The First Emperor of China

by Jonathan Clements

  On the eastern flank of the necropolis, outside its walls, archaeologists uncovered a north-south row of six smaller graves, possibly containing the remains of the princes brought down by Zhao Gao. Ahead of the graves are the remains of 29 horses, possibly a random number, or perhaps the same horses that drew funeral carts for the luckless princes.9 Pits of rare animals, including peacocks, sit to the north and south of the small graves, and other objects have been found all over the site.

  Remarkably, the findings of the late 20th and early 21st century have confirmed many of the claims made in the Record of the Historian, not about the army itself, which is not mentioned in detail, but about the disposition of the site. Underground barriers protect the ground beneath the site from springs, as mentioned in the Historian’s account. The site was incomplete, with a “Pit 4” sitting empty next to the other, more famous discoveries. The Terracotta Army was buried in underground halls, a symbolic recreation of the First Emperor’s own attendants, and would have remained untouched were it not for a fire that brought roof beams crashing down upon chambers below.

  However, the First Emperor’s tomb still remains a mystery. A cynic might suggest that, considering the vast size of the site, it is a cunning marketing ploy to leave the tomb unopened, particularly since so much circumstantial evidence suggests that it may have already been robbed in the distant past. The museum may have much of interest to the tourist, but archaeology itself is a slow process, its benefits not immediately apparent, and in constant danger of reductions in funding. For as long as the First Emperor’s tomb sits in the distance behind the exhibition hall, the guides have stories to tell their parties, and the managers have promises to dangle before funding bodies. If the archaeologists were to fall immediately upon the tomb mound, the magic of the First Emperor could be over before it really begun – the archaeologists would find plenty to occupy them, but if the tomb were a wreck and the treasures plundered, there would be no 21st century Tutankhamun mystique left to sell.

  The Terracotta Army was a private secret, a series of underground chambers designed for the First Emperor’s use in the afterlife, but plundered before completion, and left smashed into millions of pieces. It now stands reborn, with a purpose-built chamber overhead that lets in daylight the army was never supposed to see, not even in the original plans. Its nearby exhibition hall features imitation pagoda roofs built of steel and faced in granite, using materials much solider and longer lasting than the wood and clay structures of old. The museum itself has already stood longer than the ancient necropolis it exhibits.

  Visitors are told that the First Emperor himself has yet to be found, although the place of his repose is visible to all. Somewhere, they say, beneath the green-leafed mound in the distance, the First Emperor is said to lie at the centre of a vast model of the universe, a ceiling into which jewels have been set as constellations, and, ‘under heaven’, a sculpted replica of the known world, from the wastes beyond his Great Wall, to the jungles and mountains of the barbarian south, mountains and plains, and rivers picked out in mercury, running down to a replica of the ocean. Someday, the guides claim, our shovels will finally reach the chamber, and we will see the giant candles of whale-oil that were designed to burn for a century. We will find the piled corpses of the tomb’s builders, and beyond them, the luckless concubines, sacrificed because no man but the First Emperor could be suffered to love them.10

  The greatest prospect of all is that the guides are right. So much of the fanciful reporting of the Record of the Historian has been proved true since 1975; why would the Historian Sima Qian lie about everything else? The lootings reported in days gone by, the scavenging, the fires and chamber collapses, do not necessarily refer to the tomb itself, but all seem to apply to the vast symbolic army to be found at the foot of the hill. The Terracotta Army may have inadvertently performed its chief function, guarding its lord by distracting his would-be grave robbers. Although no contemporary images of the First Emperor survive, we may yet get to see his face, lying in his undiscovered burial chamber, in a golden coffin, set on a silvery sea.

  Appendix I: Ancestors of the First Emperor

  Ancestors of Qin, from Legendary Times to 848 BC

  Early Dukes of Qin, 857–621 BC

  Later Dukes of Qin, 621–338 BC

  Also please add the following as a small into a corner of the main family tree showing Ying Zheng’s immediate family:

  The Meng family, Companions of the King

  Appendix II: Names and Titles

  Packaging Chinese history into a legible account is rendered extremely difficult by the Chinese language itself. A Chinese character is not a meaningless ‘letter’, denoting a single sound. Instead, it is a complex glyph packed with meaning, an entire syllable with a tonal dimension completely lacking in English. To an oriental reader, a single word, like Qin, or Rong, or Di, means much more on the page than it ever can in its simple romanised form. This presents unexpected difficulties for the popular historian, flensing meaning from sentences, and leaving us with monosyllabic moments like: ‘Dan, prince of Yan, feared the king of Qin.’ More irritatingly, without the ability to convey tonal structure or the inherent meaning of the characters, there are barely 120 words in Chinese. The number of men called Li, or countries called Wei, soon build up in any account, further confusing the reader. There is a world of difference between wéi and wèi, but it is often not obvious to the non-Sinologist.

  The Chinese of the period had several kinds of names. The ming is the name given at birth, and the zi is an ‘adult name’ conferred upon reaching maturity (for boys) and on marriage (for girls). People also had a xing, or surname, denoting their family, and some, particularly nobles, had a fourth name, or shi, denoting their clan affiliation. Nobles also received a posthumous name, conferred in summary of their life’s achievement. When faced with such a plethora of titles, I have endeavoured to assign a single name to each major character, and to stick with it to preserve editorial consistency and reader sanity. In First Emperor, I have followed the policy of my earlier Chinese history books, Pirate King (published as Coxinga in paperback) and Confucius, diligently removing any Chinese words where possible. I have, in translation terms, mixed communicative and referential language, rendering what things mean, rather than what they say, on those occasions where it makes the text more readable. I have also deliberately applied anachronisms where they help simplify the text, preferring the term Sichuan, for example, to the archaic provinces of Shu and Ba, even though Sichuan only entered popular parlance in the 13th century AD.

  Such a policy works, I hope, in a popular account, but requires an appendix such as this so that readers may pursue the same story in other books. This requires not only giving the entire, unsullied names of the historical participants, but also their renderings in another romanisation system – I have used the Pinyin system invented in the 20th century, but many earlier accounts use Wade-Giles, the 19th century system cluttered with apostrophes and strange consonantal transformations, that spells Beijing as ‘Peking’, yet still expects the reader to pronounce it as ‘Beijing’. There is still another system, Yale, which is an even better representation of the sound of Chinese on the page, but seems so alien to non-specialist eyes that it might as well be Martian. This is probably not a good time to mention that in the 2200 years between the time of the First Emperor and our own, many of the pronunciations of Chinese characters have shifted so much that they are almost unrecognisable. The meaning of a character may still be apparent to modern Chinese eyes, but the sound it might have once made can be the subject of much conjecture and debate.

  In the text, I have been judiciously careful with my use of the terms king and emperor. Strictly speaking, the subject of this book was indeed the first emperor of China, creating a new title combining two characters used to describe the rulers of old – huang and di. Some sources describe the legendary holders of those titles as ‘emperors’, rather than the more semantically correct ‘kings’. Fur
thermore, it might be argued that the ruler of the failing Zhou dynasty, in claiming to be the ruler of all under heaven, might also be termed as an emperor, even though he wielded temporal power more equivalent to a pope or United Nations Secretary-General. But the ‘ruler’ of the Zhou is better described as a king, as are the rulers of the separate states who, in the generations preceding the events of this book, gradually began repudiating his authority by taking the title of king for themselves. It was the Qin emperor who conquered and united these warring states, creating both the concept of a ruler above these minor satraps that required a new title, and indeed, ultimately the name for the region he controlled itself – China.

  Anguo

  (An-kuo) His name means ‘Peace (or Safety) for the Kingdom’, and his posthumous title as ruler, Xiaowen, is translated here as The Learned King.

  Chunshen

  Ch’un-shen, also known as Huang Xie (Huang Hsieh).

  Educated Duke

  Xiao (Hsiao)

  Fan Yuchi

  (Fan Yü-ch’i)

  Gao Jianli

  (Kao Chien-li)

  High Prince

  Ying Gao (Ying Kao), called simply ‘High’ in my text to avoid confusion with Zhao Gao.

  Jieshi

  (Chieh-shih) – literally ‘stone tablet’.

  Jing Ke

  (Ching K’o)

  Lady of Glorious Sun

  Huayang, Queen Dowager Huayang.

  Lady of Summer

  Xia (Hsia), Queen Dowager Xia.

  Lao Ai.

  Also Lao Du. The name suggests an individual of ‘licentious and poisonous behaviour’, which is hardly an auspicious title. One suspects that Lao Ai, if he existed at all, must have been a nickname for the true individual, whose name has been erased from history by disapproving scribes. Shortly before his fall from grace, Lao Ai was created Marquess Zhangxin (Chang-hsin), ironically ‘the long-trusted’.

  Li Si

  (Li Ssu)

  Mu the Well-Chosen

  ‘Well-Chosen’ is my translation of Renhao (Jen-hao), literally ‘A Good Appointment’.

  Red Prince

  He is called Dan (Tan) in original sources, which is also the name for cinnabar; occasionally the Crown Prince of Yan (Yen), or Prince Tan of Yen.

  Wuyang

  More properly Qin Wuyang (Ch’in Wu-yang) I have referred to him chiefly as plain Wuyang in order to avoid confusing his surname with the name of the nation of Qin in the text.

  Xu Furen

  (Hsü Fu-jen) A furen is a ‘master’ of an art, so this could be either a proper name, or a mark of respect for his smithing skills. The name is recorded in the Record of the Historian as that of the man who sold the world’s sharpest dagger to the Red Prince.

  Yiren

  Sima Qian calls him Zichu, but according to the Intrigues, he was originally called Yiren (Yi-jen), ‘the Outsider’, and renamed Child of Chu, Zichu (Tzu-Ch’u) by the Lady of Glorious Sun, in honour of his diplomatic decision to wear the national dress of Chu, her native country, when he went to seek her support. Upon his enthronement, he was known as king Zhuang Xiang (Chuang Hsiang), a coinage combining the characters for Sobriety and Assistance that I have translated as ‘Merciful’ in the light of certain acts conducted during his reign and recorded by Sima Qian.

  Zhaoji

  She is strangely unnamed in ancient sources, or at least, is identified by terms so descriptive as to possibly not be names at all. Some call her Zhaoji, which simply means the Lady of Zhao. Another source calls her Geji, which could mean Princess of Songs, but is also a poetic term for a performer – roughly equivalent to chanteuse. Considering her former career, it is possible that the Record of the Historian refers to her disparagingly as The Singer. She is also referred to as the ‘Queen Mother’ until Ying Zheng’s grab for imperial power, whereupon she becomes the ‘Empress Dowager’.

  Appendix III: Some Modern Fictional Accounts of the Qin Emperor

  The First Emperor remained a taboo subject for much of the 20th century, although he enjoyed a brief renaissance in the early 1970s, as supporters of the ailing Chairman Mao lent credence to his image as a despot with his country’s best interests at heart. However, since the uncovering of the Terracotta Army and its attendant archaeological evidence, we now know more about the First Emperor and his times than did the inhabitants of any generation since his own. It is not the place of a historical account to turn to evidence from modern media, but it is perhaps worth noting that for the grandest and most accurate evocation of the First Emperor’s life and times available in the 21st century, the reader may find a trip to the cinema as useful as a trip to a museum.

  The Qin Emperor TV series (1984) is the longest version available, stretching over 60 episodes and starring Lau Wing as the emperor. It is also the least realistic, clinging to the Record of the Historian’s claim that Lü Buwei was the father of Ying Zheng, which leads Zhaoji to carry the First Emperor in her womb for eleven months. The series introduces the convenient character of Mi, a girl from Han over whom Ying Zheng and the Red Prince quarrel. Mi leaves Ying Zheng at the altar to elope with the Red Prince, although she dies during their escape, thereby instilling the Red Prince with his desire for revenge – a sadly prosaic motivation, somewhat unnecessary when one considers the bigger political picture. When her younger brother eventually arrives in Qin to plead for his country’s future, he is revealed as the stuttering Han Fei. Meanwhile, the Red Prince’s younger sister turns out to be a secret agent and martial artist, who falls in love with Jing Ke and herself dies trying to avenge him after the assassination attempt fails. As if that were not enough dramatic licence, the final chapters find Ying Zheng falling in love with the wandering widow Meng Jiang-nu, and touring his empire hand-in-hand with her, until she develops a guilty conscience over her dead husband.

  The film The Emperor’s Shadow (Qin Song, 1996) focuses on the story of the musician Gao Jianli, taking the reference in the Record of the Historian to his early life in Handan, and combining it with elements of the story of the Red Prince. In fact, the film suggests that Gao Jianli’s mother was a wet-nurse, making him and Ying Zheng ‘milk-brothers’. When the assassin Jing Ke arrives for his audience with the king, he is almost sent away before he can get close enough, but claims to have a personal message from Gao Jianli in order to get close enough to make his attempt on the king’s life. Gao Jianli is captured in the fall of Yan and (literally) branded as a criminal in a misunderstanding, but attracts the attentions of the First Emperor’s disabled daughter Yueyang; as with all other modern dramatisations of the events in the Record of the Historian, the crucial extra ingredient is always romance. The Emperor commissions Gao Jianli to compose a national anthem suitable for the Qin state, and rashly allows him to believe that he can marry Yueyang, when she has already been promised to the general Wang Ben.

  The Emperor and the Assassin (Jing Ke ci Qin Wang, 1999) concentrates on the plot of the Red Prince, and introduces the character of the First Emperor’s favourite concubine, his childhood companion who wishes that they could return to their carefree days in Handan, and who agrees to help in his intrigues in the hope that he will have more time for her if he unites the world. The Red Prince is allowed to escape, and goaded into mounting an assassination plot, because that is the only way that the First Emperor will have an excuse to invade the Land of Swallows. Meanwhile, the Lao Ai conspiracy is presented in a reversal of historical events as a small band of revolutionaries overwhelmed by vastly superior numbers of loyalist troops. The Emperor and the Assassin also inserts many scenes about the life and motivation of Jing Ke, presented as a reluctant killer who has sworn off all fighting after witnessing a blind girl’s suicide. The First Emperor himself plans the elements of his assassination as if it is a form of theatre, and goes into the throne room on the day wearing armour under his robes. Jing Ke’s attack proceeds as described in the Record of the Historian, but the First Emperor is left angry that none of his followers dares t
o intervene. He is also deserted by his concubine, who has come to believe in the assassin’s aims.

  Barely two years after The Emperor and the Assassin, the actor who played Jing Ke (Zhang Fengyi) would portray Ying Zheng himself, in the TV series First Emperor (Qin Shi Huang, 2001), which would also use the idea of a concubine from the emperor’s native Zhao as a catalyst. Running for eight months and over 30 episodes, the series stretches mere sentences from the Record of the Historian into entire episodes, and speculates wildly on the machinations concerning the selection of Ying Zheng’s principal wife. As with its predecessors, it homes in on the most glaring absence in the Historian’s biography, the First Emperor’s love life, since he somehow managed to sire 20 children without more than a passing reference to his wife or concubines. The TV series suggests a conflict between the Lady of Glorious Sun, who favours a candidate from her native Chu as her adoptive grandson’s bride, versus Zhaoji and Lü Buwei, who push the First Emperor into choosing a princess from their native Zhao. The Emperor’s decision is swayed by the presence of his childhood sweetheart, Li Jiang, as a handmaiden in the entourage of the Zhao princess, although he later develops an interest in Ah-ruo, the Chu princess he previously spurned. The series grapples with the absence of the emperors’ women from the historical record by pointing out, logically, that only a princess was worthy of an emperor in marriage, but that in dethroning all the rival dynasties, the emperor had left himself unable to allow for any woman to be of suitable rank. ‘The only princesses left,’ he admits creepily at one point, ‘are my daughters.’ First Emperor also dwells at length on the rebellion and defeat of Ying Zheng’s younger brother Chengjiao, an incident swiftly glossed over in the Record of the Historian, but reasonably presented here as an early attempt by Zhaoji and Buwei to put a more pliable puppet on the throne. Its later episodes are presented as a family drama: the Zhao princess commits suicide to avoid capture by her enemies, leaving Li Jiang as the Emperor’s favourite concubine, and the stepmother of Prince Fusu, although she refuses to become empress because she cannot bear the hatred of Ying Zheng’s enemies. Ah-ruo, meanwhile, achieves a greater role as a symbol of all Ying Zheng’s failings. As the mother of the hated Huhai, she is the instrument of Qin’s decline, and haughtily tells her husband that, like the Chu nation itself, he may have conquered her body, but her heart remains her own. The series departs further from historical events with a final confrontation between Li Si and Prince Fusu on the Great Wall. Li Si confesses his deception over the First Emperor’s will, but then uses his legendary powers of persuasion to convince Fusu to commit suicide as ordered to preserve the future of Qin; if Fusu takes the throne, he argues with inadvertent irony, the empire will not last.