greater part of natives’ wealth.

  The scheme strengthened the land of Qi so much that it conquered other neighbouring regions, forcing it to redraw its borders and build new walls. There was not one ‘great wall’ in China, but a thousand, forming a network of largely redundant barriers, each a fading memory of a time when a border or river once stood somewhere nearby. With the ascendancy of the First Emperor, almost all of the walls became superfluous to requirements. Those that still had some water-control function were maintained, while others were left to fall into ruin.

  To the east, the First Emperor’s domain ended at the sea. To the south and west, the mountains of the Tibetan plateau and the jungles of Indochina formed a strong enough barrier to prevent any concern among the Qin administrators. However, to the north and west, modern Mongolia and Siberia, there remained the constant threat of barbarian incursions.

  The Qin walls only protected Qin, but now Qin was responsible for the entire frontier, the First Emperor put managers to work on one of his most famous projects, the linking of the Qin wall with those that protected the northern frontier of Zhao, Land of Latecoming, and Yan, Land of Swallows.

  Such a project was a massive undertaking, but there was manpower to spare. The northern wall region was the final frontier for the Qin, separated into 12 marches. Each region was a military zone, maintained largely for the supply of the wall-building garrisons. Its easternmost point was legendarily Shanhai, the Pass on the Sea, where the mountains dropped suddenly to leave a narrow corridor of flat ground. There, the Wall was extended out into the sea itself, and above the gate to
the north, a sign simply read: ‘First Pass Under Heaven’. Southwards, to the Chinese mind, lay the World. North, lay nothing but forests and mountains.3 However, the Shanhai Pass was not the location of the Qin wall, but of later defences. The Qin wall was far to the north of Shanhai, protecting the Liaodong peninsula in addition.

  Meng Tian, son of the family of generals and a trusted servant of the First Emperor, was placed in charge of the wall project. The grand plan was to construct a road across the Ordos plateau, affording easy passage to the upper reaches of the Yellow river. In doing so, the Qin state would expand its borders over the home pastures of several barbarian tribes – known collectively to the Chinese as the Hu. The Great Wall, cutting off off the approaches just north of the river, would ensure that the Qin heartland was further protected.

  There was nothing particularly new about Meng Tian’s project. In fact, his road scheme reached north from the previous Qin wall, which encompassed the former regions of the Rong and Di barbarians, and may have even included some of their own walls, designed to keep out the people of Qin.4 What made a real difference was the sheer scale.

  Although the road scheme was never fully completed, and the locations of parts of the Great Wall remain matters of modern conjecture, Meng Tian’s project was a vast undertaking. It formed a territorial marker, but also a fortress, both for further expansion north, and for the administration of the area immediately to the south. Archaeology along its ruins has determined that the local ‘barbarians’ were not ousted in favour of colonists, but often permitted to live among them. Many of them were also only ‘barbarians’ through the misfortune of not being from Qin – like the forgotten people of ancient Sichuan, they came from civilised, long-standing cultures, wiped out and wiped over by the onslaught of the Qin armies. Wall building was thus an impressive undertaking, an endeavour of temporary military occupation, which gave way to the slower progress of thousands of workers.