The First Emperor of China

by Jonathan Clements

In the second year of Yiren’s reign, Qin armies continued to advance, now into Zhao. Although they gained further territory, a solar eclipse was enough to suggest to the superstitious that a change was on its way. The Qin forces were beaten back by a new coalition of the surviving states in 247. With its armies held back from ultimate conquest once more, Qin lost its third king in barely five years. Yiren was dead, too, although the Record of the Historian does not offer a reasonable explanation as to why Yiren, in the prime of life and attended by the best doctors and advisers, should suddenly keel over in the third year of his reign.

  If anyone had a motive to get rid of Yiren, it was Lü Buwei himself. Yiren’s heir, Ying Zheng, was only 13 years old, an age that was handily unsuitable for a royal ruler. A regency was required, and the boy-king’s mother, Zhaoji, and her former lover, Grand Councillor Lü Buwei were the ideal candidates. Foul play cannot be proved, but does not seem impossible.

  This was Lü Buwei’s chance to shine. Keen to prove himself a master in every aspect of statecraft, it was Buwei who led the army that swept down against the ruins of the royal domain. A Qin army swept down on the pitiful remnants of the former Zhou, conquering the last of the royal domain. Where once the kings of Zhou had claimed to rule the world, there was now only a charred region designated as the Three Rivers commandery. In honour of his loyal service to the boy-king, Grand Councillor Lü Buwei received part of the region as his personal fief, and the noble rank of Marquis. Notably, this appears to be the end of Lü Buwei’s supposed military career. A mop-up operation against the survivors of an earlier conquest did not seem to be beyond his abilities, but when developments called for a better application of military skills, he was happy to defer to the generals. He had made his point; he had led an army. Related Qin campaigns ensured that communications and alliances were wrecked between Qin’s three closest neighbours, and that further advances across the ruins of Chu gave Qin territory a border for the first time with Qi, the Land of the Devout.

  Lü Buwei’s skills were better used back at court, on long-term political subterfuge. The collapse of the Zhou, although it had been centuries in the making, was still a shocking event to the people of the time; a moment of epochal closure. For a state such as Qin, preparing to fill the vacuum since long before a vacuum existed, it was one more achievement in the to-do list of a conqueror. For other states, the loss of the Zhou was more traumatic; even those countries that had arrogantly asserted their own right to kingship now found themselves without any spiritual precedents. Much as they may have despised their father-ruler in the royal domain, some nations were surprised at their sudden orphan status. Lü Buwei did what he could to rub salt into the wounds. With the states of Han, Zhao and Wei in chaos, the only potential for strong opposition lay in Yan, the Land of Swallows, and Qi, the Land of the Devout. Lü Buwei managed to arrange it to that Yan’s chief minister was an ally, thereby ensuring that when he suggested that Qin and Yan collaborate in ‘attacking common enemies’, he received a positive answer. In the name of the First Emperor, Lü Buwei ensured that the Land of the Devout was plunged into conflict, although the fighting failed to turn up any evidence of the Ninth Tripod, the missing magical device believed to be in the possession of the local ruler.1

  While Lü Buwei and Zhaoji ruled in his name, the boy-king studied the art of kingship. One day, he was told, he would reach manhood and become king for real, but first, he would need to study with the best. During this period, if not before his investiture, Buwei began to amass an entourage of scholars trained in the Confucian tradition, as scribes, advisers and consultants. Such a staff was considered wholly appropriate for a prime minister (all the prime ministers of other states had something similar), and functioned not only as a think-tank, but as a machine to generate publicity. Even if Buwei ignored his advisers (and he did so regularly), their monographs and treatises could be circulated in other countries as part of an exercise to encourage other scholars to seek Qin. These writings were not merely copied, but also collated as Buwei’s own personal compendium of all the knowledge required for a ruler.

  Were it not for the later scandals that brought Lü Buwei’s downfall, it is likely that his monument to posterity would have been the 26 volumes of the Annals of Lü Buwei. The book was conceived as the ultimate encyclopaedia, a distillation of all human knowledge into one giant work that conspicuously bore its patron’s name; in the original Chinese, it had the proud title Spring and Autumn of Master Lü, a deliberate attempt to associate it with the more famous Spring and Autumn Annals of Confucius. Lü Buwei hoped to be remembered as a similarly wise sage, but seemed unable to break free of his mercantile roots. We do not know that a single word of the Annals of Lü Buwei was written by the man himself, instead, he merely funded the researches and debates of his entourage, and encouraged them to contribute. Parts of the Annals may contain anonymous contributions by other great minds such as Li Si, perhaps even Xunzi, but it was more important to Buwei that the book be remembered as a monument to his philosophy and statecraft. If that were the plan, it was a failure, although in Buwei’s insistence that he had produced the ultimate book, we may see the first seeds of the censorious policy that would later make Li Si and the First Emperor infamous. Although the Annals are an interesting window on life in the third century BC, they do not represent a cogent development of Confucian philosophy; perhaps unsurprisingly, considering their multi-author status. It is believed that the texts of the Annals also formed at least part of the curriculum for the education of Ying Zheng. When we read the Annals, we read the same thoughts that informed the First Emperor and his later decisions.2

  Lü Buwei posted the text of the Annals in public view, hoping to impress both by its size and comprehensive nature. So sure was he of its perfection that he hung a large sum of gold in the marketplace, daring any passing readers to claim it by adding a single word to his perfect publication. In Lü Buwei’s grandstanding behaviour, we can see the insecurity of a common man made good; had he any real hand in the composition of the Annals, he would have known that there was little chance of a passing scholar being able to form an opinion of a text he could only read by jostling and squinting among crowds at, presumably, an extremely long series of wall hangings. His declaration also demonstrated the self-assurance of the bully; if the leading minister of the Qin state announced he had written the perfect book, the chances of someone daring to offer editorial revisions were remote indeed.

  Despite the nature of its composition, the Annals permits us a glimpse of political theory in Qin around the time of Lü Buwei’s regency. Its worldview occupies an interesting point somewhere between the pious rituals of Confucianism and the brutal dogma of the Legalists. The Annals pays lip service to the stories of ancient kings that Xunzi was already discounting, but lifts a little from Xunzi’s own thought by suggesting that the world required a ruler, and with the Zhou departed the time has come to select a replacement from the other nations. In a triumph of self-reflexivity, the Annals argued that if the world required a sage-ruler of unparalleled abilities, then surely the king under whose authority such a book was compiled would be an ideal candidate?

  The Annals was not merely a public relations exercise for Lü Buwei, it was a political manifesto, establishing what he had achieved in his tenure in Qin. Amid traditional decrees that rulers should be wise and teachers should be respected, there are other elements that fly in the face of the Confucian tradition. The essence of the Annals is not merely a boast of Lü Buwei’s power, but a defence of his past behaviour. In the view of the Annals, a ruler of true nobility should serve as little more than figurehead, approving the decisions made by civil servants wiser in their specialist areas than he could ever be. Buwei even offered his own explanation as to what may have gone wrong to cause the end of the time of legends. Ministers, dare he suggest, ministers such as he were overlooked:

  As to the true kings of antiquity

  The occasions when they acted on their own were few,

&n
bsp; And those when they relied on others, many.

  Reliance on others is the [way] of the lord;

  Action is the [way] of the minister.3

  The Annals also displayed a contradictory attitude towards Qin tradition – happy to cite ancient precedent when it could, but equally eager to dismiss legends and myths whenever they offered no useful support. Like so many other foreigners in the Qin government, Buwei had benefited from the opportunities it offered, but did not seem to have approved of the drift further into Legalism. He pushed the idea of a ‘just war’, and defended the use of warfare as a political tool; this in itself was a controversial attack on established orthodoxy, which held that warfare was something to be avoided at all costs. However, the Annals also suggested a loosening of the restrictions imposed by Lord Shang and his successors, perhaps even a return to a true sense of ‘traditional values’, not the thunder and lightning of myth, but a hearty respect for what really mattered – the agriculture that kept a state alive. As an unexpected reflection of Buwei’s own background, he also suggested that merchants should be valued for their ability to generate wealth. Buwei’s Annals pushed the ideas of market forces and, in its own way, capitalism.

  Most dangerous was Lü Buwei’s subtle assault on nobility – his own high rank being something that he had bought (he would say earned) rather than bestowed upon him at birth. Appealing to the ancient tales that Xunzi had discounted, the Annals argued that the noblest of the legendary rulers of the world had appointed successors worthy of themselves. Lü Buwei’s point, verging on the treasonous, was that inherited nobility itself should be questioned. Why, asked the Annals, should an incompetent ruler be allowed to govern simply because of his father? Surely it was better for a wise ruler to select his successor from among the best possible candidates? A wise king chose the best possible ministers to serve him, of course, but in the view of the Annals, a wise king should also choose the best possible minister to replace him.4

  A cunning Legalist might see Buwei’s argument for what it was, a steely reminder that he held the true power, and it was in his ward’s interests to ratify his decisions. Ying Zheng, however, had another teacher – a professional politician who had trained his whole life for the kind of political office that Buwei had bought for himself.

  Lü Buwei’s most illustrious hiring was Li Si, a former student of the philosopher Xunzi and a native of Chu, the Land of the Immaculate. Whereas Xunzi grappled with the gap between the theory of Confucius and the realities of the world, Li Si embraced it. Li Si started life, much like Confucius himself, as a civil servant, but made some famously political observations about vermin. In the privy of the officers’ quarters, he glimpsed timid and fearful rats, fighting over scraps of food, and scurrying out of sight at the approach of a human. He saw a very different kind of rat in the royal granaries, where the rodents grew fat on an abundance of grain, and took their time getting out of the way of anyone approaching. Fear of punishment or discovery made the latrine rats the way they were, whereas complacency created a different sort of rat in the granary. Character, thought Li Si, was made and shaped by experience, not by birth.

  Li Si was one of Xunzi’s greatest pupils, although also one of his greatest disappointments. Whereas Xunzi saw imminent disaster in the advance of Qin, Li Si saw a golden opportunity. In his farewell address to his tutor, he told him that the skills he had learned made him highly desirable to any ruler, but that it was in his own interest to seek a master who had the best resources and the highest aspirations. It was, argued Li Si, completely futile for him to while away his days in an also-ran state like Chu, concocting great ideas that the state would be too fearful or too impecunious to implement. Li Si refused to let his potential go to waste by staying in Chu – he likened his education to ‘catching a deer just to look at the meat.’5 Li Si did not want to be one of the sewer rats fighting over scraps in the twilight days of his homeland; he wanted to be one of the fat granary rats, afraid of nobody and with plenty of things to chew on. ‘The King of Qin,’ said Li Si to his fuming tutor, ‘now desires to swallow up the world and rule with the title of Emperor.’ Rather than fight it like the noble Confucians of the other states, Li Si was ready to become part of it. He followed the money.

  Li Si arrived at the ideal time. With Buwei now enmeshed deeply in the regency, he was looking for someone to be tutor to the new heir, and Li Si, in his thirties and eager for promotion, seemed like the ideal candidate. Only a couple of sentences after announcing his arrival and hiring in Qin, the Record of the Historian describes him ‘advising’ not Buwei, but the young king of Qin himself. Although history would remember Ying Zheng as the man who instituted the rule of law all over China, it is worth remembering that in his youth, it was law itself that made him.

  Lü Buwei had other concerns. As Ying Zheng approached the age of maturity, he would expect his manhood ceremony. Shortly afterwards, he would expect the regent to step down, and Lü Buwei would lose all his hard-won power. Consequently, Buwei delayed the manhood ceremony for as long as possible, perhaps trying to think of a way to disqualify Ying Zheng from the succession, in favour of a new, younger candidate that would require a new regency.

  After serving as Ying Zheng’s tutor for almost a decade, Li Si had a vested interest in keeping his star pupil alive and seeing his coronation. Just as Buwei had once manoeuvred Yiren into the right position to become king, Li Si determined to keep Ying Zheng in line for the throne. Li Si advised him to bid his time for the ideal moment when he could capitalise not only on opportunities, but on the mistakes of others. He, too, could cite historical precedents. Just as the state of Qin itself had waited on the sidelines while the feudal domains fought among themselves, the king should wait for the Qin court factions to weaken each other before making his move. Li Si pointed to the current position that Qin enjoyed, great strength, powerful defences, and the coming opportunity to sweep down upon its exhausted neighbours ‘like sweeping the dust from the top of a stove.’ Others might currently hold the upper hand, but the king still had a trump card – he was, after all, the rightful heir to the throne, and need only wait for the right moment to enforce this.6

  In the early days of Buwei’s regency, the Qin armies renewed their attacks on other kingdoms. Zhao, however, the native land of both Buwei and his fellow regent Zhaoji, was untouched. The young king continued his studies with Li Si, and invested his Grand Councillor Buwei with the tellingly familial title of Zhong Fu, or Second Father. Having functioned in loco parentis for so long at Handan, Buwei’s status as the king’s guardian was now a matter of state record. It has even been suggested that Buwei encouraged the title himself, as a means of implying that he was indeed the true father of the king, but this is unlikely. If Ying Zheng’s paternity were in doubt, then Buwei’s position would become less, not more secure.7

  The regency saw Qin plagued by locusts and poor harvests, with outbreaks of disease not far behind. Lü Buwei, ever the entrepreneur, fought the troubles by offering a noble title to anyone who could provide a thousand cups of grain for the state stores.8 Qin was now so large, and extended so far beyond its original valley, that it was forced to admit a much heavier reliance on agriculture than before. It would need to take desperate measures to avoid another famine, and its enemies were prepared to exploit it with several espionage schemes. One, masterminded by the state of Han, planted a civil engineer in Qin, where he suggested a new irrigation scheme. The plan was to build a canal between the Jing and Luo rivers, connecting the waterways and providing ample irrigation for new farms. The scheme was a great success, and would in years to come provide fantastically high crop yields to feed the hungry armies of Qin. The Zheng canal, as it would be known, would have such an effect on the area’s economy that it would be of paramount importance for centuries to come. However, none of that was part of the original plan. The entire purpose of the Zheng canal was to occupy as many men of Qin as possible on a grand scheme, thereby keeping the country too busy with interna
l matters to attack its neighbours.

  Lü Buwei’s regency also saw several notable efforts by the administration to honour wealthy merchants and incorporate them within the system. Considering Lü Buwei’s background, this is unsurprising – he clearly had no time for snooty declarations of traditional values or implications of inherited nobility. If someone had amassed a fortune through other means, Lü Buwei saw no problem with offering them a sinecure of some description and making them part of the establishment. One such beneficiary was a man whose sole claim to fame was a long-standing business connection with the barbarians of the western frontier, who had built up a fortune by bartering silk for animal furs in a never-ending cycle of profit. The man was not only given a noble rank, but invited to participate in ministerial audiences. Similarly, a rich widow who continued to run her late husband’s cinnabar business was honoured as a paragon of wifely virtue by order of the boy-king – a decree signed by Ying Zheng, but wholly masterminded by Lü Buwei. His reasons for placing such an emphasis on virtuous widowhood, however, may not have been solely involved with a desire for money.9

  Beyond the intrigues of neighbour states, Qin had internal problems within the palace. It is unclear when Lü Buwei resumed his earlier relationship with Zhaoji, or indeed if the couple had ever stopped seeing each other in secret. Considering that Yiren left Zhaoji behind after he fled the siege of Handan, and was not reunited with her for some years, it is possible that Buwei and the Queen Mother had been enjoying more than each other’s company for some time.

  Ancient sources suggest a growing tension between Lü Buwei and Zhaoji. Buwei was keen to leave his merchant past behind, a social climber intent on gaining power and respect, enjoying his newfound role as regent. Zhaoji, however, had other appetites – we must regard the insinuations of later scribes with a degree of scepticism, since they were written during a regime intensely hostile towards the Qin, but even so, there are many claims in ancient sources that Zhaoji was insatiable.