Now standing unopposed, Zhao Gao continued his efforts to keep the Second Emperor out of sight. The Record of the Historian recounts a strange incident that may have been a symbol of Zhao Gao’s supreme authority, or perhaps a cruel means of confusing an already-addled mind. He supposedly presented the Second Emperor with a deer, telling him that it was a horse.
The Second Emperor laughed and corrected Zhao Gao, only to find all the other attendants were in on the deception; they all assured him that he was looking at a horse.
Now convinced that he was suffering from delusions, the emperor was persuaded to confine himself to his quarters, fasting, and occupying himself with hunting trips and other distractions. He was, understandably, also troubled by nightmares, telling Zhao Gao that he dreamed his carriage had been attacked by a white tiger, which killed one of the horses. Zhao Gao interpreted it for him with more mystical diversions, telling him that he was under the curse of Evil Water, which needed to be fought off with further prayers and sacrifices. Zhao Gao advised a country trip, in the course of which the emperor should throw four white horses into a nearby river, and thereby break the spell.
Bundled out of town on the pointless mission, the Second Emperor became so jittery, that when he saw a human figure in the trees on his hunting grounds, he immediately shot him.
Zhao Gao made an earnest show of covering up the accident, arranging with the Prefect of the capital (conveniently, his own son-in-law) to announce the discovery of a corpse with no clue as to the assailant. However, in private, he berated the emperor for his manslaughter of an innocent bystander, and warned him that unless he left the palace, the gods would punish him.15
By this point, however, the Second Emperor was growing angry. Frustrated with the stories of revolts in the outside world, he lost his temper and chastised Zhao Gao. It was a relatively small deed, simply the arrival of a messenger informing Zhao Gao that the emperor was unhappy with developments. However, it was a fatal error for the Second Emperor, who had thus far been tolerated as a convenient figurehead for Zhao Gao. By flexing his imperial muscles, he had just demonstrated that he was too dangerous to continue in his role.
The conquered nations had reverted to their independent state. The Qin empire was over, within a few years of the First Emperor’s final victory. Zhao Gao, however, was prepared to make the best of a bad situation. If Qin was no longer an empire, it could be a kingdom again. He could arrange it so that the Second Emperor took the blame, and perhaps explain that imperial ambitions were an offence against heaven, and had been punished. All he needed to do was remove the Second Emperor and replace him with a more pliable ruler – a new king of Qin, not an emperor.
A mere three days after the Second Emperor had relocated to his country retreat, Zhao Gao arranged for members of the palace guard to dress as bandits and feign an attack on the residence.
The last battle of the Qin empire was a brawl at a country house, with the Second Emperor’s eunuchs and attendants on one side, and the disguised soldiers of the palace guard on the other. Several dozen died in the scuffle, until the Second Emperor was found cowering behind the curtains in his chambers.
Even the Record of the Historian cannot decide on exactly what happened next. It presents two versions of the same event. In one, Zhao Gao permits the emperor to flee to a high tower, and then persuaded him to jump rather than face capture by what he claimed were ‘bandits’.
In the other version, the Second Emperor found himself alone with a single remaining eunuch. He asked his last faithful servant why he had not warned him before, and the eunuch replied that the emperor had killed everyone who had tried to warn him, and that staying silent had been the only way of staying alive.
Zhao Gao’s son-in-law entered the chamber, flanked by archers and guardsmen. They read out the accusations levelled against the Second Emperor: that he had failed in his imperial duty, performed badly as a ruler, and lost the Mandate of Heaven. The Second Emperor pleaded to see Zhao Gao, but his request was refused. Instead, the Prefect ordered that the Second Emperor ‘take appropriate steps.’
Perhaps seeing Zhao Gao’s plan to downgrade Qin to a humble kingdom once more, the Second Emperor offered to resign his imperial status. When this was refused, he instead suggested that he be pensioned off with a noble title. When even this was refused, he begged to be allowed to live as a commoner, as he had supposedly permitted some of his relatives to do so.
The Prefect realised that he had perhaps not made himself clear. He told the Second Emperor that the sentence was death. As the guards approached to carry it out, the Second Emperor killed himself.16
What happened next is also a subject of debate. One ancient account claims that Zhao Gao took the emperor’s seal and announced that now, he was the ruler of Qin. Much to his annoyance, however, the assembled nobles refused to obey him, and he was forced, with great reluctance, to put a member of the royal family back on the throne.17
In a council of the surviving nobles and ministers, Zhao Gao announced that the empire was gone. Instead, he nominated a young prince, Ziying, as the new king of Qin, hoping thereby to cancel any difficulties on the other side of the passes. If the ruler of Qin no longer claimed to rule the world, then presumably Qin would be spared the need to fight off any rebels.
Prince Ziying’s exact identity is unclear. One account calls him a younger brother of the First Emperor, another calls him a nephew of the Second. His credentials, however, were impeccable, as was his grasp of court politics. King Ziying knew all too well that Zhao Gao had only enthroned him with greatest reluctance, and he had already seen what happened to those who got in Zhao Gao’s way. There were already whispers at court that Zhao Gao had received messengers from the Land of the Immaculate, offering to recognise him as king of Qin. Unless Ziying acted quickly, Zhao Gao could all too easily trump up some new charges, or, worse, arrange for an invasion from the Land of the Immaculate to instal himself to his ‘rightful’ throne. Accordingly, Ziying immediately confined himself in his quarters, feigning sickness, and thereby avoiding a trip to the local temple that might have been an attempt by Zhao Gao to arrange an assassination.
When Zhao Gao eventually came to pay his respects to Ziying, the king stabbed him to death, and ordered his relatives to be executed. But by then it was too late, armies were already marching on Qin. A mere 46 days after his enthronement, the last king of Qin was forced to ride out to surrender before one Liu Bang who had, like Zhang Han, once been a gang-master on the construction of the First Emperor’s tomb. Liu Bang led a force of 3000 into the Qin capital, killing any remaining defenders, and carrying off the children as slaves. Liu Bang’s troops had red uniforms, the former colour of Qin criminals, itself a reference to the ruling element of the former Zhou dynasty – Fire.
Fire is what Liu Bang brought to the Qin capital, razing it to the ground in a conflagration that engulfed the entire city, including the famous Apang Hall and the irreplaceable library of banned books. With that, Qin was truly gone. Ziying and his family were soon executed and China was plunged back into civil war.
Although the domain of the First Emperor was no more, his ambition continued to inspire others. It was only a few years after the destruction of the Qin capital that Liu Bang would return, to build again on the opposite bank of the Wei river. This new town would become Chang’an, the capital of a new emperor and a new dynasty. The dynasty was the Han, and its first emperor would be Liu Bang.
In less than a decade, the ten thousand year plan of the First Emperor had been destroyed.
Epilogue: The Terracotta Army
The First Emperor’s ‘ten thousand generations’ barely lasted a few years past his death, but his successors improved upon his ambition. Liu Bang’s Han dynasty lasted, give or take a couple of succession squabbles, for 400 years, many of which were spent gazing over its figurative shoulder at the ‘mistakes’ of its predecessor. The Qin dynasty was an object lesson in political failure, but also a bogeyman to be appeased �
�� despite its alleged evils, it was accorded fearful respect by the dynasty that followed it. Liu Bang himself ordered in 195 BC that ‘twenty households’ should move to the site of the Qin Emperor’s mausoleum to watch over the tomb.
In the intervening centuries, not even the Han dynasty endured. It was followed by other civil wars, and other unifications. Sometimes, new border regions asserted control – tribesmen from beyond the wall proclaimed themselves emperor on several occasions, including the Mongols in the Middle Ages, and the last conquerors, the Manchus. China reached its farthest extent during the Manchus’ Qing dynasty, lasting from 1644 until the 20th century. The last emperor was finally deposed, replaced first by a Republican government, and then the Communists who rule mainland China to this day.
These later dynasties improved upon the wall building of the First Emperor, only adding to his mystique, but while the Qin dynasty was regarded as the first of China’s historical rulers, it was not regarded as the greatest. There was simply no evidence of what it had achieved, historians were left with nothing but the legends and stories of ancient chroniclers, and occasional pieces of archaeological evidence.
It has been suggested that the Qin state’s rapid rise to power, and its co-option of conquered nation after nation of slave labourers, created a one-off manpower dividend allowing for the unification of China, the centralisation of authority, the breaking of new farmland, and the building of roads and cross-state connections.1 While there may have been other boundaries, the concept of a Great Wall created for the first time the concept of a China that would be safe behind it.
Every dynasty, however, had its stories of the First Emperor. Ban Gu, the historian of the Han, corroborated the stories of the First Emperor’s tomb, and reported that its outer façade had been destroyed in a fire by one of the armies that overran Qin. He also implied that it was not long before looters descended upon the rubble, and that after they had departed, the site was abandoned. What outer evidence of the tomb still remained was burned in a second blaze, this time started by a shepherd searching for a sheep in one of the access tunnels, and rashly doing so with a torch that set fire to the struts above.2
Six hundred years after the death of the First Emperor, the geographer Li Daoyuan told another story. He explained that Mount Li had been chosen as a site for its auspicious geology: it had once had a gold mine on its north face and a jade mine on its south face, demonstrating not only its sacred value, but also perhaps how the tunnels had come to be dug in the first place. Li Daoyuan also mentioned that the tomb had been thoroughly gutted, claiming that 300,000 men (a number suspiciously similar to the work-gangs said to be stationed there) had spent a month stripping it bare, and still left items behind. He also repeated the shepherd story, claiming that the ruins had smouldered for three months before the fires finally died out.
During the Ming dynasty, over a thousand years after the death of the First Emperor, the site was still a place of legend. A government official reported that the inner and outer walls of the tomb complex were still in evidence, although the gates in them were long gone. Grave markers and entrances to underground silos could be found all over the site, but local legend held that the tomb of the First Emperor himself was not in the complex, but within the hill of Mount Li behind it.
There are, however, some strange contradictions in the stories about the destruction of the tomb. The most notable is the description of the initial robbing, seemingly conducted as an ongoing military operation by one of the generals who would later fight to become an emperor himself. Ancient records make much of the burning of the Qin capital, but have nothing to say about the emperor’s coffin. Had it actually been found, surely it would have been reported? When ancient writers speak of the looting of the complex, they are discussing an area several miles across, which would have been scattered with pavilions and temples, each probably adorned with works of art, fine furnishings and precious items. And yet, in all this discussion of the pillaging, there is no mention of any traps (which the emperor’s grave was supposed to contain), nor any discussion of the First Emperor’s actual sarcophagus. Is it possible that, despite the claims of ancient scholars, the looters had merely pilfered the façade, yet failed to find the tomb itself?
Later poets and singers mention a gold coffin lying undiscovered, but still acknowledged that the site had been well and truly pilfered by two thousand years of passers-by. The location of the coffin may have been a secret, but not so the terracotta army, which must have been accessible enough for Zhang Han’s men to pry the swords from the hands of the statues before they went to defend Qin in its last days. Even if the central part of the necropolis lay undisturbed, surely the Terracotta Army must have warranted a mention over the intervening millennia?
Apparently not. From the state of modern finds at the Mount Li site, we now know that the necropolis was incomplete at the time of its ransacking. Zhang Han’s army may have even comprised the very potters and artisans who were supposed to be finishing it, instead deserting it with an entire grave pit left empty. In the modern museum at Mount Li, the figures have been painstakingly pieced together, but the famous Terracotta Army did not stand to attention when it was first discovered. Instead, it was lying in pieces, smashed by the men who had built it as they scavenged it for weapons, then probably crushed by the falling roof beams of a later fire.
Although the scale of the Terracotta Army was not known until the 1970s, there were several foreshadowings of its discovery. Up to five metres of reddish, sandy soil had accumulated over the site in the centuries since its construction, but archaeologists also found evidence of earlier, impromptu discoveries. During digs at Mount Li, archaeologists found several graves from the 18th and 19th centuries, whose diggers had obviously struck terracotta fragments, only to discard them as worthless with the rest of the back-filled soil.
The region around Mount Li had been left untouched for a long time, but was repopulated during the sudden expansion of the Chinese population during the 17th and 18th centuries. It may be a mere coincidence that there are now 20 villages around the complex, or perhaps new settlers used the wells of earlier communities, and naturally gravitated to the places where the original guardians once lived. But the growth in population of modern times led to new inhabitants, new settlements and new disturbances of the earth. It was only after the Terracotta Army had been discovered that the relevance of earlier finds made sense – numerous peasant tales of ‘bits of pot’ turned up by ploughs, or found in wells. One local legend, which only made sense with hindsight, was that well diggers on Mount Li itself had fallen into a vast cave, stacked with human skeletons and other bones. However, when a second party was sent to investigate, the cave could no longer be found. Terracotta remained the material of choice for many devotional objects and religious statues, a fact which would naturally lead anyone finding fragments that they were imminently about to stumble upon a grave or cursed site. Such superstitions probably preserved many of the terracotta sites, including some that have yet to be found.
One old farmer from a homestead near the Mount Li site recounted a childhood memory of his father, who spent days digging a well, only to uncover a terracotta figure. In a mixture of 20th century cynicism and traditional superstition, the man angrily dragged the terracotta figure out of the ground – according to his son, Huo Wanchun, the figure was apparently complete. The terracotta figure was then hung on a nearby tree and attacked with sticks by local boys, in an attempt to ‘exorcise’ the magical curse that had somehow prevented Huo’s father from finding water.
The countryside around Mount Li is riddled with similar finds, not only of the famous terracotta figures, but also of the fragments of the necropolis – roofing tiles, bricks and chunks of masonry. A local song remembered a bygone age when a fashion developed among well-to-do locals to collect Qin dynasty bricks, ensuring that evidence of the actual buildings was soon eroded further, as the materials of their construction were carted off to build forgotten foll
ies and garden ornaments. Local superstition held that using a Qin brick as a pillow would prevent fevers and toothaches, a belief that led to brisk business for local scavengers, but the further displacements of archaeological evidence.3
In 1932, a few paces from the western wall of the mausoleum, a farmer found a terracotta head only a couple of feet below ground level. The government of the time however, preoccupied with its own corruptions and threats, had no interest in the find, which was eventually lost. The site suffered further abuse in the 1940s, when republicans converted it into a makeshift fortress during the civil war with the Chinese communists, rending its base, sides and summit with protective trenches. In 1948, shortly before Chairman Mao proclaimed the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, peasants in the nearby village of Jiaojia found two terracotta figures, thought to have been crouching crossbowmen or half-kneeling stable-boys. Although the mood of the time was iconoclastic, the figures fell into the hands of village elders, who maintained some degree of traditional superstition, and placed the figures on the altars of a nearby temple. They eventually came to the attention of government officials around 1956, and were cited in a report of the time as the only extant examples of the statuary of the First Emperor’s legendary mausoleum. At the time, writer Zheng Zhenduo rightly guessed that they formed part of some kind of symbolic honour guard for the First Emperor, and that there were others somewhere else to be found.4
The First Emperor of China Page 18
