The History of China - #22 - Qin 3: Web Of Deception

Episode Date: May 18, 2014

Following the First Emperor's "Weekend At Bernie's"-esque death, the Qin Dynasty is thrown into turmoil over who will succeed the Emperor who sought to live forever. But at the heart of this web of intrigue sits the eunuch Zhao Gao, pulling the threads of the dynasty itself toward his own mysterious ends. 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 20, Web of Deception Last episode, we discussed Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of Qin's life, reign, and death.

And we ended at the Weekend at Bernie's-esque conspiracy between Prince Hu Hai, Chancellor Li Si, and the eunuch Zhao Gao to suppress the news of the emperor's death for the more than two months it would take to get his body back to the capital, Xianyang. This time, the aftermath of the first emperor's death, the brief reign of the second emperor, and one of the most infamous eunuchs to ever occupy the imperial court. As the dead emperor's cavalcade hurried back to the capital and desperately tried to cover up the unmistakable stench of death with rotten fish, the three conspirators, Li Si, Zhao Gao, and Prince Hu Hai, continued to discuss amongst themselves what would be the next

step after Qin Shi Huang was buried. It was a fairly open question, as the first emperor rather famously had long ago stopped preparing for his own death, having been convinced that he could find the means to live forever. It was, you'll remember, in fact his search for an elixir of immortality that earned him his place in the ironic Death's Hall of Fame, having come to the conclusion that Mercury was the way to eternal life. Though the eldest son, Prince Fusu, was the obvious heir, he had had a falling out with his father and had been effectively exiled to the Northern Front to quote-unquote protect the frontier. Chancellor Li Si and Fu Su hadn't

seen eye to eye in quite a while. The prince regarded Li Si's brutal policies and information suppression as too extreme for his own tastes, and the chancellor feared that should Fu Su come to power, he would lose at the very least his position and stature, and quite possibly his head. Prince Hu Hai saw in the uncertainty a chance to leap out of his older brother's shadow and become the new emperor instead. Though for the most part, the weak-willed teenager was simply herded along by the other two co-conspirators. And as for Zhao Gao, well, we'll get to him in a moment. The important thing was this. All three of them agreed that Fusu

should not be the next emperor, and so concocted a scheme just crazy enough to work. Alter the emperor's will to decree that Hu Hai rather than Fusu would succeed their father to the throne of Qin. Before getting to the outcome of their plot, though, some background on the third conspirator, trusted advisor to the imperial throne, Zhao Gao. If you're a fan of either the book series by George R. R. Martin or the HBO show Game of Thrones, Zhao Gao was in both personality and form, much like Lord Varys the Spider. Like his fictional counterpart, Zhao was a eunuch, made so in his early adulthood following the conquest of his former kingdom, Zhao. He was descended from the royal family of the former kingdom, but had, along with all of his brothers, been castrated as punishment for crimes his parents had been declared guilty of by the victorious Qin.

One of the invading generals, Meng Tian, had supposedly also raped Zhao Gao's young wife in the process. The laws of Qin stipulated that criminals who underwent castration were to subsequently serve in the imperial court as slave servants. As in many other parts of the world, eunuchs were often used in such sensitive positions close to those in power. The demasculinized servants were regarded as implicitly trustworthy because, hey, it's not like they were going to start their own dynasty or fool around with the princesses or anything. Zhao Gao, in particular, made himself an indispensable and implicitly trusted member of Qin Shi Huang's inner circle of advisors by presenting himself as an expert in law and punishment, which you'll remember was something of a preoccupation for the Qin monarch.

But though outwardly he was, by all accounts, nothing but Qin's faithful, devoted servant, Zhao Gao never forgot where he came from, nor everything the Emperor of Qin had taken from him. Zhao fully intended to pay his liege back in kind, but knew that to have any real chance, he'd need to play the long game. His opportunity came with the first Emperor's death and the question mark hovering over his potential successor. For Zhao Gao, Crown Prince Fusu was an unacceptable choice, but for no other reason than he had a mind of his own, unlike his ridiculously pliable younger brother. But in addition, Fusu's stint along the northern border had brought the

prince very close to the commander of the northern army, none other than General Meng Tian, Zhao Gao's ex-wife's rapist. If Fusu ascended to the imperial throne, it was more than likely that Meng would be his next chancellor. But where any other man might have seen adversity, Zhao Gao saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Thus the triumvirate altered the emperor's last will, and on reaching Xianyang, sent the proclamation all across the empire, declaring Hu Hai the heir to the throne, and ordering both Prince Fusu and General Meng to commit suicide. Now, whether it was blind loyalty, or just knowledge of the far more horrible fate resistance would lead to,

Prince Fusu dutifully carried out his father's apparently final wish, and fell on his own sword. But General Meng wasn't quite convinced of the good job on the front all these years, now just go ahead and die, command. He repeatedly requested a confirmation of the order and was ultimately arrested for his trouble. And that show of resistance was the icing on this particular cake for Zhao Gao, because it meant that Meng's entire family would also suffer for his breach. This notably included the general's younger brother, Meng Yi, who had once sentenced Zhao Gao to death, and had only been saved by the first emperor interceding on the eunuch's behalf. The whole lot of them were put to death, and in 210 BCE, Prince Hu Hai was enthroned at Xianyang as Qin Arshi Huangdi, the second emperor of Qin, or just Qin Arshi for short. I had previously alluded to Qin Arshi's

lack of, oh, let's call it independent thinking skills. The fact of the matter was he was a complete wet noodle. To put it another way, when your name is still used 2,000 years later as a Cantonese epithet for an incompetent spoiled brat, you know that you messed up somewhere along the way. This was, of course, exactly what Zhao Gao and Li Si wanted in an emperor, a nice vacant puppet for the pair to make dance. But it was Zhao in particular who found the boy easy to manipulate, given that the young monarch viewed the eunuch as a trusted confidant, teacher, and mentor. The emperor's trusted advisor explained to him that, as the divine son of heaven, he must not allow commoners to see his face or hear his voice. Even his

top advisors would quickly find themselves only rarely in face-to-face communication with Qin Arshi, and instead had their instructions relayed only through his personal eunuch advisor, Zhao Gao. In a matter of months, the second emperor had become a complete shut-in, and his only interface with the operations of his kingdom through Zhao, who now enjoyed near-absolute control over the Qin dynasty. But what could a eunuch hope to do with that kind of power? After all, he couldn't father children or seize the dynasty in his own name, and Zhao Gao had never forgotten just who was responsible for that.

No, the son of the Zhao kingdom could no longer build an empire, but he could dismantle one, piece by piece. On Zhao Gao's quote-unquote advice, the emperor ordered inspections of his governors, military commanders, and even his own brothers and sisters, searching for any hint of disloyalty or wrongdoing. As had been long established by the Qin's legalist leanings, the punishment for any such infraction was, what else, execution. The stated goals of these decimations was to root out the bureaucratic deadwood and bring the mechanisms of state more firmly under imperial control.

In practice, however, they served only to weaken the second emperor's legitimacy, kill off yet more of the royal family, and further alienate him from any of the surviving officials. Within a year, the stability and rule of law that had flourished under Qin Shi Huang had been almost completely dismantled, and the first, but far from last, uprising against the Qin tyranny began. This was known as the Dazixiang Uprising of 209 BCE, and it came about as the result of one of the more head-scratching clauses of the Qin legal code. Namely, that soldiers, ministers, or any others taking up a government position must report to their stations on time and without delay, no exceptions. Any tardiness was met with, yep, execution for all involved.

And on paper, I can understand why such a law might have looked good to a Qin-era legalist. It sounds super threatening, and the people were definitely not going to want to be late. The problem is that if a company of 900 soldiers find their way blocked by heavy rains and flooding and realize there's absolutely no way they can reach their assigned post on time, as was the case for the regiments of Captains Chen Sheng and Wu Guang as they raced to reinforce the northern border's defenses, it really puts them in, well, a bind. So, rather than arrive late to their posts and just in time for their own mass execution, the contingents and their commanders made the only choice left to them, rebel.

Of course, the company knew they were as good as dead regardless. What was a paltry 900 men going to do against the might of the Qin army, after all? But they resolved that it would be better to die sword in hand and fighting than bound and kneeling. The company had come from the south of China, the region formerly known as the Chu Kingdom. And so they decided that if they were going to rebel, it may as well be for something. How about the restoration of Chu? Chen Sheng and Wu Guang declared their holdfast in Chen County, Henan, as the Kingdom of Rising Chu, and themselves as co-kings to stand against Qin's tyranny. declared their holdfast in Chen County, Henan, as the Kingdom of Rising Qiu,

and themselves as co-kings to stand against Qin's tyranny. The Kings of Rising Qiu initiated a propaganda campaign against Qin Arshi, claiming, rightly it turned out, that it was Prince Fusu who should have been the new emperor, and his brother had usurped the throne after wrongly forcing him to commit suicide. This struck a chord with the already deeply discontented populace. It should be noted that in addition to the ongoing intergovernmental purges, the levels of taxation had been steeply increased to pay for the behemoth projects the first and second emperors had continuously undertaken. You know, the mausoleum, the Great Wall, and most recently,

the mammoth Eopang Palace that Qin Shi Huang had commissioned and whose construction was ongoing. Within months, the rebellion's ranks had swollen from a laughable 900 to more than 20,000 strong. But that was really the high-water mark for the Dazhexiang uprising and rising Chu. As kings, Chen and Wu succumbed surprisingly quickly to paranoia and draconian measures against their own followers. Executions were meted out for even the slightest hint or rumor of disloyalty. And of course, none of this was helped by the fact that while 20,000 soldiers was a far sight better than 900, it was still but a drop in the bucket compared to the resources at the Qin army's disposal. Time and again on the battlefield, the armies of Rising Qiu would meet with bitter defeat against

the superior Qin forces. It should come as little surprise, then, that between the command paranoia and the dismal scoreboard, the would-be rising Chu kingdom swiftly found itself critically short of additional volunteers, along with its generals either disappearing into the night, splintering off to form their own rebellious factions, or outright stabbing their superiors in the back, as would be the fate of King Wu Guang. A mere six months after it had begun, Wu and Chen's uprising was undone when King Chen Sheng, leading a force afield to recruit badly needed reinforcements after yet another embarrassing military defeat, was betrayed and assassinated by his own guards in the winter of 209-208.

Though the Dazhexiang uprising had snuffed itself out, it had, in its short time, lit flames of resistance to the tyrannical rule of Qin Arshi and Zhao Gao all across the nation. Rebels, brigands, and civil unrest began to take root everywhere the central authority couldn't immediately quash it out. The emperor, however, remained almost entirely ignorant of the situation, being both shielded by Zhao Gao and having previously shown everyone what might happen to a messenger bearing bad news, having executed the last one who dared tell him about the bad state of his country.

But in 208, Chancellor Li Si decided that the lie could be maintained no longer. Along with fellow minister Feng Chuqi and General Fang Jie, Li approached the emperor and relayed the unmistakably terrible news, that vast portions of the empire were now in open revolt, turmoil had taken over the countryside, and it had by now become so widespread that even the vast Qin military could barely hope to contain it. But rather than heeding his chancellor's pleas, Qin Arshi listened to the whispers of Zhao Gao, who informed him that this trio of traitors were simply making excuses, not being honest with their emperor, and in truth secretly plotting treason against the throne of

Qin. The second emperor called for their arrest and ordered none other than Zhao Gao to make sure that the truth of their treachery was wrung, pried, or sliced out of them. In what, in retrospect, was definitely their smart move given the situation, both Minister Feng and General Fang committed suicide in their cells. Li Si, however, could not bring himself to take his own life, and so steeled himself for the ordeals to come. For whatever good that would do. He was brutally tortured into confessing his treasons by Zhao Gao's agents. The forcibly extracted confession in hand, Zhao Gao then recommended the prescribed punishment for such a vile crime, death via the Five Punishments.

It was an ancient system of punishment that had been revived in the Qin state, ironically by Li Si himself. The five punishments, or wuxing, could be meted out individually depending on the severity of the crime, or all together. They were, in order of severity, muo, the branding or tattooing of the face to mark the offender with the crime they had committed, yi, the offender's nose being cut off. 3. Yue, amputation of one or both feet. During the Warring States period, it was also said to have been practiced by removing the offender's kneecaps.

4. Gong, or castration, or for women, sequestration in a room for the rest of their life. Imperial China practiced complete castration, with both the phallus and the testes removed, typically in a single razor slice. The resulting eunuch, if he survived, would be employed in the imperial court, as Zhao Gao was well aware. Finally, dapi, capital punishment. Methods of execution included their relatively merciful beheading and strangulation, to boiling alive, quartering, death by a thousand cuts,

and the old standby being pulled apart by horse-drawn chariots. Lì Sì was sentenced to run the entire gamut. He was branded, his nose sliced off, his feet removed, castrated, and finally sliced in half, horizontally, at the waist. And as had become the horrifying norm, his whole family was executed along with him. But Zhao Gao's stranglehold on the Qin Dynasty was only beginning to make itself apparent. The eunuch next made it his goal to ensure that every official surrounding the puppet emperor would be ultimately and absolutely loyal to him and him alone. According to Simatian, as translated by Burton Watson, in September of 207,

he brought a deer and presented it to the second emperor, but called it a horse. The second emperor laughed and said, Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse. The second emperor laughed and said, Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse? Then the emperor questioned those around him. Some remained silent, while some, hoping to ingratiate themselves with Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, and others said it was a deer. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law and had them executed instantly thereafter the officials were allson of the late King Huai of Chu, a man called Xiong Xin, had taken up the banner of his ancestors, rallying his countrymen to his side and taking up the name King Huai II of Chu. Backing his claim, and the ultimate power

behind the throne, was the warlord Xiang Liang, his nephew and second-in-command Xiang Yu, and the clansmen that the pair commanded. In the ninth lunar month of 208 BCE, autumn as it were, the Chu led by Xiangliang and the Qin led by General Zhang Han clashed at the Battle of Dingtao. The insurgent army met with defeat against the Qin regulars, and in the melee, Xiangliang was struck down. Victorious, Zhang Han sought to press his advantage by laying siege to the rebel stronghold city, commercial center, and Zhao kingdom capital, Handan. Young Xiangyu was eager to avenge his uncle's death, and rushed to reinforce the Chu army stationed at Anyang, where he planned to march on the besieging Qin army.

Upon his arrival, however, Xiang Yu found himself under the acting command of Song Yi. The two quickly found themselves at odds with one another, Xiang Yu wanting to attack immediately, while Song Yi opting for a more cautious approach against the far larger Qin army stationed across the river. General Song replied to Xiang Yu's urges to attack, quote, end quote. Xiang Yu took this rebuff calmly in stride. By which I mean, he burst into Song Yi's tent under cover of a heavy nighttime rainstorm

on the 47th day of their encampment and took the commander by surprise and murdered him. Xiang Yu then got out ahead of the news that Song had been killed, proclaiming that he had been charged by King Huai II himself to track down and bring to justice the traitor Song Yi. None of this was even remotely true, of course, but Xiang Yu wrote to the King of Chu, explaining that whether or not authorization had actually been given,

hey, what's done is done. You need an army, I've got the army, let's let bygones be bygones. The King was convinced, or at least he saw no other option if he was going to keep the operation's timetable intact. And so, Huai II retroactively approved of the assassination, I mean, royal execution, and named Xiang Yuactively approved of the assassination, I mean royal execution, and named Xiang Yu the commander of the strike force. Now officially in command, Xiang Yu dispatched his two lieutenants and 20,000 soldiers to

cross the river and scout out the enemy position at Juelu. Xiang and the rest of his army followed on the 12th month of 208. But before setting out to join up with the scouting force, Xiang Yu ordered his men to take with them only three days of supplies and destroy the rest, including their cooking pots and utensils, and to sink their boats after crossing the Yellow River. The message was clear. The Chu army would either resupply off the corpses of their defeated enemies, or, well, they wouldn't be needing supplies ever again. Jiang's scouts reported the location and disposition of the Qin besiegers.

As usual, it was enormous, some 200,000 strong, while Xiang Yu's force numbered only 50,000 to 60,000. But the Qin army was positioned to starve out the rebels' holdup in Handan, and Xiang Yu's army was able to rush in and cut off the Qin's supply lines, throwing the larger force into disarray. That disarray swiftly became defeat, then rout, with more than 100,000 casualties suffered by Qin in the ensuing flight. The remainder was then forced to retreat, and General Zhang Han took command of the fallback position, where he sent his lieutenant, Sima Xin, to the capital, Xianyuan, to beg the emperor to send reinforcements immediately.

Now this was the bulk of the Qin military, but it was now cut off and facing an army that could wipe them out if no help was sent. Obviously, this opportunity was too good to pass up, and so now-chancellor Zhao Gao, who had graciously accepted the promotion after former-chancellor Li Si's vile treachery had been justly punished, went to work, ensuring that no help was sent. The eunuch wormed his way into Qin Arshi's ear, convincing the emperor that Zhang Han was lying to him, and was in fact in league with the Chu rebels and seeking to draw out Xianyang's forces. The emperor, shocked at such apparent treachery, denied the reinforcement request, and demanded that Sima Xin return to Zhang Han and order him to report to the capital and face

judgment for his crimes. On the return trip, though, Lieutenant Sima was attacked by assassins dispatched by Zhao Gao, possibly in order to prevent the Qin army from surrendering to Qin Arshi and thus be spared destruction. Though Sima survived the attack, his report to General Zhang Han troubled the commander greatly. In the meantime, Xiang Yu's force had continued to grow as more and more insurgents joined the Chu ranks. The Qin army found itself surrounded and without reinforcements, with likely execution

awaiting them in Xianyang even if they made it there. So Zhang Han decided to go with the unknown option, surrendering to Xiang Yu. But 200,000 soldiers proved problematic for Xiang Yu, as he had neither the spare men to guard them nor the extra supplies to feed them. And so Xiang Yu solved his problems by burying them, all 200,000 of them, alive, outside the city of Xinyan, in Henan. With everything going better than expected, Xiang Yu turned his sights and armies on the now defenseless Qin Heartland. This should have been raising a red alert in Xianyang,

but Qin Arshi wasn't fazed, not through any bravery on his part, but simply because he was still completely in the dark about the reality of the situation. Ever since he had executed the last messenger who had dared to bring him bad news, why, people had very little bad news to present. Go figure. His willful ignorance now existentially threatening everyone in the capital, one of his eunuchs, not Zhao Gao, it should be noted, finally mustered up the courage to confront Qin Arshi about the realities of the situation. No, there are no more troops to muster. No, we are not winning. Yes, we are losing, and badly. Yes, you've been systematically lied to from the get-go by your mentor Zhao Gao. No, there's not a lot to be done about it at this point. Furious, the emperor attempted to order Zhao Gao's arrest on sight,

but by now the entire court was firmly in the pocket of the chancellor, having already needed to pass Zhao's deer horse test to keep their heads attached to their bodies. Out of options, the second emperor produced a dagger and slashed his own throat in October of 207 BCE. The Qin dynasty was burning down around him, but Zhao Gao's song of revenge wasn't yet completed. To finish his vengeance on the dynasty that had taken his family, his manhood, and his homeland, he required one final pawn. And in one of his few missteps, he chose Prince Ziying. Traditional tellings claim Ziying was Crown Prince Fusu's surviving son. But historian Wang Lichun argues

that given their purported dates of birth, and the fact that Prince Ziying had two grown sons to assist him, he was more likely Xin Arsha's uncle, brother of the first emperor. Either way, Chancellor Zhao's mistake was in presuming the third emperor would be the same weak-minded fool as the second. On the day of his enthronement, Zeyin sent a message to the ancestral temple where he was to receive his jade seal of office, telling those present that he was ill and could not attend. In truth, he suspected that Zhao Gao planned to have him assassinated, either going to or back from the temple. And so he planned to lure the treacherous eunuch to his own house. As he suspected, Chancellor Zhao promptly arrived at Ziyin's home to urge

the prince to attend his own coronation. But immediately upon entering the residence, Zhao Gao was set upon by Ziyin and his two sons, killing the chancellor where he fell. Zhao Gao was dead, but his revenge was absolute. Upon officially taking up the office, Ziying found that there was no way to pull the dynasty out of its death spiral. Too many competent bureaucrats had been put to death, too many enemies had been made, and far too much of the formerly vast Qin army had been killed in battle or buried alive. The short-lived Third Emperor of Qin promptly surrendered the dynasty to the warlord Xiangyu's rebel force as it neared the defenseless capital city in the winter of 207.

In return, Xiangyu showed his usual amount of leniency toward those in his mercy. He ordered Ziyin and his entire royal family executed at once, and the destruction of the partially completed Eopang Palace by fire, notable for being both a symbol of the Qin Emperor's ostentation and excesses, as well as having been the repository for many of the last surviving copies of texts that had been ordered destroyed by Qin Shi Huang less than a decade before. They had survived the purging fires of Qin, only to be burned anyway in the flames of the dynasty's destruction.

For all his brutality on the battlefield and toward his defeated foes, Xiang Yu wasn't without a strange kind of nobility, almost. In almost a George Washington-esque moment, Xiang expressed little interest in forging his own dynasty on the ashes of the Qin, and declined to take up the reins of power then and there. Fatefully, he expressed a deep longing to return to his homeland in Chu, stating, quote, should not return home when one has made his fortune, is equivalent to walking on the streets at night in glamorous outfits. Who would notice that? End quote. In reply, one of his followers,

incredulous that this warlord he had followed for months or years was just now going to turn around and go home when the world was at his fingertips, said, quote, It is indeed true when people say that the men of Chu are apes dressed in human clothing. Xiang Yu took such an insult in stride, as he always did, by boiling the man alive. Xiang announced that the Qin dynasty was no more, and instead he would be dividing the empire into 18 sovereign kingdoms to be meted out

to his top followers, several of the other rebel leaders, and even one apiece for the vanquished generals of Qin, Zhang Han, Sima Xin, and Dong Yi. To King Huai II of Chu, he conferred the more illustrious, but still entirely ceremonial, title of Emperor Yi of Chu, while Xiang Yu himself took up the newly created mantle Hegemon King of Western Chu. Now normally, I'd take the time to list off the 18 kingdoms, and who was granted control of each, but by the time I had finished the list, several of them would already be gone. Seriously, the 18 kingdoms began to eat each other almost as soon as their borders were set. The new kingdom of Qi immediately conquered Jiao Dong to its east and Ji Bei to its north, thus reintegrating the borders of Qi from the

Warring States period. Hegemon King Xiang Yu would quickly decide that he wanted more than just western Shu after all, and so ordered both his puppet emperor of Chu and the king of Han killed, and their territories integrated into Western Chu. Meanwhile, the new kingdom of Han, yes, there were two Hans, conquered the three territories granted to the former Qin generals, dubbed the so-called Three Qins, Yong, Sai, and Zhai. So right off the bat, the 18 kingdoms became 12, thus beginning the four-year-long interregnum period we'll explore in the next episode, the Han-Chu Contention. Thank you for listening. You don't have to be living an ocean away to dread the idea of going to the post office. The lines, the jostling, it's a real bother.

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