The First Emperor of China
Page 23
11 GSR I: 143; Loewe, Biographical Dictionary, pp.683-4; Yuan and Xiao, Tales of Emperor Qin Shihuang, pp.113-4. Zhang Liang would eventually come out of hiding during the unrest that followed the First Emperor’s death, when he played a leading role in the foundation of the Han dynasty. Loewe, Biographical Dictionary, p. 19, suggests that Cang Hai may have been the name of a group of disaffected people, and not a single individual.
12 GSR I: 144.
13 Clements, Confucius, p.68.
14 GSR I: 144. See also GSR I:149, which implies that among the many immortality recipes the emperor tried were hallucinogens. If he spent part of the time suffering the after-effects of supposed immortality ‘drugs’, then some of his later irrational behaviour makes more sense.
15 Yuan and Xiao, Tales of Emperor Qin Shihuang, p. 106.
16 Ibid. p. 129. The jester You Zhan’s comedic attitude won him a lot of friends in the palace, particularly among the palace guards, whom he once summoned in the middle of a banquet, thereby revealing to the Emperor that they had been standing watch outside in the rain. He would even survive the Second Emperor, lampooning Huhai’s plans to paint Xianyang’s city walls by asking where a large enough room could be found to leave the city to dry in.
17 Later walls, most famously that of the Ming dynasty, would return to the Shanhai Pass as a borderline between civilised south and barbarian north. See Clements, Pirate King: Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, pp.85-8.
18 GSR I 145-6.
19 GSR I: 147.
20 GSR I: 150.
21 GSR I: 150n., disputes the nature of live burial, and suggests that the First Emperor invited them to observe the bizarre phenomenon of melons that had bloomed in winter, but had previously ordered pitfall traps to be dug beneath them. However, it would have to be a large and complex pit-trap indeed that could ensnare 460 scholars at once.
22 Knoblock and Riegel, Annals of Lü Buwei, pp. 165-6.
23 GSR I: 151; Yuan and Xiao, Tales of Emperor Qin Shihuang, p. 107.
NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN
1 Loewe, Biographical Dictionary, p.652.
2 GSR VII: 342.
3 GSR VII: 343.
4 Although there is no mention of it in the Record of the Historian, later fictional sources often imply that Fusu was Li Si’s son-in-law. If true, it shines new light on Li Si’s attempt to remove all other princes from the succession during the First Emperor’s lifetime, and adds a new twist to their falling out over the Burning of the Books. Li Si might have initially promoted Fusu as a controllable candidate for Second Emperor, only to realise his error when Fusu stood up to him. Perhaps this is another reason why Li Si’s decision to betray Fusu is so loaded with tension in contemporary accounts. If Li Si’s daughter was still alive, he would be betraying her at the same time. If he had a grandson through Fusu, perhaps one he had hoped to instal one day as a filial Third Emperor, then he was also signing the boy’s death warrant.
5 Loewe, Biographical Dictionary, p.229, suggests Li Si was more active in the deception. GSR VII: 341 also implies that Li Si had a premonition of the coming danger at a banquet a year or so earlier, although his complaints that things could only get worse could have just as easily been a backhanded boast that he could not imagine how things could get better.
6 GSR VII: 346 has 12 brothers killed in the capital, and ten sisters dismembered at a place called Du; GSR I: 157 mentions six dead in Du, implying the victims are all male (although presumably their spouses suffered similar fates, and may have been the ‘princesses’), and a further three brothers forced to commit suicide in the capital. It is a mystery why the Historian contradicts himself. An ‘inner palace’ arrest suggests that the last three princes were quite young, perhaps even children, hence my use of the term ‘boys’. Archaeologists at the Mount Li site have found seven graves presumed to be those of the First Emperor’s sons, but more may await discovery; Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Ch’in tomb’.
7 Zhang, The Qin Terracotta Army, p.77.
8 GSR I: 148. Apang (also O-p’ang, Epang) seems to have referred to the ‘hipped’ tetrahedral roof planned for the palace. ‘At its completion,’ suggests the Record of the Historian, ‘he would have selected a better name to call it.’
9 GSR I: 157
10 Hulsewé, Remnants of Qin Law, 102-3.
11 Loewe, Biographical Dictionary, p.38.
12 GSR I: 159.
13 GSR VII: 159-60; GSR I: 347, 351-2.
14 GSR VII: 354.
15 GSR VII: 356; GSR I: 161. The two accounts in the Record of the Historian differ slightly in chronology and motivation, but I have combined them here.
16 GSR I: 162.
17 GSR VII: 356.
NOTES TO THE EPILOGUE
1 Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires, p.71.
2 Mao, Discovery of the Eighth Wonder of the World, p. 19. Mount Li was also a site sacred to Nüwa, the ancient goddess who had repaired the ‘hole in the sky’ in the time of legends. According to a local folktale, a statue of Nüwa had come alive in the presence of the First Emperor, while he was fantasising about sex with her. The statue spat in the emperor’s face, causing a malignant growth to form. After prolonged penance lasting 49 days, the First Emperor was granted a reprieve, and the affliction was removed by bathing in the hot springs that sprang up on the mountainside. Yuan and Xiao, Tales of Emperor Qin Shihuang, p. 156.
3 Ibid., pp.37-8.
4 Ibid., p.42.
5 Zhang, The Qin Terracotta Army, p.31-2.
6 Ibid., pp.41-42.
7 Ibid., p.45.
8 Ibid., p.62
9 Ibid., p.17.
10 GSR I: 155.