The First Emperor
of China
Jonathan Clements
Albert Bridge Books
2015
First published by Sutton Publishing, 2006.
Second Edition © 2015 Jonathan Clements
ISBN 978-1-909771-11-6
In Memory of
Roger Zelazny
(1937–1995)
we are all shadows
About the Author
Jonathan Clements is currently a Visiting Professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University, China. His books include histories of Beijing and the Silk Road, and biographies of Chairman Mao, Marco Polo and Khubilai Khan. He was a consultant and interviewee on the National Geographic documentary Koxinga: A Hero’s Legacy, which drew heavily on his book Pirate King, and has appeared on many other TV programmes on Chinese and Japanese history, including New Secrets of the Terracotta Warriors (broadcast in the US as Emperor’s Ghost Army) and Ancient Black Ops: The 47 Ronin. His most recent works include The Art of War: A New Translation, which revisits Sun Tzu’s military classic, and Modern China: All That Matters, a study of contemporary issues facing the People’s Republic.
Also by Jonathan Clements
An Armchair Traveller’s Guide to the Silk Road
Sun Tzu’s Art of War: A New Translation
Modern China: All That Matters
A Brief History of Khubilai Khan
Mao
Wu: The Chinese Empress Who Schemed, Seduced and Murdered Her Way to Become a Living God
Confucius: A Biography
Pirate King: Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty
The Little Book of Chinese Proverbs
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgements
Prologue The Dagger in the Map
1 The Divine Destiny
2 The King of Qin
3 The Fighting Tigers
4 The River of Power
5 The Longest Cemetery
6 The Burning of the Books
7 The Ashes of Empire
Epilogue The Terracotta Army
Appendices
I Ancestors of the First Emperor
II Names and Titles
III Some Modern Fictional Accounts of the First Emperor
IV Chronology
Notes
References and Further Reading
MAPS & TABLES
Ying Zheng’s Immediate Family
The Expansion of Qin
Journeys of the First Emperor (220-211 BC)
The Site of the First Emperor’s Tomb
Preface and Acknowledgements
Demonised for centuries, the First Emperor is an imposing figure, even in classical accounts. Our chief written source for him is the Record of the Historian, a vast chronicle of ancient China by the Han dynasty author Sima Qian, including biographies of many of the major figures of the era. But the First Emperor is also a shadow. In his own lifetime he was aloof and hidden from view, protected by distance from killers and admirers alike. When none dared look at him or speak his true name, it is unsurprising that we have little idea of his facial features or character. There is little in ancient accounts about his personality, instead, all we have are the bold architectural statements and the brutal political decisions. A biography of the First Emperor is, by necessity, also a biography of those closest to him – of the past works, more than 40% of Cotterell’s First Emperor of China is devoted to the politics and history of the Warring States, while the protagonist of Bodde’s China’s First Unifier is not the emperor at all, but his wily chief minister, Li Si. As for original sources, we have decrees issued in the name of the First Emperor, but little of his personality, although the Record of the Historian includes biographies of his ministers, his generals and even the man who tried to kill him. The First Emperor himself is that silence in between, the subject they dare not mention or the distant sovereign in whose name they claim to act.
Writing about the First Emperor today is hampered further by the concerns of the Han dynasty, the successor state that survived in one form or another for 400 years after him. Although the emperors of the Han retained a great deal of Qin’s organisational structure, laws and practices, it was vital for them to establish a clear ideological distance between themselves and the dynasty they had supplanted. This led to an enduring smear campaign about the alleged excesses of the Qin empire. Qin had failed so that Han might flourish, but Han perpetuated many Qin policies; therefore its First Emperor and his ministers themselves were required to take the blame for its failure as a matter of personality and character, obscuring many of their achievements and leaving little space in Han accounts for admiration or even-handedness. Scholars have even cast doubt on many established stories about the First Emperor’s infamous deeds, pointing to textual changes in language and tone that suggest that certain tales – including the Burning of the Books and divine portents of his fall (see Chapter 6) – were later interpolations by Han propagandists.1
There are inferences that we can draw from certain asides and moments – the implacable conqueror of China is also the man who ran from an assassin, tugging in vain at an unwieldy ceremonial sword that was too big to draw from its scabbard. He was the man who had everything, and yet was plagued by signs of his own mortality. He was the ruthlessly secular thinker, defying the old gods, and yet still trying to join their number. Despite his hatred and censure of superstition, we now know that his burial featured divine gestures of faith and power rivalled only by the pyramids of Egypt. For 2200 years before the discovery year of 1974, nobody guessed the First Emperor’s final monument lay beneath the red clays of Lintong, designed to last forever but presumed destroyed within years of his death. There are people alive today who were born in a world that did not know of the terracotta army. Truly, we live in interesting times.
It was Jaqueline Mitchell of Sutton Publishing who first suggested a book on the Great Wall, and who then allowed me to talk her round instead to a book about the man who caused it to be built. My agent, Chelsey Fox of Fox and Howard ensured there was blood for the drums. My former history tutor, Ellis Tinios, thought he had retired from the University of Leeds, only to find himself standing on his desk late one Saturday evening, a phone jammed in the crook of his neck while he squinted among his papers for a Xiongnu chronology. Andrew Deacon was similarly surprised to find me pestering him for chemical analyses of Chinese cement, Motoko Tamamuro was prevailed upon to translate obscure legends, while the librarians of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies were their usual unflappable selves.
This second edition is published by Charlotte Howard at Albert Bridge Books almost a decade after the original work, and draws on further experiences, including the unexpected decision by Guoji Wenhua to publish a Chinese-language edition. London’s British Museum held an acclaimed 2007 exhibition of artefacts from the Terracotta Army, arguably containing more up-to-date materials and documentation than that to be found in the Army’s home museum. I have also benefited from the contacts brought about by my work on a 2013 documentary for Channel 4/PBS, which took me back to the Terracotta Army site in the company of producer Su-Mae Khoo, cinematographer Brian McDairmant and director Ian Bremner, and led to illuminating conversations with Marcos Martinon-Torres and Janice Li from University College London. Professor Li Qi’s decision to appoint me as a Visiting Professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University from 2013-16 also brought me into close proximity with many other details and elements of the First Emperor’s necropolis.
This 2015 edition incorporates details from several books published since my original publication, most notably the lavish British Museum exhibition catalogue, The First Emperor, edited by Jane Portal, and the
insightful The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han by Mark Edward Lewis, which challenged many of my earlier conclusions. Modern readers also have the additional benefit of the Chinese Archaeology website (kaogu.net), maintained by the Institute of Archaeology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, offering many updates and reports on new excavations as they happen.
My grateful acknowledgement goes to Stanford University Press for permission to quote from Xunzi, translated by John Knoblock and The Annals of Lü Buwei translated by John Knoblock and Jeffrey Riegel; to the University of Michigan’s Center for Chinese Studies for permission to quote from the Chan-kuo Ts’e, translated by James Crump; to Indiana University Press for permission to quote from volumes I and VII of The Grand Scribe’s Records, translated by William Nienhauser et al. and to E.J. Brill for permission to quote from China’s First Unifier by Derk Bodde.
Prologue: The Dagger in the Map
Confucius said: ‘Those who do not think ahead will find their troubles close at hand.’2 It did not take a wise man to see that Ying Zheng wanted to rule the entire world. His ancestors had begun the slow progress of conquest. His grandfather, the Bright King of Qin, had deposed the Son of Heaven himself, leaving the world nominally rulerless. Now, Ying Zheng was 33 years old, presiding over a nation that struck fear into the hearts of its neighbours. His country was a machine of war, a state run on military lines, its citizenry regimented and harshly disciplined. Such an environment created a people bred for conquest, and the state of Qin was steadily eating up its rivals.
Something needed to be done. In Yan, the Land of Swallows, the Red Prince decided he would not wait for the warlike Qin peoples to march over his borders. The army of Qin was infamously ruthless; for the Red Prince himself, there would be no quarter, for he had once been a friend of Ying Zheng, and a hostage who had escaped from the kingdom. When Qin attacked, the Red Prince was going to die. The Red Prince thought ahead, and hatched a plot of assassination.
The planning was elaborate. There was no way a killer could sneak past the walls, guard posts and bodyguards that surrounded the king of Qin. In order to get close enough, an assassin would have to gain the trust of the king and his ministers. The Red Prince needed someone who would undertake the mission, a deed that would result in certain death, for even if the killer somehow made it through the many defences and struck a fatal blow, his chances of getting out alive were slim. The assassin would need to be supernaturally lucky, or perhaps stupendously sure of himself.3
The Red Prince found his man. His name was Jing Ke. He was, he claimed, an expert swordsman, but one who had trouble selling his services to noble clients. Perhaps his attitude was to blame; he famously got into fights with other swordsmen over the subject of sword-fighting itself. Perhaps he was never as proficient as he boasted; once, an argument over a chess game in the town of Handan turned violent, but Jing Ke fled before he could prove himself in actual combat with his opponent, Lu Goujian. This was, however, one of the incidents that brought him to the attention of the Red Prince’s advisers, who saw in Jing Ke not cowardice, but an ability to keep a cool head in tense situations. While Jing Ke’s swordsmanship had never been put to the test, he had found other ways of making a name for himself. He associated with the wrong crowd, and was often found in the marketplace, drunk in the company of a dog-butcher and a musician.
He seemed like an unlikely candidate to save a nation, but he came on the highest recommendation. In order to preserve the utmost levels of secrecy, the Red Prince’s chief adviser took his own life after suggesting Jing Ke, both to conceal the plot and convince Jing Ke of its importance. Armed with the news of the adviser’s suicide, the Red Prince begged Jing Ke to take the mission. Jing Ke agreed.
Perhaps in the understanding that he would be making a one-way trip, Jing Ke took his time.4 A voluntarily condemned man, he undertook lavish last meals, indulged in luxuries fit for a king, and dallied with a succession of slave girls supplied for his pleasure. Later legends, considered too frivolous for inclusion in the Record of the Historian, have Jing Ke skimming golden coins across a pond, feasting on the liver of a priceless horse, and even maiming a pretty musician, so that her hands might be presented to him on a jade platter.5
The Red Prince grew concerned about his choice, wondering if the assassin would ever begin the mission. While Jing Ke enjoyed his many, many last requests, the Qin war machine rolled ever onwards, conquering the Land of Latecoming, where the Red Prince had once lived.
While Jing Ke continued to enjoy himself with his luxuries and his bedmates, the Red Prince looked for the means to carry out the deadly mission. Realising that, in the unlikely event Jing Ke reached the king’s inner chamber, he might only have seconds to carry out his task, the Red Prince had been searching for the ideal weapon. No sword, axe or spear would make it past the king’s protectors, but a small dagger might. The Red Prince’s aides, unaware of the purpose of their quest, had been sent out in search of the sharpest in the world. Eventually, they found something that seemed to fit the description: a knife in the possession of a refugee from the Qin conquest. He was persuaded to part with his dagger for a hundred measures of gold, and sent on his way, ignorant of the purpose to which the dagger would be put.
The Red Prince had also been experimenting with poison. Speed was not really the issue; if it worked, it worked. More important for a diligent assassin was the required dosage. The king might be armoured; he might be struggling. When the assassin struck, he might only have the opportunity to make the slightest graze on his quarry’s skin. The Red Prince’s experiments had cost many lives – slaves struck with poisoned blades until the assassin was convinced he had found the concoction that could deliver the most likely death from the smallest cut. As the Qin army drew ever nearer to the border, the Red Prince felt obliged to mention that time was running out.
However, Jing Ke was still not ready for his mission. He reminded his client that it would still be necessary to somehow get close to the king of Qin, and that this would not become suddenly easy. He would need a ruse to enter into the king’s confidence, some way of making it past the outer guards, a means of evading the chamber sentries and the personal bodyguards. The king of Qin was notoriously, understandably paranoid, and unlikely to let a stranger near his royal person unless that stranger had somehow done a great service to his kingdom.
Jing Ke had an idea. He had heard that Fan Yuchi, once a loyal general of the king of Qin, had fled his former master and sought sanctuary with the Red Prince. There was a high price on his head – a thousand measures of gold (almost half a metric tonne), and a noble rank, the rulership of an area comprising ten thousand households. Jing Ke asked for his head.
The Red Prince was scandalised. The general had come to him for help. He could hardly have him killed merely to satisfy his own scheming desires; whether it meant the plan would fail or not. The Red Prince was adamant; he would not order the death of the refugee general Fan Yuchi. Accordingly, Jing Ke went to see Fan Yuchi himself.
The former general brooded somewhere on the Red Prince’s estate, alone. Jing Ke told him that he had heard of the massive reward on the general’s head, and asked the general what he planned on doing with his life.
The general had no answer. His family was dead, and no career awaited with the military of his former enemy; the men of Yan would never follow him in battle. He told Jing Ke the truth: that he could do nothing but sit in exile and dream of revenge.
In one of history’s strangest business proposals, Jing Ke offered him a deal. He asked for Fan Yuchi’s head. In return, he promised to avenge him, by taking his head to the king of Qin to claim the reward. When the grateful king admitted Jing Ke into his presence, Jing Ke planned to grab him by the sleeve and pull him close, stabbing him with the poisoned knife.
‘Day and night,’ replied Fan Yuchi, ‘I gnash my teeth and eat out my heart trying to think of some plan. Now you have shown me the way!’6
The Record of the Historian, the a
ncient Chinese book from which this story comes, implies that Fan Yuchi acted immediately. It is more likely that he thought about it for some time, before seeing that Jing Ke’s harsh plan was the only way he stood a chance of avenging himself. He slit his own throat.
The Red Prince received the news with some shock. He dashed to the general’s chambers and found the body sprawled where it had fallen, its blood in a trail across the floor. He embraced the general’s corpse and wept, the Record of the Historian claims, ‘in deep sorrow’ – relief perhaps, that the brave general had taken the terrible decision out of his own hands; hope, that his last, desperate scheme now had some chance of success; despair, that with each step of the plan, the Red Prince became ever more ruthless and calculating. Even as he fought to save himself, he was turning into a copy of the enemy he despised.
The Red Prince ordered the head of Fan Yuchi to be placed inside a box. Now it would be possible for Jing Ke to feign loyalty by presenting the king of Qin with the head of his enemy. Yet still Jing Ke did not leave.
He could not arrive in Qin alone; that would still look suspicious. The Red Prince found a local man, Wuyang, a fierce criminal who had committed his first murder aged just thirteen. Wuyang was capable of great violence, a berserk fighter who could spring into action at the slightest provocation. The Red Prince thought he would be ideal as a travelling companion for Jing Ke – an unobtrusive youth who could keep the king’s courtiers occupied when the crucial moment came. There is no mention in the Record of the Historian of what price Wuyang demanded for his services.
When Jing Ke still did not leave on his mission, the Red Prince lost his patience, suggesting that perhaps Wuyang might be able to accomplish the mission on his own.
The Record of the Historian records a cryptic response from Jing Ke. With great reluctance, he agreed to leave, remonstrating with the Red Prince that Wuyang did not stand a chance on his own, ‘setting off with a single dagger to face the immeasurable might of Qin.’7 But Jing Ke also complained that the reason he had waited so long was that he was waiting for a friend. According to Jing Ke, his view of the mission required three assassins, not two, and he had sent word to the ideal candidate to complete the team. The Record of the Historian does not reveal the identity of this mysterious third man, but later events and asides suggest that it was Lu Goujian, the chess-playing swordsman from whom Jing Ke had once fled.8
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