Wirgin, J. The Emperor’s Warriors: Catalogue of the Exhibition of the terracotta figures of warriors and horses of the Qin dynasty of China [trans.A.S. Winstanley] Edinburgh: City of Edinburgh Museums and Art Galleries, 1985.
Wise, S. Rattling the Cage: Towards Legal Rights for Animals. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 2000.
Yao, X. An Introduction to Confucianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Yoshikawa, T. Shin no Shikôtei [Qin Shihuangdi]. Tokyo: Kodansha, 2002.
Yuan, K. Dragons and Dynasties: An Introduction to Chinese Mythology. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.
Yuan, Y. and Xiao Ding. Tales of Emperor Qin Shihuang. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1999.
Zhang, W. The Qin Terracotta Army: Treasures of Lintong. London: Scala Books and Cultural Relics Publishing House.
NOTES TO THE PROLOGUE
1 Portal, The First Emperor, pp.25-7.
2 Confucius, Analects XV, 11.
3 Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, pp.58-61; Nienhauser, Grand Scribe’s Records, VII: 325-323. Both books are partial translations of the Shi Ji, which I translate in my own text as Record of the Historian. Hereafter, Nienhauser references given as GSR, my own translations from the Shi Ji as SJ.
4 Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, p.60. The time is not specified, but long enough for a Qin general to annex an entire nearby kingdom, and for the news of the neighbour’s defeat to reach Yan. At the very least, Jing Ke’s lordly delights took several weeks. An anonymous, fictionalised account from the first century BC, perhaps using a source now lost to us, places Jing Ke’s sojourn with the Red Prince at three years. See ‘Prince Tan of Yen’, in Bauer and Franke, The Golden Casket, p.44. A variant account can be found in Crump, Chan-kuo Ts’e, pp.504-11.
5 Bauer and Franke, Golden Casket, p.44. Disc-shaped coins were only used in the Land of Swallows after the Qin conquest. At the time of the Red Prince’s plot, Yan coins were knife-shaped and unlikely to be much good for skimming.
6 Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, p.61.
7 Ibid., p.62. I have changed Watson’s Ch’in to Qin to avoid further confusion.
8 The evidence for this is wholly circumstantial – the fact that the fight over the chess game is recorded at all, and the later passage in which Lu Goujian, on hearing of the assassination attempt, says: ‘What a pity that he never properly mastered the art of swordsmanship. And as for me – how blind I was to his real worth!’ Reading between the lines, Lu Goujian may have received an invitation from Jing Ke, but ignored it, unaware of its true meaning until it was too late. Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, p.66.
9 Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, p.62. Crump, Chan-kuo Ts’e, p.509, distinguishes two songs, not one that is repeated. Yoshikawa, Shin no Shikôtei, pp.97-8, has a much longer song, supposedly by Jing Ke, but dating from the Eastern Jin dynasty long after the events took place.
10 SJ, p.324.
11 Wirgin, The Emperor’s Warriors, pp.85-6.
12 Some sources interpolate a passage in which Jing Ke seizes the king and demands that he swear to abide by his demands on pain of death, in the style of a famous would-be assassin of antiquity. The tale of ‘Prince Tan of Yen’ goes even further, claiming not only that Jing Ke’s blade wounds the king, but also describing an uneasy standoff in the courtroom. The king asks to hear a final song, and a minstrel delivers a coded message in her lyrics that allows him to fight off his assailant. The story omits to explain how the king might have survived the supposedly deadly poison, or indeed what concessions Jing Ke might hope to obtain, and sounds suspiciously like the set-up to a musical number in a forgotten play. Whatever its origins, it does not appear in the Record of the Historian, which alone is probably reason enough to discount it. See GSR, p.331; Bauer and Franke, Golden Casket, pp.47-48.
13 The Record of the Historian reports cryptic last words from Jing Ke, that he only failed in his attempt on the king’s life because he had made the mistake of offering a deal. There is, however, no evidence of this deal beyond the discounted earlier passage mentioned above. GSR, VII: 332; Crump, Chan-kuo Ts’e, p.510.
NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE
1 Yuan, Dragons and Dynasties, pp. 1-13. The evocative translation of Ban Gu (P’an Ku) as ‘Coiled Antiquity’ is from Birrell, Chinese Mythology, pp.30-31, although she cannot trace any use of the name before the third century AD.
2 Yuan, Dragons and Dynasties, p.19.
3 Ibid., p.45.
4 Ibid., pp.55-6.
5 GSR, I: 90n.
6 GSR, I: 91.
7 Loewe, ‘The First Emperor and the Qin Empire’, p.61.
8 See however Analects IX: 13 (Clements, Confucius, p.98), where Confucius muses that even a barbarian state might benefit from his guidance.
9 GSR I: 107.
10 Knoblock, Xunzi I, p.17-18.
11 GSR VII: 95; Crump, Chan-kuo Ts’e, p.81.
12 Knoblock, Xunzi I, p.18. (Qiangguo, 16.4)
13 GSR VII: 89.
14 Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires, p.31-3.
15 GSR VII: 95.
16 Cotterell, First Emperor of China, pp. 107-8.
17 GSR I: 111.
18 Sage, Ancient Sichuan and the Unification of China, pp.116-7.
19 Bodde, ‘The State and Empire of Ch’in’, p.47. See also GSR I: 114, which suggests that the king’s injury was a broken shinbone, leading to later fatal consequences.
20 Knoblock and Riegel, Annals of Lü Buwei, p. 17.
21 Yao, Introduction to Confucianism, p.76.
22 Cotterell, First Emperor of China, p. 96.
23 Knoblock, Xunzi III, p.223.
24 Knoblock, Xunzi I, p.17.
25 Crump, Chan-kuo Ts’e, p.129.
26 Knoblock, Xunzi I, p.20.
27 He may have written anonymous memorials during this period that were later incorporated into the Annals of Lü Buwei.
28 Crump, Chan-kuo Ts’e, p.151.
29 Shi Ji, p.306.
30 Shi Ji, p.306. ‘A hundred years on’ is a euphemism for the death of her husband.
31 Crump, Chan-kuo Ts’e, pp.151-3.
32 Shi Ji, p.308, uses qi, the usual term for weeping, preceded by fei, a character that usually means ‘boiling’.
33 Sima Qian, GSR I: 123, suggests it was instead in honour of his ancestor Zaofu, whose descendants adopted the name of his fief, Zhaocheng, as a surname. It is, however, curious why he does not use Ying – since that would be a more obvious choice. The surname Zhao seems to imply that the mother’s family was of higher birth than the father’s and certainly contributed to the rumours concerning his parentage. It should also be noted that a suspiciously similar story was told about Lord Chunshen of Chu, Land of the Immaculate, who supposedly tried to pass off his own son as the king’s. Perhaps the tales became confused during the unrest that led to the beginning of the Han dynasty.
34 Shi Ji, p.308.
35 Yoshikawa, Shin no Shikôtei, p.31. The quote is from the ‘Wu xing zhi’ (Five Articles) of the Han Shu, a book designed to pick up Sima Qian’s history where it left off. Typically, however, the Han Shu keeps to arch insinuations; if we believe such nonsense (and stranger things have happened in the Qin dynasty!), it is equally probable that Ying Zheng’s name was deliberately changed to Zhao Zheng temporarily in an effort to break the supposed curse.
36 Yuan and Xiao, Tales of Emperor Qin Shihuang, p.11. The servant was Zhao Sheng; his son, Zhao Gao, would go on to become the Second Emperor’s tutor and, ultimately, murderer.
37 GSR I: 83.
NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO
1 Knoblock and Riegel, Annals of Lü Buwei, p.12. Crump, Chan-kuo Ts’e, pp.66-7, translates them as the Nine Cauldrons, and reveals that they were massive bronze ceremonial objects once used by the rulers of the ancient Shang dynasty, and subsequently appropriated by the ancestors of the Zhou. The tripods/cauldrons were widely regarded as signifiers of divine kingship, and were also the subject of a theft attempt by the state of
Qin’s chief rival, the state of Qi.
2 Hung, ‘Preparations for Unification,’ p.51.
3 Lüshi Chunqiu 17.2; Knoblock and Riegel, Annals of Lü Buwei, p.417.
4 Knoblock and Riegel, Annals of Lü Buwei, p.46.
5 GSR VII: 335.
6 Bodde, China’s First Unifier, p.14.
7 GSR VII:313n.
8 Hung, ‘The establishment of a new system for the consolidation of unification,’ p.107.
9 Knoblock and Riegel, Annals of Lü Buwei, p. 12.
10 Di Cosmo, Ancient China and its Enemies, p. 142.
11 Shi Ji, p.311.
12 Knoblock and Riegel, Annals of Lü Buwei, p.21. The possibility still remains that Sima Qian may have written the passage, perhaps before his castration when such information would not have been known to him, or that events happened exactly as described, with the hair-plucking merely used as a means of fooling those in immediate contact with Lao Ai in the early days of his deception.
13 Kronk, Cometography, p.7.
14 GSR, I: 129.
15 GSR, I: 93, 130. Yoshikawa, Shin no Shikôtei, p.50, convincingly argues that the journey to Yong, the old Qin capital, is mentioned by the Historian because Ying Zheng’s manhood ceremony would have taken place there. Since this was also the location of Zhaoji’s new residence, it is possible that the ceremony led to a number of family secrets coming out: Lü Buwei’s attempts to hang onto the regency, Ying Zheng’s desire to take it, and Lao Ai’s affair with Zhaoji.
16 Crump, Chan-kuo Ts’e, p.420. Wade-Giles converted to Pinyin.
17 GSR VII: 315, quoting the Shuo Yuan.
18 GSR I: 130. On guixin, ‘gathering firewood’, see Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, p.15. For the length of the sentence, see GSR I: 132, which has Ying Zheng exempting the Sichuan exiles from ‘[further] state service’ in 235, tellingly after the final purges that followed the funeral of Lü Buwei.
19 Knoblock and Riegel, Annals of Lü Buwei, p.25, quoting the Shuo Yuan. Cottrell’s Tiger of Ch’in, p. 128, suggests that Ying Zheng issued such a command with a naked sword lying ominously across his lap, and a man-sized cauldron bubbling away in the corner of the throne room ready to boil any transgressors.
20 Bodde, China’s First Unifier, p. 18.
21 Ibid., p. 19. I have converted Bodde’s proper nouns from Wade-Giles, as his original text was written before the Pinyin romanisation system had been invented.
22 Ibid., p.20.
23 Shi Ji, 85.2513.
NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE
1 Knoblock and Riegel, Annals of Lü Buwei, p.26.
2 GSR VII: 223.
3 GSR VII: 230. The murder of Lord Chunshen also caused Xunzi, the former teacher of both Li Si and Han Fei, to lose an administrative post in Chu. See GSR VII: 184.
4 Bodde, China’s First Unifier, p.72.
5 Kronk, Cometography, p.7. The Record of the Historian mentions no more celestial phenomena until 213, the year of the Burning of the Books, which we may reasonably assume to be a record from the later Han dynasty, and not something recorded by the Qin administration. See also, Cotterell, First Emperor of China, p. 156.
6 Crump, Chan-kuo Ts’e, p.448, reports an admission of the state of Han’s buffer value by Queen Dowager Xuan, the First Emperor’s great-grandmother, in a fourth century incident where Qin sent troops into Han to support the local aristocracy in the resistance of an invasion from Chu. As a native of Chu, Xuan was unlikely to have been very happy about it.
7 Landers, ‘Political Thought of Han Fei’, p. 16.
8 Bodde, China’s First Unifier, p.40. (HFZ 49).
9 Lo, ‘Restoration and Counter-Restoration,’ p.65.
10 GSR VII: 26-7.
11 Bodde, China’s First Unifier, p.63
12 Ibid., p.65.
13 Bodde, China’s First Unifier, p.68. Ch’in converted to Qin for consistency.
14 Crump, Chan-kuo Ts’e, p.158. Wade-Giles ‘Chao’ converted to Pinyin ‘Zhao’.
15 Ibid., p.159.
16 GSR VII: 29.
17 Loewe, Biographical Dictionary, p.201.
18 Crump, Chan-kuo Ts’e, p.503.
19 Ibid., p.155.
20 ‘Prince Tan of Yen’, in Bauer and Franke, The Golden Casket, p.31.
21 Ibid., p.38.
22 Hung, ‘The Success of Unification’, p.79.
23 Crump, Chan-kuo Ts’e, p.349.
24 Ji, the ‘Place of Thistles’ would eventually be rebuilt, and is better known today as Beijing.
25 GSR I: 133.
26 SJ: 330.
27 Yuan and Xiao, Tales of Emperor Qin Shihuang, p.77. Yuan and Xiao faithfully repeat the error of the original Record of the Historian, which places Meng Tian at the head of the relief forces, even though he was still a government scribe at this point. I have, however, corrected the name to Meng Tian’s father Meng Wu, following Loewe, Biographical Dictionary, p.437, and GSR VII: 363.
28 SJ, 330, 332.
29 SJ, 332. Some translators might prefer ‘pacified’, but Ying Zheng uses the term dading, which has no element of ‘peace’, but rather an enforcement of his rule.
NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR
1 SJ, 334.
2 Hung, ‘Consolidation of Unification’, pp. 109-11.
3 Knoblock and Riegel, Annals of Lü Buwei, p.400.
4 Bodde, China’s First Unifier, p. 150. Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires, p.53, estimates that up to 25% of the pre-Qin writing symbols were deleted from public use. Note that a prime factor in the success of the unification of the script was the destruction of so many old books, a fact which has led many to believe that the Burning of the Books may have been a spin-off of Li Si’s script unification scheme, and not necessarily anything to do with the suppression of unwelcome ideas. There are obvious parallels with the simplification of Chinese in the People’s Republic in the 1950s, an effort that, even assuming it had been well intentioned, also served to render many pre-Revolution texts impenetrable to graduates of the modern educational system. Although the simplified script is supposed to make life easier, it is little help to the Sinologist, who must learn the unsimplified forms anyway if he wishes to read anything written before the 1950s, or indeed anything published in non-Communist China (Taiwan).
5 Bodde, China’s First Unifier, p.179.
6 See Wise, Rattling the Cage, p.27.
7 Qin was not the only state in China to do this. During the later Han dynasty, Sima Qian himself, the author of the Record of the Historian, suffered a sentence of castration, but was only forced to undergo the punishment when he missed a payment on his opt-out fine.
8 GSR I: 333.
9 Loewe, Biographical Dictionary, pp. 437-9 and 705.
10 Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, p. 184.
11 Ibid., p.187 (E6).
12 Ibid., p.202 (E22).
13 Ibid., pp.189-92.
14 Ibid., pp.194-5 (E 16).
15 Ibid., p. 102. Rank, however, was not a transferable commodity. If an individual was promoted for military service, but died before the promotion could be carried out, his successor would not inherit the rank. Ibid., p. 82 (A90).
16 Ibid., p.198 (E 20).
17 Ibid., p.200 (E 21).
18 Ibid., p.121 (D2).
19 Ibid., p.123 (D11).
20 Ibid., pp.124-5, (D13, D14, D15).
21 Ibid., p.137 (D48)
22 Ibid., p.137
23 Ibid., p.123 (D10).
24 Ibid., pp. 102-3. We do not know the precise level of accuracy required, but in the following Han dynasty, six out of every twelve arrows/quarrels were expected to hit a target. Each successful hit above the minimum 6 would win a marksman two weeks’ bonus, up to a presumed maximum of three months, either in pay or time off in lieu.
25 Ibid., p.135 (D45).
26 Ibid., pp. 127-8 (D21, D22, D23). It is interesting to note that there is such a thing as a ‘botched’ sacrifice. Presumably, these are ones where the omens do not live up to priests’ expectations.
NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE
1 Barnes, Rise of Civilization in East Asia, p. 169.
2 Hung, ‘The Age in which Ch’in Shi Huang was born,’ p. 13.
3 Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Great Wall of China’.
4 Di Cosmo, Ancient China and its Enemies, p. 140.
5 Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, p.71 (A 69), and 33. Hulsewé takes particular interest in the size of wall-builder rations, since he was himself once an inmate in a Japanese prison camp. He notes that wall-builders, if fed according to the rules, were significantly better provisioned than Japanese POWs.
6 Geil, Great Wall of China, p.104
7 Ibid., pp.101, 106; Shao, ‘What is the origin…?’, p.163.
8 Geil, Great Wall of China, pp. 103-6
9 (Reuters), ‘Rice a Building Block in China’.
10 Geil, Great Wall of China, p.63.
11 Ibid., p.106.
12 GSR I: 138; Momiyama, Shin no Shikôtei, pp. 138-41.
NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX
1 Yoshikawa, Shin no Shikôtei, p. 168. Yoshikawa’s source is Feng’s Miscellany (Feng-shi Tingjian Ji, or Mr Feng’s Record of Things Heard and Seen), a Tang dynasty compilation by Feng Yuan. The journey to Mount Yi is recorded, sans folklore, in GSR I: 138.
2 Yuan and Xiao, Tales of Emperor Qin Shihuang, pp.92-3; GSR I: 138.
3 SJ 340; final two sentences from GSR I: 139.
4 Yuan and Xiao, Tales of Emperor Qin Shihuang, pp.97-8.
5 GSR I: 142.
6 SJ 344; GSR I:142.
7 GSR I: 142
8 Yoshikawa, Shin no Shikôtei, p. 176-77, quoting Shui Jing Zhu (Commentary on the River Classic), by Li Daoyuan. A depiction of the workmen tumbling over as a dragon snaps their rope is included in the carvings of the Wuliang shrine, implying that although recorded in the Northern Wei, the folktale of the search for the Ninth Tripod dates back at least as far as the Han dynasty, if not to the time of the First Emperor himself.
9 GSR I: 142; Yuan and Xiao, Tales of Emperor Qin Shihuang, pp.102-3.
10 Yuan and Xiao, Tales of Emperor Qin Shihuang, p.111; GSR I: 143.
The First Emperor of China Page 22
