by John Keay
But because so little is known of Ashoka beyond what is contained in his inscriptions, he is usually taken at his own evaluation. The First Emperor, because so much is known of him from other sources, is not. Falling victim to a prolific historiographical tradition that would habitually disparage ephemeral dynasties and which was gravely offended by some of his actions, the First Emperor, were he to have emerged from his underground mausoleum, would have found his stone-cut words ignored. He might then reasonably have complained about double standards; for had works like the Shiji and those based upon it been destroyed and only his epigraphy survived, history might have been as kind to him as it has to Ashoka.
In 213 BC the destruction of other texts constituted the incident mainly responsible for consigning the First Emperor’s reputation to abiding ignominy – abiding, that is, until Red Guards tore a leaf from his book, so to speak, in the late 1960s and thus helped to rehabilitate China’s first cultural revolutionary. For though his reformation of the script was welcomed by the literate, the First Emperor showed nothing but contempt for traditional scholarship. History was there to be made, he seemed to say, not to be repeated. To those who prattled about the grand old Duke of Zhou and Heaven’s Mandate, he extended neither respect nor favour; and when they continued to snipe at the legalist emphasis on law rather than precedent, and on a ruler’s strength rather than his virtue, the literary pogrom of 213 BC was his typically unequivocal response.
After Lu Buwei, the merchant-minister who was probably not the First Emperor’s father, fell from grace in 238 BC, he had been replaced in the imperial favour, and eventually as chancellor, by another upstart. Described as ‘a man from the black-headed people of the lanes and alleys’, this was Li Si, whose twentieth-century biographer considers him the éminence grise behind the First Emperor’s throne and calls him ‘China’s First Unifier’.14 An arch-practitioner of legalism and probably the composer of the emperor’s triumphalist inscriptions, Li Si had once studied under the philosopher Xunzi. So had Han Fei, legalism’s most eloquent exponent. Both Li Si and Han Fei then embraced a scruple-free code that was anathema to their mentor but welcome enough in Qin, a state of which the philosopher had been highly critical. One can only suppose that the quality of Xunzi’s instruction left something to be desired.
In the assault on tradition Han Fei led the way, famously satirising Confucian scholars as ‘stump-watchers’; for according to Han Fei, in urging the emperor to adopt the ways of the ancients, such scholars would have His Majesty behave like a doltish farmer who, chancing to see a rabbit collide with a tree stump, lays down his plough and spends the rest of his days watching the stump in expectation of repeat pickings. In other words, past precedent was no guide to present exigencies, and the state could ill afford scholars who preached such nonsense. Since they neither tilled nor fought, such pedants were parasites. Their elegant phrases undermined the law and their disputatious counsels left the ruler in two minds. If indulged, they would assuredly bring ruin, wrote Han Fei.
Therefore in the state of an enlightened ruler there are no books written on bamboo strips; law supplies the only instruction. There are no sermons on the former kings: the officials serve as the only teachers. And there are no fierce feuds involving private swordsmen; cutting off enemy heads [in battle] is the only deed of valour. When the people of such a state speak, they say nothing in contradiction of the law; when they act, it is so as to be useful; and when they perform brave deeds, they do so in the army.15
Legalism, which is also sometimes called ‘Realism’, ‘Rationalism’ and ‘Modernism’, was nothing if not pragmatic. Only scholarship that strengthened the state, like that of the legalists themselves, was admissible. When in 213 BC a Confucian scholar suggested to the emperor that, since he was now all powerful, this might be the moment to revive the Shang and Zhou tradition of rewarding loyal kinsmen by granting them fiefs, it was Li Si’s turn to reach for the pen (actually the writer’s brush). Fief-granting had proved an unmitigated disaster, he memorialised. ‘Feudal’ rulers had risen against their superiors, and they had been encouraged to do so by scholars who pillaged antiquity to confuse the issue and disparage present authority. Now these same ‘adherents of personal theories’ would have Qin repeat the mistake. They were criticising the emperor’s territorial arrangements, forming cliques and undermining his authority. They must be stopped.
I request [then] that all writings, the [Books of] Odes, Documents and the sayings of the hundred schools of philosophy be discarded and done away with. Anyone who has failed to discard such books within thirty days . . . shall be subjected to tattooing and condemned to ‘wall-dawn’ [i.e. hard] labour. The [only] books to be exempted are those on medicine, divination, agriculture and forestry.16
The emperor concurred; and so began the great bamboo-book-burning of 213 BC. It was followed, according to later sources, by a purge in which some 460 scholars were either executed or buried alive. A far-fetched explanation offered for this second assault may simply disguise the need to halt any oral, as well as written, transmission of the texts. To a people who distinguished themselves from others on the basis of their historical awareness and essentially literary culture, the book-burning and the persecution of scholars were devastating blows. Popular sentiment would never forget them, scholarship never forgive them.
Yet the impact was certainly exaggerated. Books at the time were not numerous; nor were readers; and bamboo, though it burnt fiercely enough, also lasted well in concealment. Total suppression was probably impossible. In fact, give or take some of those ‘hundred schools of philosophy’, even the works specifically mentioned by Li Si survived. The historical records of Qin were exempted from destruction, and while those of the other ‘warring states’ were indeed depleted, the imperial archive is said to have retained copies of most ancient texts, including the Confucian classics. Several scholars have argued that a greater loss was sustained seven years later when Xianyang’s palaces, including the imperial archive itself, were ransacked by Qin’s victorious opponents.17 It could be another case of Qin’s reputation being burdened with the sins of its successors.
Seemingly the idea in 213 BC was not to abolish history and literature but to restrict access to them and so, as the Shiji puts it, ‘to make the common people ignorant and to see to it that no one in the empire used the past to criticise the present’.18 Yet the result was exactly the opposite: for in an effort to make good the supposed losses, Han scholars would scrutinise what survived even more intently. ‘Thus, if anything, its practical effect was to strengthen the tendency decried by Li Si of looking backward rather than toward the present.’19 In short, Qin’s ‘cultural revolution’ entrenched the culture it was supposed to discredit while discrediting the revolution it was supposed to entrench.
CRUMBLING WALL, HIDDEN TOMB
That the dynasty responsible for first uniting much of what we now call ‘China’ should have crowned its achievement by lending its own name to its territorial creation seems logical enough. ‘Qin’ (pronounced ‘chin’) gave us ‘China’ – or so it is said. The word first found its way into the Indo-Aryan languages of Sanskrit and ancient Persian as ‘Sina’ or ‘Cina’, from them into Greek and Latin as ‘Sinai’ or ‘Thinai’, and from them into French and English as ‘Chine’ and ‘China’. Spin-offs like ‘sino’-phile and ‘sini’-fication were coined from the same pedigree by ‘sin’-ologists. In the most satisfying of equations, Qin is revealed as China’s etymological ancestor as well as its imperial ancestor; and a centralised empire with a distinctive culture becomes the defining characteristic of both.
But unlike zhongguo’s flexible equation with ‘Central States’, ‘Middle Kingdom’ and then ‘Central Country’, the etymology of ‘Qin = China’ is far from straightforward. Sanskrit’s adoption of the ‘sin’/‘cin’ root seems to predate the rise of Qin; it could, in that case, derive from Jin (pronounced ‘zhin’), the hegemonic state headed by Chonger in the seventh century BC. Much later,
the Graeco-Roman world in fact knew two Chinas: Sinai/Thinai and Seres (or Serica), both of which exported silk but were not thought to be the same place. Medieval Europe then added yet another, Cathay. This was the country that Marco Polo claimed to have visited. Polo seldom mentions anywhere called ‘Chin’ (or ‘China’) and then only as a possible alternative name for ‘Manzi’, which was the southern coastal region.20 In this restricted sense ‘Chin’/‘China’ was used by Muslim and then Portuguese traders, but it figured little in English until porcelain from this ‘Chin’ began gracing Elizabethan dinner tables. Shakespeare caught the mood in Measure for Measure with mention of stewed prunes being served in threepenny bowls and ‘not China dishes’.21 After long gestation, china (as porcelain) was lending currency to China (as place) – just as in Roman times seres (the Latin for ‘silk’) had led to the land itself being called ‘Seres’. Ultimately, then, it was contemporary crockery from the south of the country, not an ancient dynasty from the north, which secured the name of ‘China’ in everyday English parlance and led, by extension, to the term being applied to the whole empire.
Appropriately enough, Qin was acquainted with this later, southern, ‘Chin’. In the wake of his victory over Chu (including Wu and Yue) the First Emperor extended his conquests deep into the extreme south of the country. They seem to have embraced Guangdong province and parts of Guangxi and Fujian (which together formed Marco Polo’s ‘Chin’), plus on paper at any rate what is now northern Vietnam. But uncertainty surrounds not only the extent of these acquisitions but also their timing. If, as the Shiji has it, Qin’s successful southern campaign was in 214 BC, this was only four years before the First Emperor’s untimely death and the rapid disintegration of his empire. Three new commanderies are said to have been established in the south, but since all would have to be reconquered by the Han dynasty, it must be doubtful whether Qin’s control was fully effective. Whatever its extent, the First Emperor’s southern dominion was fleeting.
As in Sichuan, though, it was notable for the cutting of an important canal. This linked a southern tributary of the Yangzi to a northern tributary of the West River, which itself debouches into the estuary of the Pearl River near Hong Kong. Designed in 219 BC to facilitate a southern advance and to provide an inland waterway through Hunan to Guangzhou (Canton), the canal would be much realigned but, like Li Bing’s water-works, still exists. In the same year, the emperor himself reached the southernmost point of his imperial travels when he turned back somewhere just short of the proposed canal in the vicinity of Changsha. At the time the hill country to the south had not yet been secured, which should have been a good enough reason for heading north again. But the Shiji offers a different explanation, indeed one that seems designed to reveal an imperial trait which was of growing concern to ministers such as Li Si and to the whole Qin court.
Apparently the emperor was much drawn to hilltops. His inscribed stelae were usually positioned on them and he liked to climb them in person. But on an eminence near Changsha his progress was halted by what sounds like a tornado. Taking this as a personal affront, he excused the wind but blamed the hill, ordering it to be stripped of trees and painted red. Three thousand convicts were put to work immediately. Since ‘red was the colour worn by condemned criminals’22 and clear-felling the nearest thing to limb-by-limb amputation, it is evident that the hill was being punished for lèse-majesté. Delusions of more than mere grandeur were afflicting the emperor: a sense of transcendence had overcome him; ‘all under Heaven’ was his, and that included natural features. When some 2,200 years later Comrade Mao’s Long Marchers sang songs about ‘painting the countryside red’, they may not have been aware of this ominous precedent.
More significant, because it resulted in the construction of the so-called Great Wall, was the empire’s extension northwards. Sima Qian’s Shiji continues to be vague about the geography and chronology, but it seems that the First Emperor’s conquests extended right along the northern perimeter of the erst-while ‘warring states’ and that these conquests were undertaken continuously throughout his eleven years as emperor (221–210 BC). As in Sichuan, colonists were speedily dispatched to the newly conquered territories; and frequent mention of these deployments provides a few clues as to the advance. So does the alignment, insofar as it can be established, of the Qin wall, part of which was much farther north than most of its successors. On this basis, the First Emperor’s forces look to have mounted a three-pronged advance, pushing north of west to Lanzhou in Gansu province, north of east to the edge of the Korean peninsula, and due north across the Ordos, an undulating desert wilderness within the Yellow River’s great northern loop, towards Mongolia.
The last advance, that due north across the Ordos, is the only one of which Sima Qian has much to say – and most of that in the course of a biographical note on Meng Tian, the Qin general responsible. Meng Tian was sent north with either 100,000 men or 300,000 men, probably in 221 BC, to disperse the Rong and Di peoples and take control of the Ordos. Once established there, he set about building walls. At a time when in Europe Hannibal was overcoming the natural frontier that was the Alps, Meng Tian determined to construct an artificial frontier. Its line reportedly covered a distance of 10,000 li (c. 5,000 kilometres – 3,000 miles) from Lintao (near Lanzhou) to Liaodong (east of Beijing); and initially it ran north across Ningxia province until, on reaching the Yellow River, it followed round that river’s great northern bend. Thereafter Sima Qian says nothing about its alignment; nor does he anywhere mention its purpose. He did, though, visit the scene of Meng Tian’s labours, albeit a century later. On site he seems to have been as much impressed by the 850 kilometres (530 miles) of road that Meng Tian had constructed up through the badlands of the Ordos as he was by the wall itself.
I have travelled to the northern border and returned by the direct road. As I went along I saw the outposts of the long [i.e. Great] wall which Meng Tian constructed for the Qin. He cut through the mountains and filled up the valleys, opening up the direct road. Truly he made free with the strength of the common people.23
From this it would seem that Meng Tian’s ‘Great Road’ involved more engineering than his ‘Great Wall’. The former is said to have been ‘cut through the arteries of the earth’, while the latter ‘followed the contours of the land . . . twisting and turning’ and ‘used the mountains as defence’ and ‘their defiles as frontier posts’.24 If Sima Qian’s 10,000 li are to be taken literally, the wall was certainly longer than the road. On the other hand it is generally accepted that Meng did not start his wall from scratch. Wall-building, both as a demonstration of exclusive sovereignty and as a defensive precaution, had been practised by the ‘warring states’ for at least a century. In places Meng Tian had merely to repair these existing stretches and connect them up.25
The term used in Chinese literature for Meng Tian’s wall, as for the ‘Great Wall’ of later fame, is changcheng, literally meaning ‘long wall’ or, as with zhongguo (‘Central States’/‘Middle Kingdom’), ‘long walls’. Cities, palaces and even villages might be surrounded by changcheng. Thus according to another interpretation, Meng Tian’s wall was not in fact a continuous construction but a succession of the ‘outposts’ observed by Sima Qian, each surrounded by its own changcheng.26 This would certainly help to explain why Qin’s changcheng receives so little mention in later history and also why it was (or they were) apparently so ineffective as a defensive rampart. If the textual context provides a clue, the section north of the Ordos was more offensive than defensive. As the culmination of a major advance and as accommodation for a permanent garrison in what had previously been Rong and Di country, the wall was (or the walls were) meant to consolidate Qin aggression rather than forestall non-Qin incursion.
Needless to say, walls, outposts, watchtowers and whatever else may have been involved were constructed of hangtu. Layers of brushwood were sometimes incorporated into the tamped-down earth, but dressed stonework like that of the sixteenth-to-seventeent
h-century Ming wall was not even contemplated. Though hangtu structures last long underground, above ground they are no match for the sandstorms, extreme frosts and occasional floods of twenty centuries. Archaeologists have identified only a few stretches of Qin wall, mostly in Gansu. Yet screeds have been written about the enterprise, and some startling statistics have been deduced as to the millions of men (they served in rotation) required to shift the trillions of tons of earth necessary for 10,000 li of chariot-width wall. The loss of life is reputed to have been horrific, although whether it resulted from the climate and conditions of service on the northern frontier, from the ancillary roadworks as implied by Sima Qian, or specifically from wall-building is not clear. Walls certainly got a bad name; so did Meng Tian and the First Emperor as those responsible for the most notorious example. But of late, scholarship has been chary of such deductions. It is more inclined to demolish the whole concept of a ‘Great Wall’ and to diminish the scale and significance of Qin’s pioneering effort.
This is in marked contrast to the indulgent treatment now afforded to Qin’s other extravaganzas. Stone Cattle Road, Li Bing’s irrigation works, a similar scheme on the Wei River, the Hunan canal and Meng Tian’s road have all been archaeologically authenticated. Other Qin highways have been charted, their combined length coming to something well in excess of Gibbon’s estimate for the entire road network of the Roman Empire. But until recently the colossal dimensions of the emperor’s new Opang (Epang, Ebang) palace (675 by 112 metres – 740 by 120 yards), the labour force required to excavate his tomb (700,000 men) and the almost incredible features ascribed to that lost mausoleum had occasioned only suspicion. Then in 1974 came the discovery of ‘the terracotta army’. The ‘grave’ doubts evaporated. An emperor who could join his ancestors at the head of an entire life-size army was capable of anything.