The First Emperor of China

by Jonathan Clements

  After the ceremonies at Mount Tai, the First Emperor’s entourage headed further along the northern coast of Shandong to the easternmost point of his empire. The First Emperor’s progress then continued back along the southern coast of Shandong, before heading inland again at the picturesque Mount Langya. The site was famed for its scenery, and had been chosen by an ancient king as the ideal place to build a tower overlooking the sea. But the Langya tower was now in ruins, causing the First Emperor to announce that he would have it rebuilt, and in a suitably more ostentatious fashion than the original, since he was an emperor, and the original builder had been a mere king. However, the First Emperor caused some consternation among his subjects by announcing that he would remain at Langya to observe the renovations. He had, after all, seen the massive ramparts of the western wall, and the achievements in road building and architecture throughout his domain. Langya Tower would be a similarly impressive monument, and, to what must have been his followers’ intense annoyance, the Emperor was going to stay and watch. He was sure, he said, it would only take a few weeks.4

  Despite the efforts of the work-teams, and the conscription of thousands of peasants from the surrounding area to drag rocks along the slopes, the project took several months. Local legend holds that a number of bitter folk-songs date back to the project, lamenting farmers’ fates, torn away from their fields to labour on a pointless imperial folly, starving while their crops rotted unharvested. Eventually, the tower was complete, and the elated emperor arranged for another memorial to be carved into a monument, which praised, without a scrap of irony, the wondrous way his imperial grace brought happiness to his people.

  Although not mentioned in the Record of the Historian, we can hazard a reasonable guess at what happened next. The First Emperor had already looked out over the seas to the east at the empire’s furthermost point. Now, at Langya, he had one last opportunity to do so, and mused aloud about what may lie beyond the horizon. The Record of the Historian picks up the story at Langya, with the arrival of men who could supply an answer.

  Something had happened to the First Emperor during his journey to Shandong. Perhaps it was the weight of his achievements and responsibilities. Apart from a childhood in Handan, the Historian makes no record of the First Emperor physically experiencing the world beyond Qin until after his coronation. Perhaps it was only after undertaking a journey of many hundreds of miles that he was beginning to appreciate what had been done in his name. Now, he had seen its furthest frontiers, and witnessed for himself just what could be achieved through the harsh application of the Qin laws.

  Although born to a dynasty that scorned superstition, and educated by a man whose disdain for the supernatural was legendary, the First Emperor had begun to worry about his own mortality.

  Perhaps the Emperor had been led into such thoughts by the elaborate preparations for his royal tomb. The commission of an imperial mausoleum would have, however nobly, drawn attention to the fact that the First Emperor, while revered as the embodiment of perfection, would inevitably die. After gaining the world, the First Emperor was forced to recognise that he would eventually leave it behind.

  The First Emperor refused to believe it. It is not uncommon for accounts of royalty to allude to insanity – what could be more insane than being set up as a living god, reared for imperial excellence, and appointment as the earthly representative of an unknowable divine order? As he entered his forties, his mid-life crisis manifested itself in extreme ambition. He had already done the impossible by conquering the world, how hard would it be to conquer death?

  Thanks to the onerous responsibilities of organising a suitable ritual on Mount Tai, the imperial entourage had gained a following of local wise men. Some were learned men who had spent their lives studying the Confucian classics and debating fine points of court protocol. Some were charlatans.

  One of the latter group was Xufu, a man from the Land of the Devout who claimed to know Taoist secrets of immortality – there was a magic pill, he claimed, that could make a man live forever. He informed the First Emperor that there was indeed something beyond the eastern seas. Some days’ sail away, there was a chain of holy islands, where the immortals themselves could be found. Suddenly, the First Emperor was interested. He pressed the self-professed sorcerer, and, perhaps, Xufu realised that he was digging his own grave. In what may have been an attempt to fudge the issue, Xufu assured the emperor that it was very difficult, almost impossible for human beings to approach the isles of the immortals. Only qualified wizards and pure youths and maidens might be able to approach.

  It sounded like a good enough risk to the First Emperor, who immediately authorised the commission of a fleet, to be crewed by Xufu and his cronies, with a thousand virgin boys and girls to be rounded up from the region. The First Emperor wanted Xufu to go in search of the isles of the immortals, to find the miracle immortality pills, and to bring some back for his ruler.5

  Xufu’s exploration venture was not the only hare-brained scheme authorised by the First Emperor. As the entourage made its way back west from the coast, leaving Xufu to somehow draft his virgin crews, the First Emperor stopped in at Peng-cheng. There, he continued with prayers and sacrifices, intent on locating an important artefact. He had seen the western walls of his great grandfather the Bright King. He had seen the eastern ocean, the existence of which he had previously only taken on faith. He believed that loyal sorcerers were going in search of the potion that would make him live forever, so perhaps it is not surprising that was more susceptible to other beliefs.

  He also ordered the construction of further monuments to his greatness, for which he, or his stone-carvers, among the usual statements of imperial glory and lasting wondrousness, saw fit to make a comparison between the First Emperor and the sovereigns of legend. It was a sign of increasing hubris, since the First Emperor, or his stone carvers, regarded his achievement as somehow greater than that of the demigods of old. In his estimation, he had conquered an area even larger than that defined as the ‘under heaven’ of Chinese myths. Moreover, thanks to the Legalist system pioneered by Lord Shang, instituted over many decades in Qin, and brought to fruition by Lü Buwei and Li Si, the First Emperor believed that his government was better, too. His inscription said, of the ancient Sovereigns:

  The Sovereigns of ancient times had knowledge that was disordered, and laws that were disunified. They posed as divine beings to deceive and frighten their different subjects, but their deeds did not live up to their boasts, and so their reigns did not endure. Even before their deaths, their nobles rebelled, and their laws went unheeded.6

  The implication was clear – the great men of the past, so revered by previous generations, were nothing compared to the First Emperor. But even as the empire promulgated its old-style Qin disdain of religion, its ruler continued to drift ever further into superstition.

  Peng-cheng was the legendary site of one of his great grandfather’s setbacks. During the Bright King’s grab for power and battles with the doomed Zhou dynasty, he had attempted to gain the powerful magical artefacts known as the Nine Tripods. But one had eluded him, and allegedly ‘flown away’ from the royal domain. If one believed in the Ninth Tripod, and someone in the First Emperor’s entourage was clearly giving it enough credence, then it may have been the vital missing factor that prevented the Bright King from becoming the Ruler of the World long before his great-grandson. By that token, the First Emperor owed it to his ancestor to locate the missing artefact, and owed it to his dynasty’s future success to secure it for himself. The Ninth Tripod, according to the Qin state’s record, had flown through the air far to the east, where it had crashlanded somewhere suitably distant to be of nothing but academic concern to the Qin chroniclers. Inadvisedly confident that nobody would be able to go and look, they estimated its last known resting place in the Land of the Devout, in a river near Peng-cheng.7

  At the time, the Land of the Devout had been the most powerful, but also the most distant rival state. In l
ater generations, the rival’s supposed possession of the Ninth Tripod had presented a handy excuse for the coalition forces that toppled the one regime that could have contended with Qin for mastery of all under heaven. But now that there was a First Emperor, he wanted the Ninth Tripod for himself, and he was prepared to wait while a thousand divers searched the river. The Record of the Historian does not say how long he idled on the banks, but he seems to have lost patience relatively quickly. Assuming that the artefact would soon be found, the entourage left the divers to it and moved on, heading further to the south.

  A later folktale, recorded in Li Daoyuan’s Commentary on the River Classic of the Northern Wei dynasty, seems to refer to the sighting, or presumed sighting of the Ninth Tripod. Supposedly, the First Emperor was told that the Ninth Tripod had been seen in the river. But although the dredgers’ rope caught on something below the surface:

  …when they tried to pull the tripod out, a dragon bit the rope in two. Therefore the local people whispered ‘No sooner did it bring delight, than the line of the tripod was cut. 8

  It was a bad omen for the First Emperor, since the ‘line of the tripod’, as written in Chinese, could refer to either a rope around a cauldron, or a dynasty hoping to achieve absolute power – if thwarted in one meaning, it was implied, Ying Zheng would be defeated in both.

  The First Emperor intended to take in all four corners of his domain. Although his armies would press further to the south in his own lifetime, the southernmost point he reached in his own travels was Mount Xiang on what had formerly been the southern marches of the Land of the Immaculate. According to legend, Mount Xiang was the burial site of the Princesses Ehuang and Nüying, daughters of a divine ruler of legend, who had also become the concubines of his nominated successor. The bamboo groves on the mountain’s slopes were renowned for speckled patterns on the wood, said to be the girls’ tears, which fell onto the mountain slopes when they found that their ruler had died from overwork.

  Doubtless still smarting from the embarrassments of Mount Tai and the fruitless riverbed search, the First Emperor was in no mood for the bad weather that plagued him on the lake. Seeing the roof of the princesses’ shrine in the distance, he angrily asked about its origin. On being told the story of the two princesses, he decreed that they were merely the daughters or bedmates of true greatness, and undeserving of their noble titles. Thinking that the spirits of the princesses were responsible for the choppy waters that had almost upended his imperial boat, the First Emperor ordered for the mountain itself to be punished. There was no propitiation for Mount Xiang, instead three thousand convicts were shipped to the mountain to strip its slopes of all trees and greenery. Another legend of the same event claimed that First Emperor also orderd the entire mountain painted red, the colour of a criminal’s clothing, although the Record of the Historian restricts itself to reporting the deforestation. It is worth noting that 3,000 Qin convicts, swarming all over the mountain in their distinctive scarlet garb, would be enough in themselves to appear to ‘paint it red’; perhaps this is the origin of the folktale. The shrine itself was set on fire and left to burn, as a warning to any other divinities who dared to challenge the First Emperor’s power.9

  The following year, 218, the First Emperor took another journey to the east, revisiting many of the same sites. The plan seems to have been a second visit to Shandong, the easternmost point and the Langya tower were also on his itinerary, although there does not appear to have been any plan to head south again. The train proceeded with soldiers marching on all sides, and 36 carriages, many identical, and most flying the traditional black flags of the First Emperor’s family and lucky element.

  Despite warnings of bandit activity in the region, the First Emperor’s entourage continued, only for the peace of its progress to be disrupted by a lump of iron falling from the sky. Somewhere above the train of carriages, a would-be assassin had pushed a heavy weight from a cliff, aiming straight at the carriage he believed to be the First Emperor’s. His judgement was one out, and his assassination anvil instead crushed the carriage directly in front of his actual target, sending debris flying that itself almost caused the First Emperor to be injured.

  The assassin did not have quite as lucky an escape. He was apprehended by guards, and taken to Li Si and Zhao Gao for interrogation. He supposedly regaled them with a curse:

  The fatuous and self-indulgent emperor killed the princes and crushed the six states. Won’t their descendants kill him? All the loyal officials of the dynasties will have their revenge!10

  Refusing to give his name, the man claimed that he had missed deliberately, before letting slip that his only regret was that he had let his young master down. When pressed as to who that mysterious ‘young master’ might be, he somehow eluded the clutches of his tormentors, and killed himself by smashing his head into a nearby column.

  The unfortunate demise of the sole suspect did not deter Li Si and Zhao Gao from investigating further. Homing in on the phrases ‘young master’ and ‘loyal officials’, they deduced that there was an ideal suspect close by – a man called Ji Ping, whose father had been a chief minister in the state of Han, and who himself had served two kings as an official before the Qin conquest. Ji Ping himself had a young son, angered by the theft of his birthright, and with a suitable motive for trying to kill the First Emperor.

  Remarkably, Li Si’s reasoning was correct. Although many local aristocrats had maintained their lifestyles and and former wealth after the Qin conquest, one son of the local Ji family was indeed unsatisfied. He is remembered to posterity as ‘Zhang Liang’, although that is merely an alias he assumed during his flight from Qin justice. Turning his back on a family rich enough to afford 300 slaves at their mansion, he vowed to avenge the fallen Han rulers, but did so in secret.

  Like the earlier plan of the Red Prince, Zhang Liang’s operation took a long while in forming. Although he lacked the Red Prince’s national budget, he bided his time until a suitable candidate presented himself, the strongman Cang Hai Gong. It was this Cai Hang Gong who was the suicidal would-be assassin, a man who had demonstrated a superhuman ability to throw large weights for great distances, although an all-too-human fallibility in the selection of his target. But while the cracked skull of Cang Hai Gong was hacked away from his dead shoulders and put on display on the walls of a local city, Zhang Liang was able to make good his escape. He was forced to spend several years in hiding.11

  There was a brief and violent display of imperial investigation in the region, designed to ensure that the locals appreciated who was boss. However, it would appear that the incident was covered up to some extent, since the organisers would come forward after the First Emperor’s death to reveal that they had escaped with their lives. The imperial party then hastened back to the relative safety of the Langya tower, which seems to have become something of a coastal retreat for the First Emperor, where he might while away the summer months on the releatively cooler coast, before heading back towards his landlocked capital for winter. Before returning to the Qin heartland, the First Emperor commissioned two further monuments, the text of which makes specific reference to his reforms. If there is any element of truth rather than official spin, by the year 218 the First Emperor believed that Li Si’s programmes to unite the laws, weights and measures had been fully implemented.12

  For the following two years, 217 and 216, as the Record of the Historian bluntly puts it, ‘nothing happened.’ The First Emperor remained in Xianyang, and made no further tours out to the coast, perhaps spooked by the latest assassination attempt, or occupied with other tasks. The various building schemes of the Wall, other defences, the construction of the public buildings, and the massive population movements were probably more than enough to keep a nation busy, and the only decree noted in the annals comes right at the end of 216, when the First Emperor granted an increase in allotted rations to citizens of his empire. However, the reasons for the lack of official activities may have been more personal – the Fi
rst Emperor may have found a new hobby, and one that kept him close to the palace, and out of public sight.

  After the hardships of unification and consolidation, his 216 decree shows a sign of softening and perhaps satisfaction. China was finally unified, not only in theory, but in practise. However, human nature remained unchanged. It seems that the First Emperor either tired of palace life, or decided to put his own system to the test. Late in 216, he donned civilian clothes and slipped out into the city in disguise, accompanied only by four bodyguards.

  Outside the palace, nobody knew the First Emperor’s face. He was able to walk among his people without fear of assault. Although he set little store with the ancient texts of olden times, it was said that when the great sage Confucius once ran a town along virtuous principles, that people began to internalise the laws.13 People passed each other on the streets with the correct degrees of decorum and respect, lost articles were left where they had fallen, so that the owners might find them, and life became harmonious. Perhaps the First Emperor was expecting to find something similar in his capital. Instead, as he wandered along the banks of a city pond, he was jumped by a group of thieves.14

  His bodyguards, who had presumably been maintaining a discrete distance, soon came to the rescue, and swiftly beat the would-be robbers to death. But the effect on the First Emperor saw him return to his previous severity. After thirty years as the ruler of Qin, and five as the supposed ruler of the world, the emperor was unable to walk outside his own palace without getting mugged. There was clearly still work to be done.