The First Emperor of China

by Jonathan Clements

  Considering several other stories about the First Emperor, it is possible that he made many forays out of the palace, but that the Historian only reports the one that almost ended in disaster. It is also conceiveable that the attackers were not opportunistic criminals, but assassins who had been informed of his relatively unprotected wanderings by a palace insider. Another folktale about him records an earlier expedition in disguise, at which the First Emperor listened in rapt attention to gossip about a local man, whose great-grandfather had supposedly ridden to heaven on the back of a dragon. The tall tales seem to have convinced the Emperor that he was looking in the wrong place for the secret of eternal life. While his various scholarly advisers continued to siphon money out of the imperial coffers in search of alchemical quick fixes, the First Emperor announced that he would seek to follow in the footsteps of the Taoist masters of old. Such figures, it was said, would dwell among the mountains and lakes in simple lives of contemplation, until they divested themselves of earthly concerns and achieved immortality.

  The First Emperor determined to try it, but did so with typical brute force. Instead of walking into the wildnerness and disappearing, as the ancient Taoist sage Lao Zi had supposedly done, he ordered the construction of a suitable wilderness close to home. A huge pond was dug south of the city, filled with water diverted from the Wei river and surrounded by sculpted rocks and landscaped gardens. Here, the First Emperor spent some time frolicking in his man-made retreat, hoping to achieve some form of Taoist enlightenment. However, when enlightenment and immortality were not swiftly forthcoming, he grew impatient.15

  Few in the Emperor’s realm would dare suggest that he was wasting his time, although one man did. He was the First Emperor’s court jester, a dwarf whose diminutive size somehow allowed him to get away with outrageously sarcastic comments about his ruler. On hearing of further plans to expand the palace gardens the jester commented that it would be handy to have so many deer around as an early warning system in case of enemy attack. Although no action was taken at the time, the Emperor quietly shelved any expansion scheme in favour of more practical improvements to the city, and gave up on his fake life of seclusion.16

  In 215, he made a fourth inspection tour, heading along the road to his birthplace of Handan, before heading north to the former domain of the Red Prince, the Land of Swallows. He left another monument at a place on the coast whose name by the time of the Historian was simply Jieshi (‘Stone Tablet’), boasting that he had ‘exempted the innocent from taxation’, and also that he had pulled down city walls in the Land of the Swallows. This latter comment may refer to an earlier fortification at the Shanhai Pass, a place where the mountains met the sea on the coastal road to Liaodong. It had in the past, and would again at several dates mark the border between China and the ‘barbarian’ world, but the First Emperor’s own border was significantly further north. Pulling down walls at Jieshi would have been a symbolic acceptance that there was no need for them, as they were firmly within the borders of China.17

  There was another reason for the First Emperor’s trip to the north of his kingdom. Supposedly, there was a wise man in what had once been the Land of Swallows who could put him in touch with an immortal. However, this meeting does not seem to have come about, and the First Emperor instructed three of his supernatural ‘advisors’ to conduct further searches for the elixir of life. Then, his party travelled along the line of Meng Tian’s Great Wall, which now linked the northern border of what had been the Land of Swallows to the northern border of what had once been the Land of Latecoming.

  Back in the capital there was disappointing news. One of the First Emperor’s many supposed ‘experts’ had returned empty-handed from a long quest in search of the elixir of immortality. However, perhaps in anticipation of imperial anger, he claimed to have received a message from the gods for the First Emperor’s ears. It was a simple statement: ‘The empire will be destroyed by Hu.’

  The First Emperor took the message to be a warning that his work was not yet done on the northern border. The Rong and Di barbarians might be incorporated into the empire, but at least two groups defined as Hu still remained north of the Wall zone. That, at least was the excuse for a new order to Meng Tian, to conduct a further campaign against the barbarians. Using the newly built wall as a base, Meng Tian sallied forth with tens of thousands of men, advancing far into Inner Mongolia before returning to report suitable pacification once more.18

  The northern border was not the only place where the First Emperor ordered a clean-up. Similarly sweeping reforms were made to the criminal justice system, particularly regarding tax-dodgers. Qin taxation was levied on the head of each household, which had created a technical loophole that would exclude a man from taxation if, instead of setting up his own household upon reaching his majority, he took his wife’s name instead and sought adoption into her family. The practise, common throughout Chinese history, was designed to ensure that, in cases where a family lacked a male heir, the family name would be continued through the adoptive son-in-law, and ensure that there would always be a named descendant to carry out the necessary rituals of ancestor worship. However, it would appear that far too many of the First Emperor’s subjects were bending the letter of the law, and signing up as adoptees simply to save money. Considering the Qin dynasty’s historical disdain for religion, and the First Emperor’s increasing frustration with his search for magic aids that actually worked, his reaction was predictable. In 214, the First Emperor ordered that all such tax-dodgers, along with a number of fugitives from justice, convicts and other undesirables, should be rounded up and packed off to the far south, where they would serve on a new frontier.

  An army of the Qin empire pushed further south than Chinese had ever been before, following a tributary of the Yangtze river to its south-western extreme, and then traversing the mountain range into the basin beyond. The expedition established three new commanderies in the south, Guilin, Xiangjun and Nanhai. Although the exact locations are still open to conjecture, it is thought that Guilin (‘Cassia Woods’) was roughly equivalent to the place that bears that name today, while Nanhai (‘South-Sea’) was somewhere near modern Canton. Xiangjun (‘Elephant-District’, is more problematic and may have been somewhere near modern Kunming, or perhaps even further to the south, where the Red river meets the Gulf of Tonkin. The region as a whole was designated as the place of the ‘Southern Yue’ peoples, Nan-yue (locally Nam-viet), using the same characters that are now transposed and pronounced Vietnam.

  The expansion to Nan-yue moved the First Emperor’s borders all the way to another seacoast in the southeast, and seemingly impassable jungles and mountains in the southwest. Now, finally, he might consider his job of conquering the world finally accomplished, at least geographically. Some of his subjects, however, were still not playing by the draconian rules of Legalism. For so many men to have successfully avoided taxation or justice, there had to be a large number of law enforcers and judges who were not fulfilling their duties. Consequently, the year 213 saw a purge of all officials thought to have failed in their responsibilities, packed off to join the criminals they had once sentenced, either on further Great Wall labours in the north, or hacking out a colony on the new southern frontier.

  It was widely agreed that there was finally cause for celebration. With the great Legalist plan finally believed to be a success, the First Emperor gave a great banquet at his palace in Xianyang. It was attended by the eldest of his children, lords and officials of note, and a group of his most trusted political advisers, known as the Seventy Erudites.

  As the banquet reached its climax, one of the officers proposed a toast. Years of imperial service had taught him the best policy to follow, and his speech was a textbook glorification of the First Emperor suitable for one of the stone tablets dotted all over the empire. The First Emperor, he said, was truly great, he had accomplished many things, allowing the territory of Qin to expand beyond its borders, seizing control of formerly independent s
tates, and even places far beyond. Moreover, in his implementation of new laws and pacification measures, the First Emperor had created a new state that would endure for the rest of time.

  The toastmaster finished with a flourish, and when the First Emperor acknowledged his praise, the banqueting hall erupted with cheers and applause. But not all the diners were pleased with his version of events, and one scholar from the district that had once been the Land of the Devout took drunken exception. His name was Chun Yuyue, and he spoke the secret concerns of a number of the First Emperor’s scholars, and possibly a few of the First Emperor’s children. Emboldened by alcohol, he flew in the face of Qin policy, by recalling olden times, pointing out that it had been a policy in the days of the legendary sovereigns to parcel out marches and fiefdoms to those who had served them faithfully, and indeed to family members. If Chun Yuyue’s complaint was anything to go by, numerous officials in the Qin war machine had failed to appreciate all the clauses in the Legalist agenda, and had served in the expectation of being granted small kingdoms of their own upon the completion of the Qin conquest. However, Li Si’s Legalist system was far more flexible than that. As part of his policy of keeping control centralised, no official was safe. Instead, uneasy triumvirates and temporary contracts governed many provincial regions, and the First Emperor maintained the right to depose or replace any of his ‘nobles’ at short notice. The implications of this policy were increasingly unwelcome to the First Emperor’s sons, perhaps a dozen boys of whom perhaps only one, Prince Fusu, stood a chance of attaining political power.

  But if he spoke with the silent support of the princes, Chun Yuyue gave no sign. He limited his speech to a complaint about the Qin empire’s wilful ignorance of tradition. Chun Yuyue was a follower of the Confucian school, and hence believed that many traditions existed for a reason. Chun thought that the First Emperor’s system of prefectures and counties was not benign at all, but an unstable danger, particularly since anyone who really deserved to be given control of a province would disqualify themselves through their own loyalty.

  Chun Yuyue’s comments were not popular, but he spoke well enough to gain the First Emperor’s attention. He asked his closest adviser to respond, perhaps an unwise choice of speaker, since Li Si was personally responsible for the organisation of the prefecture system, and likely to have taken the criticism as a personal attack. Li Si admitted that the system still had teething troubles, but in the half-dozen years since it was first instituted, it seemed to be working.

  We will never know if Li Si’s next comments were made in the heat of the moment, or if he merely chose to suggest a policy he had been mulling over for some time. Certainly his past activities, particularly in the reform of the writing system and government institutions, had set him on a road that made his next suggestion wholly characteristic. After brushing off Chun Yuyue’s comments with disdain, Li Si pointed out to the First Emperor that such ignorant carping was likely to continue for some time in the future. The Legalist system that had so successfully conquered the world was new, argued Li Si. It was the product of the Qin empire, and, so far, it had proved to be the best system that the world had ever seen.

  Chun Yuyue had made a fatal error in appealing to ancient precedents. In criticising Li Si, he had also gone up against one of the foremost minds of the age. Li Si toyed with his prey, and remarkably found a way of demolishing the argument, both with recourse to Chun Yuyue’s own philosophical system, and that of Legalism itself.

  Li Si pointed out that Chun Yuyue’s argument was based on a false premise. He was appealing to some nebulous idea of ancient perfection, although it was well known that the ancients were not perfect. The several mythical kings had each pursued different policies and systems, and all their policies had been found wanting. Li Si was able to use the very question that had first led to the formation of the Legalist system, if the ancient kings were so perfect, what had gone wrong? It had taken one truly great king, the man who became the First Emperor, to prove what the Legalists had always suspected, that the ancient legends were lies.

  Of course, this was unfair. Chun Yuyue had a point, that the Zhou dynasty preceding Qin had lasted for almost a thousand years, and that Qin had been barely in control for a decade. Li Si was being grossly overconfident in his assessment of the Qin dynasty’s achievement, but there seemed to be no way of saying so without angering the emperor.

  The impasse was precisely the kind of protocol issue that Li Si’s late rival Han Fei had discussed at length in his Frustrations of a Loner, which the First Emperor had once so admired. Although the Legalist system prided itself on its openness to debate, debate itself was closed. Either Li Si was convinced of his own infallibility, or he had realised that his own position was just as precarious as any other’s. Controversially, Li Si suggested that future generations would need to be protected from such time-wasting.

  As far as he could see, the Qin empire would soon face a new problem: that of ill-informed doubt. The government ran the risk of people like Chun Yuyue believing the propaganda of previous dynasties, alluding to a Golden Age that never was, and using such supposed precedents to question their rulers. Meanwhile, for as long as records endured of the former nations, there would be revolts and restoration attempts by disaffected adherents of the previous dynasties. Li Si proposed that the best way of pre-empting such problems was to remove such ideas from the heads of future scholars.

  Li Si proposed a government control on knowledge itself, the removal of all books, dynastic histories and even songs that did not meet with government approval. What chance would there be of irritations like Han Fei tormenting him from the grave, if there were no copies of Han Fei’s works to be read? Li Si proposed the ultimate censorship, the removal of all works deemed unnecessary by the government. Mere discussion of banned works would become a capital crime, as would the hoarding of banned literature. In accordance with the strictures of Legalist justice, officials who permitted such things to go on in their jurisdiction would suffer the same punishments. Scrolls related to farming, crop management or health matters would be permitted. Songs glorifying the First Emperor would be allowed. Copies of banned literature would be maintained in the First Emperor’s own library for consultation by loyal ministers, but all other editions were to be burned.19

  It was a suggestion of terrifying moment, and an extension of government control into the very minds of its citizens. But in a sense, with the reform of the writing system, it was already underway. The First Emperor thought about Li Si’s suggestion, and approved it wholeheartedly.

  Li Si might have been attempting to head off potential criticism, but the First Emperor had other motives. He was losing patience with the continued excuses from his advisers on immortality, and may have hoped that a purge on wasteful and useless literature might focus the minds of his best scholars. However, even as officials seized scrolls all over the country, burning uncountable irrecoverable manuscripts, the emperor’s immortality consultants continued in their charlatanry.

  In 212, the immortality project was still getting nowhere. There was still no news of the marine expedition to find the Isles of the Immortals, although asides in the Record of the Historian imply that its leader Xufu had returned to China long ago, and was lurking somewhere near Langya, frittering away the expedition’s impressive budget. The First Emperor’s private Taoist retreat had failed to be anything more than an expensive personal theme park. And despite the careful destruction of any documents thought to be untrue, the records of alchemical transformations still failed to bring any dragons down from the sky to transport him to heaven.

  The immortality consultants were under increasing pressure. What had once been an idle boast about prolonging human life had transformed into a virtual imprisonment that kept them in perpetual fear. If they were ever found to be misleading their emperor, then their lives would be forfeit, and they found increasingly elaborate excuses to explain their poor results.

  One suggested that the man
y expeditions in search of potions and herbal remedies were being ruined by the presence of evil spirits. His explanation implied that the First Emperor’s previous wanderings in disguise had themselves been part of his magical experiments: an attempt to thwart angry ghosts by mingling with the common people. The consultant advised him that the attempted remedy had failed because, while the commoners had not known of the First Emperor’s identity, there were still noble officials who had known of the plan.

  The consultant suggested that the weight of the First Emperor’s duties was interfering with his ability to achieve immortality. True Taoist immortals, he said, should be able to walk on water or across hot coals, but they also set aside worldly things. For as long as the First Emperor was present in the throne room, or interfering in public business, he did not stand a chance of divesting himself of earthly concerns.

  In a bizarre charade, the First Emperor ordered that his various homes and palaces around the capital to be connected by a series of walkways and covered arcades. The result was a citywide maze of tunnels and closed corridors, linking 277 locations. Each palace was fully furnished for the First Emperor’s pleasure, with cooks, girls and guards, none of whom was permitted to leave. This situation allowed the First Emperor to choose his place of rest each night completely at random, turning up at one of the palaces without warning

  Initially it seemed like a relatively harmless, although costly bit of fun. The First Emperor was able to disappear from public life for prolonged periods, only making himself available to Li Si and the other ministers when he wished it so. However, there were still leaks. Li Si came to meet the First Emperor on one occasion when he was one of the outlying palaces on a hilltop. Much to the First Emperor’s annoyance, he saw that Li Si’s party comprised so many chariots that it could only be heading to see the ruler – in other words, Li Si had known exactly where the First Emperor would be, and was determined to arrive with enough people in his entourage to show the proper respect. On seeing the numbers of chariots, the First Emperor realised that many of his followers were only feigning ignorance of his whereabouts. He ordered for the deaths of the attendants with him that day, and his wanderings remained truly secret from that point on.