by John Man
What now? Well, he already had the answer, from Li Si, an ambitious Legalist, who had been advising the king throughout his teenage years. His advice, based on Han Fei’s, was to withdraw into a world of mystery, guard against all impulses towards mercy, and do only those things that increase power.
At its heart, under King Zheng’s iron hand and imperialist vision, were four interdependent elements: efficient agriculture, based on the rich farmlands of the Wei valley, which provided food and excess manpower; a committed bureaucracy which gathered taxes, made lists of recruits, oversaw irrigation and managed the food supply to the army; a large professional army; and, to undermine his rivals, espionage and disinformation.
As all dictators know, nothing secures power at home better than a war abroad. The army was the key, and it worked brilliantly. It had no secret weapon. The same weapons were used by all the warring states – bows and arrows, halberds, swords, armour, even the crossbow, a devastatingly effective weapon, which was far more powerful than an ordinary bow and could be held ready like a loaded rifle. Qin also had repeating crossbows, which had a magazine and could fire ten poisoned bolts in twenty seconds.
On crossbows, the bowstring was caught and held by the trigger. Triggers were wonderful devices. As Joseph Needham puts it in his monumental Science and Civilisation in China (Vol. 5, 30), they were ‘among the greatest triumphs of ancient metallurgical and engineering practice in any civilisation’. Six pieces of bronze fitted together with the precision of a bolt-action rifle. It made the crossbow into the ancient equivalent of the Kalashnikov: sophisticated but simple, easily made, easily dismantled, easily maintained.
Qin society was a state-sized fighting machine. The men and their commanders trained for years to produce tough, mobile, highly disciplined troops. They could march 50 kilometres a day in leather armour, carrying crossbows, pikes, swords and provisions for three days. The main force was backed up by separate groups of reinforcements, all coordinated by gongs, drums, waving banners and messengers in four-horse chariots.
There was nothing new in any one element. It was the whole coordinated package that set the Qin army apart – the food supply, the recruitment, the vision of conquest and unity, centralized control, communication, training, discipline, weaponry. Thus, for the first time in Chinese history, an army arose dedicated not simply to victory in battle but to the conquest of territory. Once started – with the conquest of Han in 234 BC – the Qin army snowballed inexorably onwards, from strength to strength. If and when Qin turned on the nearby steppes, its tribes would surely stand no chance.
Of the conquests themselves, hardly anything is recorded, except their dates. Campaign followed campaign, details unknown. Han, Zhao, Wei, Chu, Yan and Qi all fell, and in 221 Qin became the core of today’s China. Those in the seven states united by the First Emperor had long referred to their lands as the centre, the ‘Central Nation’ or ‘Middle Kingdom’ (zhong guo), which is what the nation is called by its people today.
But not by foreigners. Now unified from the borders of Tibet to the Pacific, from the Inner Mongolian escarpment to the South China Sea, this region was gradually equated by outsiders with its dominant power. Thus, as the name passed from language to language across Eurasia, did Qin become China.
Now began a revolution in which the First Emperor seized total control over all aspects of society. It started with a title. How was the king to be addressed? Only the grandest title would suit: Great August (da huang) was the title conferred on the legendary founder 2,000 years before. The early emperors were named di, a term for the highest supernatural power. Moreover Zheng was to be the first of a long line, the beginning, the shĭ . So he became Qin Shi Huang Di, the First Qin August Emperor. For the sake of simplicity, he’s usually ‘the First Emperor’.
According to a popular line of Daoist thought, each historical age was dominated by one of the five elements: earth, wood, metal, fire and water, which overwhelm each other in a fixed cycle. Zhao had ruled through the power of fire. The First Emperor chose water, which extinguishes fire. Water had certain attributes, its colour being black, its number six. So all flags became black, six the preferred unit of length for measuring almost anything, from the height of hats to the width of chariot-axles.
Out went the old kingdoms and their feudal hierarchies, in came three dozen centrally controlled commanderies, subdivided into several hundred prefectures. From all the six defeated states, weapons were collected and melted down to make bells and twelve vast statues of barbarians. Each of the seven states had had different measures of area, widths of cartwheels, coins, weights, measures, styles of clothing and scripts. All were now collated, unified and imposed empire-wide. The revision of the script, various forms of which had been in existence for two millennia, was a major factor in China’s cultural unity, because governments could issue edicts that everyone everywhere could read, even if pronunciation varied widely.
Power made the First Emperor a terrifying figure. Sima Qian portrays him as physically unattractive – high pointed nose, slit eyes, pigeon breast, stingy, cringing, graceless. Traditional portraits of him don’t conform to this lean and hungry image, showing him as bearded, bulky, and always wearing headgear with tassels dangling down the front to hide his semi-divine features from mortal gaze. It’s all totally inauthentic, of course, since there were no contemporary portraits, but – rather like Christ, Genghis Khan and alien abductors – there arose an accepted, iconic version of what he was supposed to look like. Certainly, he was moody, easily angered and unpredictable, traits that he shared with other tyrants. It has been part of accepted history that he burned books, destroyed the records of his predecessors, and buried scholars alive because they opposed him. Whether or not all this is true, national unity was achieved with extremes of character, vision and ruthlessness.
The new society worked brilliantly, if you ignore the extreme brutality with which the laws were applied. Labour became available on an unprecedented scale, not only because of the empire’s vastly extended population but because hundreds of thousands of soldiers had been freed for labour by the ending of the wars of conquest. Peasants had always been liable to forced service as soldiers and labourers in their own kingdoms. Now they were called up empire-wide. Every male between fifteen and sixty was eligible for labour on state projects. A population of about 20 million could provide a workforce of several million a year. Infrastructure projects – palaces, canals, the emperor’s tomb – dominated the new nation.
One problem remained unsolved, one crucial area untaken: Ordos, with its nomads and their cross-border raids. To tackle them, to get troops into and across Ordos, Qin would need a road, of unprecedented scale, to be constructed at unprecedented speed.
1 The quotes are from Han Fei Tzu: Basic Writings, in Burton Watson’s translation (see Bibliography).
2 There are several other sources: Ban Gu’s Han Shu (finished in the early 100s AD), the Hou Han Shu (fifth century) and Jia Yi’s Xin Shu (second century BC). All are based on lost works, and written a century or more after the events they describe. Sima Qian remains the top source, mainly because of his storytelling skills.
4
MENG TIAN AND THE STRAIGHT ROAD
WHEN I FIRST HEARD OF THE ROAD ACROSS ORDOS, I WAS intrigued. It was an extraordinary idea: apparently Qin had built an 800-kilometre road in order to drive out the Xiongnu, seize control of Ordos and extend Qin’s borders all the way to the Yellow River. There are no details in the sources. In my mind’s eye, I saw a paved highway, suitable for carriages and battalions of soldiers, cutting across the territory from which the Xiongnu sprang. Perhaps I could explore some of it, and see the reality behind my fantasy.
It became an obsession. Driving along Ordos’s expressways, my mind wandered to the question of the Straight Road, as it is known. I brought up the subject with my companion, Alatan. He was very patient. Occasionally, we would be diverted on to earth roads by a new road-construction and I would wonder how many m
en with spades it would take to match these armies of scrapers and trucks. We had long discussions about how the commander-in-chief, Meng Tian, could have fulfilled his orders. It seemed to me I was on the verge of a great new insight, made possible by today’s roads. Surely today’s engineers could throw light on the problems and solutions of over 2,200 years ago?
The story starts in 214 BC, seven years after unification and thirty-two years after the First Emperor came to the throne. He was becoming obsessed by the possibility of achieving immortality. Work on his tomb, which had been going on for thirty years, increased. But the First Emperor was also interested in not dying. One of the officers sent to discover the secrets of immortality returned ‘claiming that it had come to him from gods and spirits’ that ‘Qin will be destroyed by Hu’ – that is, the barbarians of Ordos.
At this – as Sima Qian says in Chapter 88 of his Shi Ji (Historical Records), the English title of which is Records of the Grand Historian – the emperor ordered General Meng Tian to respond. Meng Tian, son of a famous father and brother of one of the emperor’s closest advisers, was the greatest general of his day. He was told to ‘lead a force of 300,000 men and advance north, expelling the Rong and Di barbarians and taking control of the region south of the bend of the Yellow River’. The Rong and Di were two of several sub-groups coming together to become part of the Xiongnu. In another section, Sima Qian says that ‘Meng Tian’s might struck terror into the Xiongnu people’ (with results that will become clear in the next chapter).
This was going to be a long operation. In his history Zizhi Tongjian (The Mirror of Good Government), Sima Guang adds to Sima Qian’s account, saying that Meng Tian ‘made successive assaults against the Xiongnu tribes, recovering the territories south of the (Yellow) River … the armies of the frontier were engaged in a protracted war that lasted for more than a decade’, after which ‘they held sway in the lands of the Xiongnu’. By that time, Meng Tian was dead, in circumstances we will get to later.
Why this massive invasion? There were several possible reasons. Supposedly, it was to counter the threat of the mounted archers, who would (according to the prophecy that fed the First Emperor’s paranoia) bring destruction to Qin. In fact, the idea that they were much of a threat to the whole Qin empire, with its massed armies and ranks of crossbowmen, is ridiculous. They were, however, a constant menace on the borders, and had to be dealt with. That fitted well with the emperor’s domestic needs and imperialist ambition. Firstly, armies must be used. Idleness breeds boredom, a decline in morale, insubordination, perhaps even revolution. So, secondly, the First Emperor gave them huge and challenging tasks – take Ordos, and build, build, build. Thirdly, armies must be fed, so Qin needed new lands and new colonists. Ordos, once cleared of its nomads, offered prime new territory. Finally, though this is nowhere stated, it would have seemed vital to extend Qin to its ‘natural’ western and northern boundary on the Yellow River. It was as much a manifest destiny as young America’s urge to expand all the way to the Pacific, except in China’s case this would prove just the beginning of expansion.
Invasion of Ordos was secured by the Great Wall, the grandest of several huge infrastructure projects. It supposedly ran from Lanzhou to Liaodong on the Pacific, a distance of 10,000 li (about 5,000 kilometres), which conforms with the usual name for the Wall, the Wan Li Chang Cheng (the 10,000-li Long Wall). Outposts were constructed, says Sima Qian, and convicts were transported to the region to populate the new districts. In fact, Sima Qian is both unclear and self-contradictory. In another chapter, he says the troops numbered 100,000, and the route of the Great Wall is left vague. True, north of the Yellow River, in the Yin Mountains, a low wall winding over the hills has a big sign that names it ‘The Great Wall of the Qin Dynasty’. I have been there, and climbed on it. It is no more than waist-high, a metre across, and made of slate. There is nothing great about it, certainly nothing ancient, though it seems to follow the line of a wall built by the state of Zhao in about 300 BC. Decaying bits of the Great Wall run across eastern and southern Ordos, but they were built later and are nothing to do with the Qin wall. Whatever Meng Tian built, it was probably made of a mixture of rammed earth and stones, with beacon towers and lookout platforms of stone. Archaeologists have traced it running across Ordos from the south-west to the north-east, picking up on the other side of the Yellow River to join the old Zhou wall. It was about 1,799 kilometres long. Its purpose seems to have been less defensive, more to seize land – much more fertile than it is today – and then control it. Further east, the Great Wall filled in the gaps between pre-existing walls built by the states conquered by Qin. Not quite as great as its name suggests, but still impressive.
These immense operations secured the whole region by expelling the nomads, an act we would now term ‘ethnic cleansing’. But that would have been just the start. If the frontier was to be held, troops had to remain on site, and be relieved regularly, and be supplied with food, clothing, mounts and weapons. Let’s say it took a few years of preparation, and that the army needed to be in camp by the autumn of 214 BC, since Qin leaders would not have wished to go on campaigning in the winter. Nomads could cope with temperatures down to minus 20°C, but Qin soldiers would have needed base-camps.
So there had to be a road. And we know it was a good one, because Sima Qian travelled along it a century after it was built. ‘I have travelled to the northern border,’ he wrote, ‘and returned by the Straight Road. As I went along I saw the outposts of the Great Wall which Meng Tian constructed for the Qin. He cut through the mountains and filled up the valleys, opening up a direct road. Truly he made free with the strength of the common people!’
Sima Qian told some dubious stories, but here he claims personal experience. It sounds convincing. So we start with a road that carried armies and construction crews, a road good enough to last over 100 years. The more I learned, the more my admiration grew, the more certain I became that there should be something concrete to see – or at least the Qin equivalent of concrete.
But it was also built very fast. Meng Tian’s military orders came through in 214 BC, and thereafter work continued only for another four years, because in 210 BC Meng Tian became a victim of the revolution that, another four years later, brought an end to the Qin dynasty. It sounds very much as if the Straight Road, 740 kilometres of it, from the First Emperor’s capital Xianyang to the Yellow River, was built in a maximum of four years. A solid road, with – as I imagined – some sort of a paved surface in four years? Wide enough for carriages to pass? With bridges over the ravines? Was this really possible? And if so, how?
Not far north of Ordos City there is an archaeological site called the Qin Straight Road. This would surely answer my questions. The road led through ridges and over eroded ravines to an entrance that looked like a film set for a Great Wall movie. Inside was a huge car park and a mock fortress with a raised terrace, 6 metres above the ground, on which stood a statue of the First Emperor in his carriage, its four rearing horses about to leap into a void. The place was abandoned. The three of us – me, my guide ‘Water’ Xu, and the driver – were the only ones there. Weeds poked through the tiled surface. There wasn’t even a ticket office. Someone had had a great idea, which had not worked.
It was obvious why not. For tourists, there was nothing to see but waving grass, with no immediate sign of a road. But wait: a few metres from the crenellated wall that fringed the site was a grassy ridge half a metre high heading north. At the edge of the ridge, the grass fell away to reveal eroded, gravelly earth. It was light brown, tinged with red, exactly the same colour as the underlying soil. If this was really the remains of Meng Tian’s road, there was no hint of either a foundation or any paved surface. No tiles, no bricks.
In the other direction, a faint path of flattened grass led to a huge white stone, 2 metres high and 4 or 5 metres long, on which three characters, cut into the rock and painted red, proclaimed this was the ‘Qin Straight Road’. But there was no sign of it. Beyo
nd the rock, the path led on another 100 metres through the ankle-high grass. It looked like an invitation, so I followed. There was nothing there, except a drop into a ravine, with no sign of a paved descent or road leading on beyond into the afternoon sun.
Well, so much for my fantasies of pavements and bridges. It looked as if Meng Tian had worked with nothing but coarse earth. And – presumably – tens of thousands of workers to move it.
I needed to rethink. Who better to help than an expert in road-building? What greater expert than the boss of the Oriental Holding Group, which built many of the major roads and expressways across Ordos? His name was Ding Ding, which to my English ears sounded like a delicate and charming bell. In the elegant surroundings of Beijing’s Kunlun Hotel, with a discreet orchestral version of Elvis Presley’s ‘Love Me Tender’ to accompany the coffee, I asked him to imagine himself as Meng Tian, commissioned by the First Emperor to conquer and occupy Ordos. It would all depend on building the Straight Road. How would he do it?
Ding Ding certainly had experience to address the problem; not that modern road-building should be compared to Qin road-building. He was virtually born into the business, because his father ran a construction company. Having been to a college for road-construction managers, he took over the business. Almost at once, in 2002, he started work on the road between Dongsheng (part of Ordos City, the local capital) and Kangbashi, the new town to the south. Back then, those 30 kilometres were appalling. I nodded, remembering. That was when I first came here. At one point the rough road vanished into a flooded river, and we crossed only thanks to the foolhardy driver, who accelerated through the muddy waters. The government decided to turn it from two lanes to four lanes, which, said Mr Ding, ‘we did in one year’. Two years later, it was too busy, ‘so in 2009 the government said, “Let’s double it again!” So now it’s an eight-lane expressway.’