by John Keay
The dimensions of the Opang palace, though probably exaggerated, no longer seem quite so excessive; the scale of the imperial tomb, its location in Xianyang having finally been discovered, prompts excited speculation; and more generally the First Emperor’s alleged eccentricities are no longer airily dismissed as the self-serving exaggerations of later historians in thrall to a different dynasty and an adverse historiography. The emperor’s devotion to the theory of the Five Phases/Elements – and water in particular – seems less far-fetched; and Sima Qian’s account of the various imperial peregrinations, including the mountain encounter at Changsha, can more readily be taken at their face value.
Although the First Emperor seems never to have led his forces in battle – few emperors would – he made five extensive tours. The Zhou kings had occasionally done the rounds of their feudatories, and future emperors, especially the Qing Kangxi and Qianlong emperors, would make the grand tour a centrepiece of imperial ceremonial. It is assumed that, like them, the First Emperor travelled to see and be seen, to exercise political oversight and be observed performing ritual ceremonies. No doubt troops were inspected and local officials interrogated; certainly orders were issued for the settlement of new colonies and the construction of new public works. But to what extent the emperor actually engaged with his subjects on these occasions is uncertain.
According to Sima Qian, he was often rather particular about not being seen. In 219 BC, on a first visit to Mount Tai in Shandong, the most sacred of summits, he completed the ascent alone and performed whatever rites he deemed appropriate in secret and without any record being made of them. Seven years later, on the advice of a man who was pandering to his hopes of longevity, he furnished each of his palaces with what might be required in the way of entertainment and female company, and then linked these establishments with covered ways and walled corridors. His whereabouts were thereafter to be kept a closely guarded secret whose revelation was punishable by death. A couple of bungled assassination attempts may have made him paranoid; no less plausibly he was embarking on what, for one who was already master of ‘All-under-Heaven’, was the ultimate challenge: mastering mortality. For just as climbing hills excited his sense of commanding the physical world, so removing himself from public sight was supposed a step towards transcending the passage of time.
Death, says Sima Qian, was made a taboo subject, with any talk of it being punishable by the same – now unmentionable – fate. Sorcerers, magicians and miracle-men with a working knowledge of eternity were summoned for examination. No expense was spared in obtaining the life-prolonging elixirs they recommended – but which may in fact have poisoned him – nor in countering the portents of mortality that surfaced with disconcerting frequency. More encouraging news came from Shandong province, long a repository of the arcane as well as the orthodox. It concerned a mountainous archipelago in the Yellow Sea where immortality, or a means of obtaining it, was reputed commonplace. The emperor determined to investigate.
Four of his five grand tours included a sojourn by the sea, whose immensity must have impressed someone from landlocked Qin and especially one whose rule depended on ‘the power of water’. On the second tour, in 219 BC, he dispatched an expedition to discover the immortals in their so-called Islands of Paradise. Since the chosen explorers consisted of ‘several hundred boys and girls’, he seems to have anticipated the voyage being a long one. He was right; they never returned. Later legend insisted that they had in fact made a landfall in Japan and stayed there. A second expedition was dispatched in 215 BC. This did return but without news of the elusive islands. A third expedition was planned in 210 BC though apparently delayed until a large fish could be eliminated. This was more probably a sea monster – the emperor had had a dream about it destroying his fleet. He therefore took to carrying a crossbow as he continued up the coast and eventually had the satisfaction of shooting dead just such a creature. It was his last victim. Days later he himself died.
Most of which could, again, be fabrication. Though unworthy of such an esteemed historian as Sima Qian, it could have been inserted in the Shiji by others after Sima’s death. Yet a century later a very similar interest in immortality and in locating the ‘Islands of Paradise’ would obsess the Han emperor Wudi, and in his case it is too well attested to be dismissed. The Shang kings had submitted their dreams to oracular scrutiny; they and the Zhou had had to face down monsters. Indulging ideas that posterity might consider fanciful, or tastes it might consider excessive, amounted to an ancestral prerogative. Whatever legalist logic or Confucian morality might make of such foibles, they were probably widespread in an age riddled with cults and rife with superstition.
Nowhere are the First Emperor’s fantasies better demonstrated than in Sima Qian’s description of his tomb. The site having been selected when he first came to the throne, by the time of his death a veritable mountain had been constructed upon it. Round about, beyond its double walls, were laid out the subterranean chambers in which replicas of his army and other mortuary accompaniments would be ranged. Human sacrifice as part of the funerary arrangements had not yet been abandoned. Consorts and concubines who had borne the emperor no children were ordered to join him in death, along with perhaps thousands of craftsmen and labourers whose intimate knowledge of the burial chamber might prejudice its security. But in Chu, and by now in Qin, clay effigies were increasingly preferred to still-serviceable humans as grave goods. They cost less, lasted longer, and when mass produced like the First Emperor’s terracotta warriors, could be replicated ad infinitum.
The 700,000 colonists sent to work on the tomb were housed near by. There too were located their stores, furnaces, kilns and assembly lines. A similar complex, scattered somewhat farther afield, is growing up today, such is the demand for terracotta replicas and souvenirs from what is becoming China’s foremost visitor attraction. But two thousand years ago Sima Qian had words only for the centrepice of the necropolis. Deep beneath the mountain itself was the emperor’s great domed burial chamber.
They dug down to the third layer of underground springs and poured in bronze to make the outer coffin. Replicas of palaces, scenic towers, and the hundred officials, as well as rare utensils and wondrous objects, were brought to fill the tomb. Craftsmen were ordered to set up cross-bows and arrows, rigged so that they would immediately shoot down anyone attempting to break in. Mercury was used to fashion imitations of the hundred rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangzi, and the seas, constructed in such a way that they seemed to flow. Above were representations of all the heavenly bodies, below, the features of the earth. Whale oil was used for lamps, which were calculated to burn for a long time without going out.27
Until 1974, when some well-diggers chanced to shovel down into those chambers teeming with clay warriors whom Sima Qian had not even deemed worthy of mention, all this too was considered fanciful. No grave could possibly contain towers and palaces, seas of mercury, a cartographic model of the kingdom and a replica of the sky at night. The tomb had reportedly been ransacked and destroyed on several occasions, most immediately within five years of the emperor’s interment. The shattered condition of the terracotta troopers seemed to bear this out. Laboriously reconstituted and remustered, they, and not the tomb itself, whose location was still uncertain, became the stars of late-twentieth-century Chinese archaeology.
Yet since that 1974 discovery, barely a year has gone by without further revelations from the great necropolis outside Xianyang. More pits containing more warriors have been opened. Others have yielded skeletons, half-life-size carriages and life-size bronze replicas of geese and cranes. One is supposed the tomb of the First Emperor’s grandmother. Meanwhile the location of the main burial chamber has been pinpointed about a kilometre from the warrior pits beneath its now greatly eroded mountain.
At the time of writing (2008) the tomb remains unopened, its secrets unrevealed. Officially it awaits the development and approval of techniques and treatments that will ensure the preservation
of its contents. Conflicting authorities – scientific and archaeological as well as party, provincial and central – may also be involved. As with the Tarim Mummies, national caution excites international impatience. But no one can accuse the authorities of not whetting archaeological appetites. Surveys, scans and probes have established that the great cavity of the burial chamber is still intact, neither choked with infill nor submerged in water. Traces of mercury, presumably from the seas and rivers that flowed so ingeniously across the emperor’s replica domain, have been detected; and their distribution has been scanned and charted to produce an almost recognisable map of China. The roof’s planetarium may still twinkle, the crossbows stand ready to fire, and among ‘the hundred officials’ a life-size Li Si could be waiting, bookless, by his patron’s nested coffins. Within the chamber, there may still reign that minutely regulated peace and order on which the First Emperor so prided himself in his inscriptions; but without, all semblance of decorum had been shattered almost before he was laid to rest.
4
HAN ASCENDANT
210–141 BC
QIN IMPLODES
NEARLY ALL THAT IS KNOWN OF the First Emperor and his book-burning chancellor comes from a book. In a culture as literary and historically minded as China’s, biblioclasts needed to beware; books had a way of biting back, and sure enough, both emperor and chancellor would be badly bitten. Ostensibly Sima Qian’s Shiji, one of the most ambitious histories ever written, was a direct response to the First Emperor’s assault on scholarship. Sima Qian saw his task as salvaging what he calls ‘the remains of literature and ancient affairs scattered throughout the world’ as a result of the Qin proscription, and then organising and presenting them in a form that would edify and instruct future generations.1 Confucius had expressed the same idea at a time when the ‘warring states’ were going to war, and like him, Sima Qian considered his role to be that of ‘transmitter’, not creator. But since all the earlier annals and commentaries (‘Spring and Autumn’, Zuozhuan, Zhanguoce, etc.) stopped short of the Qin unification, and since later histories would start with the first Han emperor, the Shiji would be the only work to deal with the intervening Qin triumph and implosion. By happy coincidence, the most dramatic upheaval in early China’s history is covered exclusively by its foremost historian.
Written about a hundred years after the fall of Qin, the Shiji (usually translated as ‘Records of the [Grand] Historian’) is by no means limited to that period or to what might then have been regarded as the recent past. Its 130 chapters span some 3,000 years, a remarkable perspective in a work of the second-to-first centuries BC. When later enshrined as the first of the eventually twenty-four ‘Standard Histories’ (one for each ‘legitimate’ dynasty) it served as a sort of ‘Book of Genesis’, beginning the narrative of China’s history and carrying it forward from its myth-rich dawn and the Five Emperors, through the Three (royal) Dynasties of Xia, Shang and Zhou, including the ‘Spring and Autumn’ and ‘Warring States’ periods, and on to the Qin and Han. Although it set the pattern for all the later ‘Standard Histories’, it is in fact the only one that deals with more than a single dynasty.
Not simply a dynastic record, then, it is not simply a history either. Besides recording and organising the past – and introducing such still-useful graphic conventions as year-by-year timelines and state-by-state tabulations – the ‘Grand Historian’ had much else on his mind. There were lessons to be learned, mistakes to be corrected, reputations to be revised and wrongs to be righted. It was not just a question of dishing out praise and blame or of raiding the past for ammunition with which to take potshots at the present. The Shiji was to be more than just ‘a history of the world according to Sima Qian’, rather ‘a history of the world according to history’; and the ways of history being, like those of Heaven, intricate and often hard to discern, it required very special treatment.
To represent something so vast and complex, the well-flagged themes, long linear narratives and clanking chains of causation expected by the modern reader would have been inadequate. The language itself had to be exact; truth and accuracy were paramount. But latitude in the selection and ordering of the factual material still allowed Sima Qian to nudge the reader towards his desired conclusions. So did his decidedly creative use of dialogue and dramatisation; and so did the rather demanding structure of the book. Of those 130 chapters, only twelve comprise ‘Basic Annals’. Along with the chronological tables, they provide a useful framework yet make for unsatisfactory reading without the thirty subsequent chapters devoted to the ‘Hereditary Houses’ (or ‘states’) and the seventy to biographies of notable persons. To find out exactly what is happening at any given moment – and more especially why – the reader needs to familiarise himself with the entire text (four to six volumes in translation) and to command a good supply of bookmarks. It is like trying to piece together a play with, instead of the script, a sequence of the lines assigned to one actor and then those to another and so on. This fragmented approach in no way prejudices the Shiji’s veracity; but it does result in a lot of repetition and not a few inconsistencies, some no doubt unintentional but others apparently designed to hint at the mixed motives and conflicting viewpoints that beset all human endeavour.
In addition, recent studies have detected many of the devices noticed in earlier classics like the Shijing and Confucius’s Analects – an obsession with names and their ‘rectification’, meanings implied by allusion and the ‘correlation’ of apparently unrelated materials, and that emphasis on faithful transmission rather than innovation. But perhaps the most intriguing insight is that which interprets the Shiji as being a rival to the First Emperor’s tomb in that it too represents a model, or microcosm, of the world as then known. Here, albeit in prose, the heavens and their constellations are also represented, and likewise the empire’s rivers and waterways, its geographical divisions and its clustered high officials. As Grant Hardy puts it:
The First Emperor’s tomb was an image of the world created and maintained by bronze – the force of arms – whereas Sima Qian’s Shiji offered an alternative depiction of the world, inscribed on bamboo slips and regulated by scholarship and morality . . . If Sima’s creation could not match the First Emperor’s in political power, it far surpassed it in influence, and eventually the famous mausoleum was known and understood by the place it held in Sima Qian’s all encompassing bamboo-world.2
On the other hand if, when the mausoleum is opened, its furnishings are found to exceed or contradict Sima’s description, it may be the First Emperor who has the last laugh. Already the ‘terracotta army’ has added an unsuspected military dimension. Further finds – imagine the consternation if they include books – could confound not only the Grand Historian but a hundred generations of subsequent historians.
If the First Emperor’s innermost coffin is found intact, it may even be possible to discover what he died of. But until then ‘the bamboo record’ must suffice. In 210 BC the First Emperor was still in his forties and apparently fit enough to undertake another tour of his domains. Only days before his collapse he was out shooting sea monsters on the Shandong shore. The suggestion that he was a victim of poisoning therefore seems plausible. But if this was the case, the dose was probably self-administered; for in the potions prepared for him by the experts in immortality the vital ingredient was cinnabar. A mineral rarity, cinnabar came largely from Sichuan and was used as a pigment, most notably to impart a ruddy shade of vermilion to the ink reserved for emperors. As a crystalline form of mercuric sulphide, it is also toxic, and when ingested in quantity, fatal. Gulping down the draughts that promised eternal life, the First Emperor may have been inviting a rather sudden death.
According to Sima Qian, at the first hint of indisposition Meng Yi, the chief minister and brother of the wall-building Meng Tian, had been sent post-haste from Shandong to organise ‘sacrifices to the mountains and rivers’, presumably for the emperor’s recovery. That left the imperial cavalcade in the char
ge of Li Si, the book-burning chancellor, assisted by Zhao Gao, a eunuch who held the important post of chief of the imperial carriages, plus Prince Huhai, the emperor’s youngest son. When the emperor expired just days after Meng Yi’s departure, Li Si proved uncharacteristically indecisive. Instead it was Zhao Gao who took the initiative. The eunuch had a score to settle with the Meng brothers; Prince Huhai, a callow youth with no redeeming qualities other than his parentage, was conveniently to hand; and Li Si, who must by now have been in his sixties, was rather easily talked into manipulating the succession.
The dead emperor’s written testament appointing another son as his heir was accordingly suppressed. So too was report of the death itself, for it was vital that the plotters reach Xianyang and secure the reins of power before the news of the emperor’s demise encouraged others to thwart them. The cavalcade therefore rumbled on towards the capital as if nothing had happened. Meals for its reclusive principal were delivered to his carriage as usual, while a wagon of fish was positioned near by to counteract the stench of rotting emperor.
On regaining the capital, the plotters swung into action. Prince Huhai was proclaimed the emperor’s designated heir and installed as the Qin Second Emperor. The First Emperor’s preferred heir was then charged with treason and, in forged orders from his father, commanded to commit suicide – which, being a truly filial son, he did. Then the Meng brothers were censured for opposing these arrangements and detained until such time as Meng Yi could be executed and Meng Tian obliged to take poison.
These events were accompanied by a reign of terror that, as described by Sima Qian, must have made the dead emperor’s heavy-handed administration seem almost benign. ‘Make the laws sterner and the penalties more severe,’ urged Zhao Gao. ‘See that those charged with a crime implicate others and that punishments extend to the families of the criminals. Wipe out the chief ministers and sow dissension among their kin.’ With the scheming eunuch acting as grand inquisitor, twelve princes and ten princesses were dismembered in the Xianyang marketplace. Those implicated with them together with their ‘three degrees of relatives’ – traditionally parents, siblings and offspring – suffered a similar fate but were ‘too numerous even to be counted’. New laws and harsher punishments were promulgated. Taxes and levies were increased, and yet more forced labour was marched off to work and die on still-incomplete projects such as the Opang Palace and the northern frontier’s walls. ‘Each man began to fear for his own safety,’ says Sima Qian, ‘and those who longed to revolt were many.’3
