The History of China - #21 - Qin 2: One Nation Under Qin

Episode Date: May 8, 2014

The victor of the Warring States Period has unified China into its first Empire and taken the name Shi Huang Di. Thereafter, he will expand his borders, unify his nation's language, build a Great Wall to the north, and attempt to stave off death itself. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The History of China podcast is available for download and subscription through SoundCloud, the iTunes Music Store under Podcasts, and most recently has joined the Spotify network. Also, please join us on our official website, thehistoryofchina.wordpress.com, as well as on Twitter via the handle at THOCpodcast, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com slash thehistoryofchina. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 19, One Nation Under Qin Last time, we went over the dramatic, exciting, and notably anticlimactic end of the Warring States period.

Seriously, Qi, couldn't you have at least put up a little bit of a fight? And to the final reunification of China under the King of Qi. This time, we look into the king who declared himself emperor and the feudal states that were forged into a lasting kingdom. I speak of the man who would unify the Chinese language, build the first Great Wall of China, and construct the Terracotta Warriors. In that order, the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang.

Now, we've talked about Qin Shi Huang before, just not by that name. Prior to unifying the warring states of China, he had the slightly less awesome title of King of Qin, Ying Zhen. It is often said, with quite a lot of merit, that the King of Qin's unification of the warring states was, in fact, the first actual unification of a Chinese nation as we discuss it today. I would, however, argue against that. Though the centuries of warfare had certainly taken their toll on the idea of interstate unity, the actual period of legal disunity was only 35 years, between 256 with the execution of the last

Zhou king and the establishment of the Qin dynasty in 221. Moreover, the idea of there being a definite Hua-Xia ethnicity and culture was already well established, dating back through the Zhou, Shang, and even Xia periods. One can fiddle and fuss over exactly when that occurred, but it's certain that the idea of a unified Chinese people did not spring out of whole cloth in 221 BCE. There are centuries of archaeological evidence to support that assertion. The Qin unification was not some upstart binding together of disparate peoples and cultures, but a renewing of the ancient legal bond between the now greatly expanded territories.

Regardless, we can at the very least agree that the pre-Qin Chinese civilization was a feudal kingdom, and European feudal kingdoms a millennium later would still be considered quote-unquote united, regardless of ducal power. Though I had poo-pooed the differentiation in earlier episodes and in terms of actual scope of power i still somewhat do it is important to note the differentiation between the kings of shang and zhou and the emperor of chin common heck any tubit governor or duke had taken up using this title during the later warring states period even tiny states like zhongshan song and so an emperor he would be and he appropriated the prestige of, as well as being a homonym of the ancient and divine Yellow Emperor, Huang Di. Seriously, even the tones are identical. It's impossible to tell them apart through listening. This was an important choice, as it unmistakably marked the new king of kings as a successor

of the very founder of the Chinese people, whose cult had once again become popular in the later Warring States period. He also tacked on the word shi, meaning first, beginning, or start, with the understanding that his descendants would become second, third, etc., upon their ascension. Thus, he became shi huangdi, third, etc. upon their ascension. Thus, he became Shi Huangdi, the first emperor. But though he, as any monarch would, had intended his line to remain intact throughout the ages, well, not to give too much of a spoiler,

but the current name of the country begins with People's Republic, not Qin. That said, Sima Qian of the Han Dynasty found it necessary to add Qin and delete the redundant di, so he is most commonly known today as Qin Shi Huang. Before moving on, it ought to be noted once again the religious overtones of the title and position. Keep in mind that the idea of separation of church and state was about 1800 years away, and at the time the head of state in China was also the head of spiritual affairs. As such, as the undisputed ruler of some 20 million faithful, some scholars referred to Qin Shi Huang not merely as corporeal emperor, but as thearch of China. And though the title of emperor is more popular and more widely accepted today,

Qin Shi Huang had no compunction against declaring his given name, Ying Zheng, as holy and taboo. He also appropriated the Chinese royal we, zhen, for his sole personal use, and expected all others to address him as bixia, your majesty, in person, and shang, your highness, in writing. As we'll come to see, language was a bit of a sticking point for the first emperor. Before we get into that, however, let's cover some of the background that was missed in the hubbub of the late boring states period the early life of young prince ying zheng born in two fifty nine to king chuang hsiang of qin and his concubine the lady by Sima Qian that the prince was, in fact, no true prince at all. Instead, Ying Zheng was hounded throughout his life, and long after his death, by rumors that he was in fact the product of a tryst

between a merchant and his dancing girl. The merchant, Liu Buwei, had befriended the young prince of Qin, Zhuang Xiang. Through Liu Buwei's help and deep pockets the prince who had no clear path to the throne managed to oust his rivals and come to power while falling in love with and asking for lu's dancing girl though the merchant also loved the beautiful girl he could not well refuse such a request and so he sent her who would become the lady Zhao, to the king's side, but already with child. The idea of the first emperor of Qin being, well, a bastard, was widely accepted throughout most of Chinese history. But before taking Sima Qian's account at face value, there are a few details to consider. First, is that Sima Qian was writing from the Han Dynasty, you know, the one that destroyed and replaced the Qin, so he had quite a few compelling reasons to slip in as many disparaging and slanderous fallacies as he could. And being not only a

bastard, but one born of a merchant, who you may recall were the lowest and most wretched of China's class systems, was an especially withering accusation. John Knobloch and Jeffrey Riegel, who together translated The Annals of Liu Buwei, wrote of the accusation, The story is patently false, meant to both libel Liu and to cast aspersions on the first emperor. But legitimate or not, Prince Ying Zheng was seated on the throne at the age of 13, following the unexpected death of his father, as we went over in episode 18. One additional detail is that throughout the extended regency, it was Liu Buwei himself, former merchant, and the young king's maybe real dad, who served as Qin's prime minister,

while being sure to reignite his relationship with the queen dowager. But Lu grew concerned that the boy king, as he grew older, might discover his liaisons with his mother, and so he distanced himself from the throne and provided a replacement prime minister, Lao Ai, who eventually also came to fill Lu's role in the queen dowager's bed as well. Lao Ai kept any suspicions of the liaisons in check by plucking his beard and disguising himself as a eunuch.

And you'd think that at some point there would have been a more thorough examination of this claim, but apparently not. The ruse worked, and the couple had two secret children, whom Lao Ai got in his head the bright idea to replace King Yingzheng with. And so in 238, the Marquis seized the Queen Dowager's royal seal and used its authority to mobilize an army in an attempted coup. Though the king was out of the capital at the time, his loyal retainers successfully broke the rebellion and drove the disgraced Lao Ai into hiding,

with a one million copper coin bounty on his head if taken alive, or half a million for his body. His supporters were captured and beheaded, and soon thereafter, Lao Ai himself was taken into custody. The legal code of Qin had a very clear punishment for those who fomented rebellion, one you may recall from episode 16 when dealing with the legalist Xiang Yang. It was Zhu Lian Jiu Zhu, the punishment of nine familial exterminations. The two hidden sons were found and killed, and the queen dowager Lady Zhao placed under house arrest until her death many years later. As for Lao Ai himself, he was strapped to horse-drawn chariots and torn into five pieces. The young king's regency literally

disintegrated. Ying Zheng now seized the power of Qin in his own right. So given that we spent the last two episodes covering the Kingdom of Qin's rise to power and its war for unification, I feel pretty safe in just going ahead and leapfrogging all of that and skipping directly to the post-war period. You with me? Great. Back to 221, the newly-minted Qin Shi Huang began implementing administrative, social, and legal reforms in rapid-fire succession. The empire needed to be reorganized. The old state boundaries neither were administratively adequate nor tonally appropriate for this new empire.

The solution was 36 Jun, which can be translated either as commanderies or prefectures. That number would continue to creep up as the Qin's boundaries continued to push further into Asia, up to more than 40. Below the prefectures were xian, districts, followed by the xiang, counties, and at the smallest level, 里, which means units of 100 families. The rigid bureaucracy of this system stood in stark contrast to previous dynasties, which had relied heavily on feudal loyalties to local lords and loose alliances. Qin Shi Huang wasn't about to set up a system that would allow his descendants to lose the reins of power like the impotent Zhou had. Unity was the watchword of the era. Unity of government, uniformity of law, and unity of the people. Prior to Qin's unification, it had been customary to refer to people by their respective feudal state. For instance, a person chiu would have been known as a churen and a person from zhao a zhaoren but ch'in su huang did away with that his china would be unified both politically and socially

and the former feudal states and their vestiges were things to be buried and forgotten as had been the case in the former kingdom of ch'in hereditary rights were done away with replaced by a meritocratic system of appointment that would not be inheritable additionally he ordered that all weapons not currently in the possession of chin's army be confiscated and melted down 12 large ornamental statues at his new capital, Xianyang. Systems of weights and measurements were in dire need of standardization, as the independent realms of Zhou had drifted widely apart over the course of their centuries of conflict. The system of weight was standardized around the jian, commonly known outside of mainland China as the caddy. Its modern weight inside the PRC is half a kilogram, but most Southeast Asian countries and overseas Chinese communities use the older 600-gram measurement of jinn. Road systems and cart axle lengths and widths were also standardized,

and road construction greatly expanded across the empire. Currency also underwent a makeover. Prior to the Qin dynasty, coinage had almost universally been blade coins, and that is exactly what it sounds like, a knife-shaped coin, which despite a wide variety of apocryphal theories and tales, there seems to be no definitive answer as to how that specific shape became so popular. Anyways, the Qin emperor decided that blade coins were so last dynasty, and implemented his new standard, the banliang coins. Banliang coins are what everyone thinks of when they think old Chinese money.

It's a round imprinted coin, often copper, with a square hole punched in the center. Its name is a reference to its weight, a half liang, or half tail, which is 1 16th of a caddy. For any fans of Greek history, it might be comparable to the ancient stater coin, both in terms of the era in which it was used and its dual functionality as currency, and weight both. One final aside before moving on, the modern Chinese idiom, ban jin ba liang, literally half a caddy, eight tails, holds the equivalent meaning to the English phrase, six of one, half a dozen of the other. With these important changes out of the way, Qin Shi Huang refocused at least some of his attention on what would be his monument to eternity, his own mausoleum.

Now, construction had begun all the way back in 246 BCE, when he was merely the king of Qin. After all, all men must die, and thus toward the completion of his goal all men would serve traditional accounts of the number of workers employed in the pyramidal monstrosities construction vary between three hundred thousand to as high as seven hundred and twenty thousand by the ever inflationary One man points out in his 2007 book The Terracotta Army that either figure is absurdly high. Sima's figure in particular is larger than the population of any city in the world at that point. He then goes on to calculate that with the tools and technological knowledge of the time, a mere 16,000 men could have reasonably finished the construction of the foundation within two years. The remaining architecture, as well as the surrounding necropolis, would require an additional 36 years, only completed in 208 BCE, two years after the first emperor's death.

And it's no wonder. The Qin emperor's mausoleum stands today, more than two millennia after construction, in a remarkable state of intactness. Even his great wall can't claim that. As recently as 2012, a new discovery was announced that the remains of a massive imperial palace had been found within the site. The massive courtyard-style construction was estimated to be 690 by 250 meters and covering 170,000 square meters, which is nearly a quarter the size of the Forbidden City in Beijing. To this day, no one has actually breached the burial chamber, in no small part thanks to the myriad booby traps said to be waiting for any who try or the lakes of liquid mercury likely ready to volatilize into a poison cloud upon exposure to fresh air sima tian wrote of the underground palace

they dug through three layers of ground water and poured in bronze for the outer coffin palaces and scenic towers for a hundred officials were constructed, and the tomb was filled with rare artifacts and wonderful treasure. Craftsmen were ordered to make crossbows and arrows primed to shoot at anyone who enters the tomb. Mercury was used to simulate the Hundred Rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow River, and the Great Sea, and set to flow mechanically. Above were representations of the heavenly constellations below the features of the land candles were made from fat of man- no sons to be out free and ordered that they should accompany the dead and a great many died after the burial it was suggested that it would be a serious breach if the craftsmen who constructed the mechanical devices had completed and the treasures hidden away, the inner gates were blocked and the outer gate lowered, immediately trapping all the workers and craftsmen inside. None could escape. Trees and vegetations were then planted on the tomb mound such that it resembles a hill. End quote. The manfish mentioned by historian sima has been a puzzle for as long as his texts have been studied it may reference dolphin or whale blubber but that's just speculation with rivers and lakes of mercury. The emperor's concubines, or at least those with no children,

accompanying the corpse to its resting place, and then sealed up, or perhaps killed outright, with only the flickering animal fat candlelight and the toxic mercurial air to keep them company. And then the craftsmen and laborers who had toiled away their lives in completion of this monument sealed up like something out of the cask of a Montiato. And all of this some 20 to 50 meters below the ground, where the palace lies,

and above which sits the pyramidal mound and the terracotta soldiers as its eternal guardians. Though the palace itself remains largely unexcavated, archaeological surveys and magnetic anomaly studies show a four-meter-high perimeter brick wall around an area of 460 by 390 meters. Sloping passageways lead down toward these walls, and the west passage in particular features an offshoot leading to a pit into which bronze chariots and skeletal horses lie as a sacrifice. In 2000, archaeologists discovered an underground dam and drainage system that had been built to divert the water table around the necropolis, and it's functioned continuously for some 2,200 years. The palace does not appear to have ever been flooded. And while Sima Qian seems to have been more than a little fuzzy with numbers,

his accounts of the mechanically flowing rivers of mercury have been validated by tests of the surrounding area, revealing anomalously high levels of the metal having leached into the soil. One of the big hurdles to opening the vault is that liquid mercury is one of the more volatile substances known to exist at average surface temperatures of Earth. At normal Earth temperatures, or at least those temperatures in which humans thrive and feel comfortable, it is found in a liquid that can seep through human skin and drive a person mad before killing them, and it also

evaporates into the air. But if a large reservoir has been sitting pressurized for a long period of time, it can fulminate like a shaken soda bottle into a poison vapor in an instant. Far beyond ancient arrows and booby traps, the big reason behind the hesitancy to open Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum is, if Sima Qian's account and the soil samples are anything to go by, opening the Qin Emperor's City of the Dead might be akin to setting off a poison gas bomb. But back to the Qin Emperor's life. In 214 BCE, he sent approximately one-sixth of his vast army to secure the northern borders of his territory. Meanwhile, the other 500,000 were dispatched to the southern frontier to follow up on their prior conquests of the Ba and Shu tribes of Sichuan. But this campaign aimed even grander, not content with merely the plains of Sichuan, but seeking the riches of the Pearl River Delta and the Vietnamese Peninsula. Against the Qin incursion stood the Baiyue, the Hundred Yue

tribes, against further encroachment from the Northern Empire, and they put up a tenacious defense. Knowing that they could not meet the Qin armies in armies in open combat the bayou commenced a devastating guerrilla campaign against their northern invader which when combined with the humidity and heat of their homeland something the warriors of the yellow river valley were entirely unaccustomed to dealing with than 100,000 casualties. Despite this overland defeat, the Qin army had managed to complete a technological and military marvel that would change the nature of warfare in southern Asia. At first, it doesn't even really seem like one should call it a weapon, certainly not in the traditional sense of the word. At least until one pulls back and sees what it was to be used for i speak of the ling chiu canal which connects to this day the xiang river to the lee river the xiang river is a tributary of the yellow river which flows into the east china sea while the lee wends its way south towards the pearl river delta and out to the South China Sea. In other words, the Qin army engineers had accomplished something that no one had ever done

before, linking together two entirely separate river valleys via a navigable 36 kilometer canal. Today, this allows ships carrying all manners of goods to sail from Beijing more than 2,000 kilometers south to Hong Kong, without ever needing to go overland or go out to sea. What this meant to the Baiyue tribes was that their Qin enemy had just built the ancient world's equivalent of a superhighway all the way to their doorstep, and they could now send all the soldiers, supplies, and equipment they needed to finish their conquest of Southeast Asia, while avoiding

the costly and arduous overland routes. The Qin's second attack broke the tribe's defenses and expanded Qin Shi Huang's control to include much of the coastal areas surrounding modern Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau, the provinces Fuzhou and Guilin, and even as far south as hanoi in vietnam his new territories secured qin shih-huang repeated the colonization tactics of his predecessors by sending more than one hundred thousand convicts and exiles to the frontier regions as colonizers and a new start to settle the wilds of Southeast Asia in his name. But as important as the Qin emperor's expansion into the Pearl River Delta was, and as imposing as his ongoing mausoleum project was, Qin Shi Huang's most enduring and arguably most important reform was of the Chinese language itself. The ancient script of the oracle bones had become highly regionalized

since the Shang dynasty dynasty some eight hundred years prior what different script systems for different portions of his empire would not do and so the first emperor decreed that thenceforth there would be a unified written language called juan shu or seal script and other forms were to cease publication. In tandem with this, his chancellor, Li Si, advised his lord that now would be the perfect time to both get rid of obsolete script systems already in publication, as well as unify political opinions and thought behind a new regime, by forcefully suppressing and destroying those schools of thought that competed with the Qin's preferred legalism school. For all its bloody carnage, the Warring States period had been a golden age for free thought. The hundred schools of thought, although they actually numbered quite a few less than 100, had included Confucianism, Taoism, Moism, the militarist school of sun tzu and sun bin the school of y him were dangerous and two-faced, singing him false praise from one side of their mouths while raising dissent and libelous accusations

against him with the other. Lysa urged the emperor to order all books collected and destroyed, sparing only those written by chain historians or concerning astrology, agriculture, medicine, or divination. Specifically targeted were the classic of poetry and the classic of history. As usual for the legal estate, the penalties for noncompliance were exceedingly harsh. There would be a 30-day grace period after the reading of the new laws, during which time all persons were to comply and submit any of the prescribed books in their possession to the authorities for destruction. Anyone found in possession of one of those books after the 30-day window would be summarily arrested and sent north as slave labor on the vast defensive fortification Qin Shi Huang had ordered constructed to ward off the Shou new raiders, the Qin Great Wall.

All right, I should probably take a minute to say something about the Great Wall, shouldn't I? Well, for starters, it's not that Great Wall. The wall Qin built is almost completely gone, and long since replaced by the far newer, far more elaborate Ming Great Wall some 1,700 years later. That is the wall you can climb today, and the one you very much cannot see from space. Both walls were designed not to keep invaders out, mind you, but simply drive them to known gaps in the fortifications that could be more easily defended. As a tactic, this would work remarkably well for quite a long time, as the Xiongnu-slash-Mongolian horsemen never really did master the art of siege works or heavy artillery. Instead, they would eventually overcome this problem by just enslaving the

Chinese to do it for them. But back to the book ban, anyone convicted of discussing either the classic of poetry or history would be executed. And to top it all off, anyone using historical examples to satirize or critique the contemporary regime, for instance, comparing Qin Shi Huang to the tyrannical Jie of Xia, would have their entire family executed along with them, because that's totally how you get people to not say mean things about you. These laws went into effect in 213, and were followed up by an even more extreme affront to free expression, two years later, when two alchemists who had promised to concoct for him the elixir of eternal life had, gasp, deceived the Qin emperor. In revenge, he ordered not only those

two executed, but more than 460 scholars to be buried alive. Given that there were a sizable number of Confucian scholars among the condemned, which remained a well-established and respected school of thought in spite of the ostensible gag order on Confucian texts, Qin Shi Huang's eldest son, Prince Fu Su, urged his father against such drastic action, stating that such a harsh sentence would only promote further instability rather than stifle it. The emperor, though, was unconvinced, and for his trouble, the heir apparent was shipped off to defend the frontier, a de facto sentence of exile. Oh, don't worry. I wasn't planning on glossing over that part about the elixir of eternal life. Far from it. Over the course of his rule, the Qin emperor had faced three attempts on his life. The first had been Lao Ai's coup attempt, the second Jing Ke's poison blade in 227,

and finally a follow-up attempt when a close friend of Jing Ke had attempted to smash the king's head in with a weighted lute. He had survived all three, but the creeping paranoia, along with just a general fear of mortality, had over the years changed Qin Shi Huang from a man who had started preparing for his death in his teens to one who now obsessed over finding the secret of living forever. He had heard of a 1,000-year-old monk living across the eastern sea on the legendary Penglai Mountain, and so he sent his Taoist alchemist, Xu Fu, along with 1,000 young men and women to find the monk and learn his secret to immortality for the emperor according to the tale shu fu and his attendants set sail but could not go back in failure as the emperor would surely execute anyone who dared return without his precious elixir they decided to cut their losses and off the northern coast of Shandong Province and carved in a large stone, quote, arrived at Fu and carved the stone, end quote. He returned again in 210,

apparently worried he'd somehow missed the supposedly enormous mountain on the tiny 10 by 1 kilometer speck of land, and again carved, quote, came to Fu, saw an enormous stone, and shot one fish and stone. In 211, a large meteorite supposedly had struck the lower reaches of the Yellow River at a place called Dongjun. On the hunk of heavenly iron,

an unknown person had inscribed, the first emperor will die and his land will be divided. On hearing the prophecy slash graffiti, Qin Shi Huang ordered his agents to root out the one who had dared write such things. And when no one confessed, he had everyone living near the crater site put to death, and the meteor fragment burned and smashed into fragments.

He then continued his increasingly desperate search for a way to avoid heaven's omen. Alchemists had long held that the key to immortality lay within those elements which were both precious and eternal. Jade, gold, cinnabar, and hematite, for instance, could convey their properties onto a mortal if they could somehow be rendered into a liquid. No matter how they tried, though, the only way his alchemists could get liquid from any of those elements was by melting it at many hundreds of degrees. And even the emperor wasn't quite desperate enough to drink molten gold. Fortunately, sort of, there were other supposedly life-enhancing and eternal elements which could more easily be rendered into a liquid form to imbibe their powers, and some of them are even liquid at room temperature. Some of the more popular choices among Chinese emperors seeking

eternal life throughout time have been sulfur, arsenic, and in the case of Qin Shi Huang, mercury. On September 10th, 2010 BCE, assured that he had last found his elixir of immortality, the 49-year-old Qin Shi Huang ingested his specially prepared mercury pills, and of course, promptly keeled over stone dead after an intense bout of itching sweating burning and discolored skin peeling away from his hands and feet as he writhed in a final ironic agony emperor just yet. He had died in Shaqiu Prefecture, a full two-month journey back to the capital and his not-quite-finished mausoleum. And being so far away from his seat of power, Chancellor Li Si was understandably worried that all of those enemies the emperor had spent much of his life accruing might use the power vacuum of his death to tear the realm apart, and with precious little anyone in the administration could do to thwart such an attempt.

Thus, Li Si did the most logical thing he could think of, cover up the emperor's death until they got back to Xianyang. It was weekend at Bernie's, the imperial edition. Only eight people were in on the ruse. Li Si himself, of course, and the emperor's second son prince hu hai who had accompanied his father on the trip and the emperor's six, definitely alive, by having his clothes changed regularly, food and drink prepared and brought to him, and holding important quote-unquote conversations to enact his quote-commands, all through the thick black shades pulled tight on every window of his imperial litter. However, nature was doing, well, what nature does to dead bodies i mentioned it was september so while not quite the scorching heat of a shanxi summer it was still plenty balmy and as always very humid an unholy stink as it rotted. Lise's solution was to order two large carts of rotten fish

to be carried both in front of and behind the we-swear-he's-still-alive emperor's carriage, because that's absolutely inconspicuous. I suppose one simply has to make do in such trying times. After what had to have been two of the most gag-inducing months imaginable on the road, the imperial train was probably smelled in Xianyang before it was seen, but at last the illusion could be dropped. With the bulk of the imperial administration once again back in the capital, news of the first emperor's death could at last be made public.

There were, after all, many things to be done. A mausoleum to finish, a dead monarch to bury, a bunch of living women and workers to also bury, and a second emperor of Qin to be enthroned. That, however, will be no simple task, and when it does at last occur, the first Emperor's replacement will have a whole host of problems awaiting him next time, as the Qin Empire faces its own potential mortality. Thank you for listening.