The Rest Is History - 444. The First Emperor of China

Episode Date: April 28, 2024

"The First Emperor will die and his land will be divided….” The First Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, left behind him a monumental legacy: an Empire which would last millennia, the foundations of the Great Wall of China, and an eerie Terracotta Army - 8000 warriors who would protect the Emperor in the afterlife. His deeply autocratic reign, and the brutal tactics he used to conquer rival states and establish the Chinese Empire, have seen him cast as the archetype of the “bad emperor”. And when compared with Qin Shi Huang, Mao boasted that “when you berate us for imitating his despotism, we are happy to agree!”. But was Chinese unification under one empire inevitable, or did it need a ruthless figure to centralise power? And to what terrifying lengths did the first Emperor go to secure immortality…? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the fantastical First Emperor of China - one of the world’s most powerful and formidable rulers. From warring kingdoms and ruthless suppressions, to necromancy, mythical beasts, doom-ridden prophecies, and even 20th century Chinese Communism.  *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London! Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. I read a few days ago that the man who ordered the building of the almost infinite wall of China was that first emperor, Xi Huangdi, who also decreed the burning of all the books that had been written before his time. That these two vast undertakings, the five or six hundred leagues of stone against the barbarians, and the rigorous abolition of history, that is, of the past, were the work of the same person, and were in a sense his attributes, inexplicably satisfied and at the same time disturbed me so that was jorge luis borges the wall in the books la moraia y los libros an essay published in 1950 tom ni hao

what do you have to say to that? I completely agree, I think. I can't believe you ambushed me with that. What a rotten thing to do. It was terrible. And what was worse was that we were faffing around before recording this. I know. For exactly one hour and six minutes.

And in all that time, I never thought to mention that I had some Chinese up my sleeve to ambush you with. Even when I was practicing my Chinese accent. No, I just said nothing. Yeah, that's terrible behaviour. I smiled weakly.

But what did you say? You can't leave us all hanging, for those of us who don't. I said, hello, Tom, and welcome to the rest of history. Oh, thanks. And to everyone else. Yeah. Huang Lili Dao, Sheng Xia, to Joshi Lushi, to everybody else as well. So, Tom, Borghese, that essay published in 1950, he's talking about the first emperor of China

and he says he built the Great Wall, but he also abolished history by destroying all the books. And very attentive listeners may remember that back in the mists of time when we record an episode about the Aztecs, the Mexica, that's what they did as well. They destroyed the books of their enemies, the histories of their enemies. But the emperor of China does it about China's own stuff yeah he does and uh the story is is that not only does he burn the books but he actually buries alive a whole array of scholars and that sense of the first emperor of china xi huangdi as a kind of menacing tyrant but i think you get the sense from that reading

from bulgess who loves this kind of stuff that that it shades into the mythic, doesn't it? Borges loves figures who are playing tricks with time or constructing massive walls, all that kind of stuff. Labyrinths. Yeah, all that. And there is the sense, I think, that Shi Huangdi is, I mean, he's building walls, he's burning scholars and books, and he kind of goes mad towards the end of his life, trying to discover a cure for immortality,

which again is like something from a Borghese story. Yeah, the elixir of life. I mean, this is an unbelievable story. Yeah. So he is a really, really fascinating figure. And I would say most people probably in the West are not familiar with ancient Chinese history. Yeah. I mean, much less so than with Roman or Egyptian or even Assyrian history.

But probably there are kind of visual markers for the reign of the first Chinese emperor, because in 1974, which is obviously a couple of decades or so after Borges wrote that story, an incredible discovery was made in a village outside Tianan in central china where the first emperor had his capital and this of course was the terracotta soldiers of the buried army which was part of the first emperor's tomb yeah and probably most people listening will have a sense of what they look like i mean it's probably the would you say the most celebrated archaeological discovery since tutankhamen i guess yeah I think so. I think if you said to people, pre-modern China, you know, ancient medieval China, do

you know anything about it? They would say, hmm, is that the Terracotta Army? Is it the Great Wall? Yeah. I mean, Borges talks about the wall, but he doesn't talk about the army. The army was at the British Museum, wasn't it? Fifteen years ago, and I went to see it. I think three.

There were three of the figures, yeah. There is something weird and haunting, because there's an argument that it's the first kind of mass-produced, because they're kind of these identical-looking figures. But we'll come to this, because we'll come to his legacy. But we need to talk about the character himself, don't we? And also his place in Chinese history, which is obviously colossal. Right, because I think that he is a figure. His story, the role that he plays, has echoes of the role played by emperors and pharaohs and kings that are more familiar to us. So whether

the history of Egypt or Rome or whatever, but he's obviously also a very, very representative figure of Chinese history. And I think particularly of the ambivalences that you get in Chinese history. So on the one hand, he has always served the Chinese as the archetype of a bad emperor, of a tyrant, of a totalitarian figure. He embodies totalitarian trends, as we will see. But on the other hand, there is also a sense that he is the first emperor, he is the first person who constitutes the imperial state of China. And he does this by redeeming what had previously been fractured kingdoms from chaos. You have seven kingdoms who are fighting among themselves. It's very kind of Westeros,

very Game of Thrones. And by forging them into a single imperial order, he is establishing a template that will endure right the way up into the 20th century. So more successful even than Augustus, Tom, who would be an obvious comparator. continuities that actually run not just up to the end of the Chinese empire, but right the way up into the present day. Because there is a sense in which in contemporary China, communist though it is, the first emperor is seen as a kind of a hero. So there's an incredible film. I know you haven't seen it because we were talking about it earlier. It's one of my absolute favorite films called Hero. It's stunningly beautiful. And it's set in this period of the wars between the seven kingdoms. And it has at its heart an attempt by assassins to kill the King of Qin who will go on

to become the first emperor. And you're siding with the assassins, but the twist is that ultimately you end up rooting for the King of Qin because he is going to go on and create modern China. And therefore without him, there will be no China. This sense of the first emperor as someone who, weirdly, in 1973, this is towards the end of Mao's life, Chairman Mao's life, there was an editorial published in the Maoist journal, The Red Flag, which described the first emperor burning books and burying Confucian scholars alive as progressive measures, which is amazing. Yeah. Robust measures for a happier China.

Exactly. And even now, it's not only filmed, there's been four TV series about the first emperor. So William Hann, you remember who I met when we were in Auckland? I do. Yeah. Chinese New Zealander wrote a brilliant travelogue about his travels across from China to the Middle East. But he said about this, you know, Caesar would love this kind of attention. Yeah.

And I guess the parallels between China and Rome are why I'm interested in it. Yeah. And the communist stuff is fascinating. We'll come to that towards the end of the programme, the way in which, in Mao's China, the reputation of the first emperor changed. But let's start. Tom, where are we? We are 300 years or so, 250 years before the birth of Christ.

We are. So Rome is a republic at this point and China doesn't exist. What is now China is a series of warring states. Is that right? Yeah. So there are seven warring states. As we said, the man who becomes the first emperor is the king of Qin. Under his rule, Qin conquers the other six states. And it is seen by the other six states as pretty barbaric. The story goes that the founder of the kingdom was a chieftain who was expert in horse breeding, which is a kind of very barbarian thing to do, who gets given this tranche of land. And then Chin grows and grows and ends up swallowing all the other kingdoms. And you mentioned Rome.

I mean, there is a slight sense there of how the Greeks, for instance, will see the expansion of Rome. So Rome at this period is busy fighting against Carthage. But also Macedon is the other parallel. I was about to say Macedon. So Macedon, which is on the northern fringe of the kind of Hellenic world, the Greek world, and then ends up dominating. Chin is the same, right? It's more warlike, it's more rugged. Yes.

And the others regard it as perhaps a bit backward, a bit uncouth. But those martial virtues are what make it successful. Yes. And so this may well be why once the king of chin has conquered the other six kingdoms i mean he's he's not reticent in proclaiming the scale of what he's achieved so on his inscriptions he boasts that he brought peace to all under the heavens and that he has humbled the mighty and rebellious and brought stability to the four ends of the earth you know there's a sense in which he's actually, his dynasty only lasts another four years after his death.

But as we say, there is another sense in which what he has established will last until 1911, when the last Chinese emperor is deposed. Yeah, Puyi. And I think that it is really right to focus in on how unusual this sense of continuity is, because obviously the Roman Empire vanishes, there is no trace of it. The Caliphate fragments and fractures. India is never a coherent whole until the British period. But in China, even though the empire may implode, may fragment,

may fracture, it always kind of comes back together again. And I think you have this sense that from this period on, a unified empire is seen by the Chinese as really the only legitimate form of rule. And so that in turn kind of raises two really, really interesting questions. And the first is, how did the first emperor do this? How did he succeed in establishing such a kind of enduring model of imperial rule, a model that would last for not just centuries but millennia? But also, that question that is focused by the passage from Borges that you read at the beginning, has he abolished history? Is it year zero, or is he drawing on traditions that are much older than him?

Yeah. So Borges was obviously fascinated by this idea that it was a year zero, that the emperor was starting again. And it's one that's very seductive. Chinese history obviously predates that first emperor. So am I right in thinking the Chinese chronology, that goes back thousands of years before this guy? Yeah, it's all before him. So Borges in his essay points this out. I mean, this is why he finds it so unsettling, the idea of abolishing history is because Borges recognizes that for the Chinese, in a sense, history is more important to the Chinese tradition, is more important to the Chinese than to any

comparable civilization. And so he writes in that essay, Chinese chronology was already 3,000 years long and included the yellow emperor, Changsu, Confucius, Lao Tzu, when Shi Huangdi ordered that history would begin with him. What he's doing there, he's citing an emperor and three sages, all of whom obviously had preceded the first emperor. The Yellow Emperor is a kind of legendary culture hero who is basically a kind of divine figure, like Osiris ruling Egypt at the beginning of the line of the pharaohs. Right. Trang Tzu and Lao Tzu were both alive during the Warring States period before the

first emperor ends that. They are exemplars of Taoism. They follow the Tao, the way. The aim of this is to bring heavens and the earth and everything in it into harmony and it has to be said that they are not obvious guides to a stable world empire so there's a famous story that's told of trangzu that i'm sure lots of people will have heard of that he falls asleep one day and dreams that he's a butterfly and then when he wakes up he doesn't know whether he's a man who dreamed he was a butterfly whether he was a butterfly now dreaming he was a man that's very balkesian so this is not the spirit that will enable you to go and conquer six kingdoms yeah and during the lifetime of the first emperor yeah the taoists aren't really a philosophical school to the degree that they will become they're kind of i think they're more like yogis in india they're kind of

into yeah breathing techniques and gwyneth paltrow very austere diets and things yeah they're posting pictures of like pathetic looking salads on Instagram. Exactly. So the first emperor, very contemptuous of that. But having said that, the Taoists do recognize that their teachings, obviously this idea that you want to bring the heavens and earth into harmony, obviously that has implications for politics. And so Lao Tzu says the Tao is great, heaven is great, earth is great, and the king is great. There are four greats in the state and the king is one of these. So there's this idea that you actually need one king to establish harmony. Well, that idea of harmony, Tom,

is obviously absolutely central to Confucianism, isn't it? So Confucius lived about a century or so earlier before the guy we're talking about. And his model, his dream is a world of balance and stability where the earthly world achieves the same level of harmony that the cosmos has. That's right. And that would imply a single political order. Well, really what he's on about is being kind, Dominic. Oh, Tom, that's nice because we're all about kindness on the rest of history, aren't we? So when I say being kind, I mean, he has this idea that if everyone knows their rightful place, if everyone behaves well, according to their roles,

then the perfect state will emerge. So he sums this up in a famous phrase, let the ruler be a ruler, the subject a subject, the father a father, and the son a son. And essentially what he's doing is he's equating the relationship

between the father and the son. And he barely talks about women, it has to be said, to a ruler and a subject. And if everyone does what they should, so whether that is performing the right rituals or, I don't know, wearing the right kind of clothes or bowing in the right kind, that everything will follow. And when everyone knows his or her place, then harmony will be universal. You know, there'll be one king, everyone will know his or her place. It'll all be great. That sounds very sound, I think. Very sound. Well, so we will see whether the first emperor agrees with you. But this sort of Confucian ideal that China is something more than just a political entity, that it is an expression of the order of the cosmos. This is something that absolutely runs

right the way through Chinese imperial history. And I think is why, in due course, the unification of China comes to seem something inevitable. Well, I wanted to ask you about that, because there is a sense, isn't there, that all Chinese history is progressing towards a single goal, which is the unity and strength and triumph of China. And precisely because Chinese history has this extraordinary continuity and because the unit of China has existed for so long, we assume that it's inevitable, that there was always going to be a country called China and not a series of warring states. But obviously there isn't a country called Europe, or at least not yet. Or Romania.

Exactly. Well, there is a country called Romania, but you know what I mean. Yeah. There's no Roman. Yes, the Roman Empire doesn't still exist. Yeah. So when we look at this guy, I suppose that's the shadow that hangs over this, or the question, isn't it? Is he single-handedly responsible for the most extraordinary geopolitical achievements in world history? Or are there other factors at play? And actually, is his individual importance less significant than we might tend to think? That question raises kind of the deep ambivalence that hangs over the ancient history

of China. Definitely, say by the early modern period, Chinese historians are looking back and they're saying it's an inevitable progress towards unity. They'll say that 2,000 years before the first emperor there were 10,000 states, and then the age of the warring states there were seven, and then with the first emperor there's only one, and this is great. This is something that was inevitably going to happen. But at the same time, there's only one. And this is great. This is something that was inevitably going to happen. But at the same time, there is also a sense, definitely during the age of the warring states itself,

that sages are not just looking forwards, but they're looking specifically backwards to a golden age of unity that's been lost. And specifically, they're looking back to the heyday of a particular dynasty, the Chu. And people love my pronunciation of foreign. Well, Dominic, you're the master of of a particular dynasty, the Chu. And people love my pronunciation of foreign. Well, Dominic, you're the master of tongues. You're a master of Chinese. The Zhu dynasty tongue. The Zhu. I mean, I'm not a specialist in Chinese linguistics by any means,

but I'm happy to dabble. Yeah. Okay. So this is the dynasty that rules for the longest in the whole of Chinese history, 789 years. 789 years. Wow. Amazing. Yeah. And they had overthrown the previous dynasty, the Shang, around 1050 BC. Yeah. So this is kind of, you know, in Europe, it's the Bronze Age collapse. It's the aftermath of the Trojan War.

It's that kind of period. And the Jew justify their rule with reference to concepts that again will endure throughout the entire sweep of history. And the most famous of these is the idea of the mandate of heaven, that a dynasty that cannot maintain order and harmony is condemned by the heaven, overthrown, and to be replaced by a new dynasty. And therefore history, a sense of the past, is incredibly important because it's what enables a dynasty to prove its fitness to rule. And in turn, that means that an ability to control what is written, to control what is propagated, to control what people read is really, really important. I mean, fundamental to the

stability of the dynasty and therefore to the stability of the state. But what happens under the Zhou is that power starts to drain from the dynasty from, I don't know, about 750 BC. Yeah. And you pass into a period that's called by the Chinese the Spring and Autumn Period, which derives from the name of the Spring and Autumn Annals, which I think is a kind of wonderful name. And in that period, you see, I suppose it's a bit like the process by which the Holy Roman Emperor in medieval Europe loses control over the totality of his empire. But essentially,

the figure of the king, he becomes a kind of spectral figure without real authority. And this is the process which results in the fragmentation. But Tom, can I just ask a question? Before you get to the warring period, when this all falls apart, at that point, so under the Zhou Dynasty, is there what we would recognise as a unified China? Are they ruling a sort of pre-classical, say, the Republic of China today is. It's much smaller. It's concentrated kind of in the heartlands. But yeah, I think there is a sense of a common identity. And it's really that common identity that people are nostalgic for. They feel that there is something waiting, that the empire that existed has broken and it should be reconstituted. And so that explains the ambivalent role that the first emperor will come to play,

that he is someone who is starting something afresh, but he is also kind of looking backwards, but he wants to disguise that. Yeah, but just on the common identity very quickly, common identity based on not just political reality, but on shared language, religion, customs, those kinds of things? No, I think it's probably closer to

pre-Roman Italy than it is to classical Greece. Okay, right. So actually that identity is quite fragile, is what you're saying? For sure, yes. But I think equally, there is a sense that is shared across these seven kingdoms that a harmony between all of them would be better than just allowing them to continue to fight and to fragment. And that really is the ideal that is associated with Confucius, who is looking back for inspiration, but also looking forwards and saying, look, if we just behave well, if sons behave dutifully to their fathers and subjects behave dutifully to the king, then the spirit of benevolence and kindness will flow out across the land and the empire will just

cohere as a result of it. And so basically, this is what Confucius and Confucian scholars who follow him are teaching the rulers of these various kingdoms, is that if you do this, then harmony will prevail. But of course, the problem with that is that Confucius is saying you can't reconstitute the unity through violence. But of course, I mean, that's a nonsense. That's the only way you can do it is through violence. Yeah. So Confucius, Tom, is living, what is he, 550 to kind of 480 or thereabouts BC. So he is 200 years before the first emperor. And that period is one of chaos, anarchy, constant war between the successor states to the Zhou dynasty. And as you say, the only way they can be welded together is through force, right?

Right. I mean, this is a very violent, aggressive world. Right. Because which of these seven kings is going to say, yeah, all right, let's have a philosopher's age. We'll all stand down. It's just not going to happen. So this is where the man who will become the first emperor steps in, because as we will see, he is very much not a Confucian. He subscribes to a very different ideology, a very different approach to rulership. And I think we should take a break at this point. And when we come back, we'll look and see what he did.

And it's all quite brutal. Oh, I look forward to it. Come I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com Cracking his long whip, he drove the universe before him. He ascended to the summit of power and ruled the six directions,

scourging the world with his rod, and his might shook the four seas. In the south he seized the land, and the lords there bowed their heads, hung halters from their necks, and pleaded for their lives. Then he caused General Meng to build the great wall and defend the borders, so that the barbarians no longer dared to come south to pasture their horses, and their men dared not take up arms to avenge their hatred. Thereupon he discarded the ways of the former kings and burned the writings of the hundred schools in order to make the people ignorant. He collected all the arms of the empire and had them brought to his capital where the spears and arrowheads were melted down. He garrisoned the strategic points with skilled generals and expert bowmen,

and stationed trusted ministers and well-trained soldiers to guard the land with arms, and questioned all who passed back and forth. Now that was Jia Yi in the Faults of Qin. So this is discussing the first emperor of China and actually makes him sound, Tom, like a pretty terrifying figure. So it sounds like a bit of a police state there, doesn't it? That everybody's been questioned. There are soldiers at every crossing. The people have been plunged into ignorance because of the destruction of their old books. And that was written about 50 years after his death. Yeah.

And Jie Yi is a bird lover. So he writes a treatise on the owl. Right. The beauties of the owl, which I think is great. Love an owl. Yeah. But he's also a Confucian. And the hostility that he's displaying to the emperor there, he's drawing on kind of Confucian ideals and finding the first emperor wanting.

Although I think, I mean, I think there is a measure of kind of grudging respect there as well, don't you think? Yeah. I mean, it stresses his omnipotence effectively, doesn't it? Yeah. But I think it's the earliest articulation of what will become a kind of prime Confucian theme running throughout Chinese history, that the first emperor had established his supremacy by consciously trampling on Confucian ideals. And because the history tends to be written by Confucians, it's quite difficult, I think, to have a sense of the first emperor

himself that isn't clouded by that criticism. So it's again, looking at the kind of Roman parallel. It's like senators writing about the early Caesars. The hostility is baked in. Right. So that's our sense of this guy. Now, interestingly, throughout this podcast, we've called him this bloke or the first emperor, but we haven't really used his name very much. And that's partly because his name changes doesn't it over time it does so you compared him to augustus yeah and augustus was a great one for changing his name and the first emperor is is very similar his birth name seems to have been the jong which dominic as you'll know of course means kind of upright or proper correct yeah righteous or

implications of rectitude there tom for people who are real linguistic scholars i think yes exactly so and he is the son of the king of chin and a concubine and within decades of his death you're starting to get hostile confucian traditions that says that his father had been a hostage, which I guess is entirely plausible when he was a young man, and that while he was a hostage, he had befriended a merchant. And Confucians regard merchants with the utmost contempt. So this is a terrible thing. They're in trade. Common. They're in trade. And this merchant had given one of his concubines to the future king of Qin,

and this concubine will be his mother. Although there are much later, again, very hostile Confucian traditions that go a step further and say that actually the king of Qin was the son of this merchant and his concubine and therefore was entirely legitimate. So you can see there a kind of deliberate attempt to try and blacken him. So he becomes king of Chin in 246 BC. He's only 13, so still very young. And he is heir to this very, very kind of formidable state. We compared it earlier to Rome or to the Macedon of Philip II and Alexander that conquers the Greek states. They have a very, very militaristic cast of mind, almost kind of Spartan level of toughness, very advanced technologically. So they've developed particularly lethal brand of crossbow. They have these huge, well-trained armies. Anyone who has seen Hero will remember the

incredible scene where the earth shakes as the army of the Qin approaches. And so already only four years after Zhong has been born in 255, the Qin have embarked on their process of conquest. And specifically, they have targeted what remains of the patrimony of the Zhu dynasty. So this very, very ancient, highly respected dynasty that had existed for centuries and centuries before. And the Qin have marched in and have extinguished them. So they're very menacing from a kind of military point of view, but they are also very

menacing if you are a Confucian from an ideological point of view, because they have a prospectus for rule that deliberately contradicts the assumptions of Confucius and this idea that beneficence and just performing the correct rituals and so on will be enough to generate harmony. And it's basically a totalitarian understanding of how states should be organized. And it's been propagated in the fourth century, so the century before the future first emperor is born, by a guy called Shang, Lord Shang. And he explicitly condemns Confucian virtues as being parasitical. So the things that he condemns are rights and music, odes and history, moral culture and virtue, filial piety and brotherly love, sincerity and faith, benevolence and righteousness, criticism of the army,

and being ashamed of fighting. All of these are condemned as weaknesses. So very Spartan. Yeah, it is. Very Spartan. And actually, Tom, it reminds me, you did that wonderful episode at the beginning of the year, chilling episode about the ideology of Nazism and the Nazis' sense of right and

wrong. And, you know, the contempt for being ashamed of fighting, for being weak, for being soft, all of that kind of stuff. I mean, there are some pretty chilling 20th century parallels there. Yes. And of course, the Nazis were inspired by the Spartans. And I think that people may recognize the extent to which there are parallels between the current Chinese state and this kind of ideal that is being spelt out by Lord Shang in the 4th century BC. So essentially, the tendrils

of the state, Shang thinks, should reach into every household. So every household has to be registered, which in turn makes it easy to get taxes from them, to oblige people to do military service, to do forced labor. And you have these kind of pyramidal structure of magistrates who are responsible for communities and then higher magistrates and so on, right the way up to the figure of the king himself. This structure, Shang says, is to be enforced with very, very brutal laws. Essentially, he says, a king who is not brutal in maintaining the law is letting his people down. A king who is kind is letting the state go to waste. And this feeds into, on the military level, a sense that, say, head harvesting is the measure of a man.

The more heads that a soldier can collect, the higher he will be promoted. And this is obviously anathema to everything that Confucian philosophy embodies. But it's obviously brilliant for the young Zhang, who, even though he's a teenager, shows himself brilliant at utilising both the war machine and this kind of ideology that he's a teenager, shows himself brilliant at utilizing both the war machine and this kind of ideology that he's been bequeathed. And so the wars carry on and the six kingdoms are swallowed up one by one. And as this process is happening, obviously all the other kings are terrified. The stories that are told of the king of chin is that he's a kind of almost bestial figure so there's a description of him that is

quoted by a later historian coming from one of his own generals that he's a man with a prominent nose large eyes a chest like a bird of prey and the voice of a jackal a man of little kindness with the heart of a tiger of that of a wolf terrifying so not the kind of person that you'd want coming for you yeah and so unsurprisingly they sponsor assassins to go and kill him and this is the historical reality that lies behind the plot of of hero oh yes but it doesn't work they all fail yes and so by 221 bc all the other six kingdoms have been conquered and And the estimate is, and again, it's quite a round figure. People may remember, I've mentioned before, that Caesar is said to have killed a million Gauls when conquering Gaul.

Yeah. The same is said of the King of Chin, that he slaughters a million and more people in the process of conquering. That's a classical history million, isn't it, Tom? Yes. I mean, who's counting, right? Right. But so he is now,

so he's conquered all the kingdoms. Yes. And he makes himself more than a king. So that's why we call him the first emperor. He's different from the Zhu dynasty or previous dynasties because he is something else. He's a paramount ruler, par excellence. He is an emperor.

Is that right? Yes. Well, so members of our beloved chat community will know that the Chinese for king, of course, is Wang. General Gordon, of course, had his Wangs, didn't he had his wangs his kings yeah but yeah so the king of chin no longer wants to be a king he no longer wants to be a wang and so he declares himself to be chin xi huangdi and chin is obviously his homeland chin is the name from which china

will come yeah so his homeland comes to be acquainted with the entire empire that he's conquered she means first and this i find fascinating do you i mean this is why i find this subject so interesting coming from the kind of the roman perspective gone so huang basically means august oh very good. And Di is a divine figure. So the yellow emperor was a Di. The yellow emperor called himself Huang Di. And so if you wanted to translate Huang Di into Latin, you translate it as Augustus Divus, both of which were names used by Augustus because he wanted a new title for himself. The divine Augustus. So that I think is why the translation for Huangdi into

English appropriately is emperor. It's a kind of an implicit comparison between Augustus and Huangdi. And what makes it different, I suppose, is that in his name, there's that link to the gods, to the realm of the divine, right? Because of the D. So he's more than just an earthly monarch. He is the incarnation of cosmic order. Is that fair? I think absolutely, yes. And we have inscriptions that he put up himself, inscriptions incised onto great stone monuments. And so in that sense, a sense of himself has survived the criticism and the obloquy of later historians. And he describes himself as ruling over a land in which all men under the sky toil with a single purpose. And he describes himself as ruling over a land in which all men under the sky toil

with a single purpose. And he is praised for having regulated local customs, made waterways and divided up the land, cared for the common people, working day and night without rest, defining the laws, leaving nothing in doubt, making known what is forbidden. So he's casting himself as a kind of godlike figure whose supervision is for the good of everyone beneath his rule and tom you've compared him with roman emperors but is there also a comparison just thinking about the stone monument with the inscription saying he did this he did that the other all men worked under his rule you know waterways blah blah blah what strikes me is pharaohs is there a comparison to be made with pharaohs, and I think obviously we are living as we do in the West and much more familiar

with the great kings and emperors of the ancient civilizations of the Near East or the Mediterranean. But I think that there is a sense in which Ji Wangdi, the first emperor, is the equivalent of those figures. But of course, he is also very, very distinctively Chinese. And I think that he embodies a totalitarianism beyond even that that was dreamed of also very, very distinctively Chinese. And I think that he embodies a totalitarianism beyond even that that was dreamed of, say, by Akhenaten, who is the kind of classic totalitarian figure in Egyptian history. Because unlike Akhenaten, who essentially has to kind of invent a justification for totalitarianism, the first emperor already has it in the form of

this ideology that's been divided by lord shang and essentially what he does once he's conquered these six kingdoms is he extends that totalitarian control across everything that he's conquered so the identity of the kingdoms gets kind of dissolved by the division of the first emperor's conquests into 36 provinces and within those again you get all these kind of subdivisions and subdivisions and subdivisions. So again, you have this sense that his agents are everywhere, keeping watch, controlling people. This is what enables him to raise armies and to impose forced labor and so on. And also he does something that may remind people of what the

Assyrians or the Babylonians did when they abducted the Israelites or the people of Judah to their capitals after conquering them. The first emperor does something very similar. He orders 120,000 of the wealthiest families from across all the various kingdoms that he's conquered to come to his capital near present-day Tian and to bring all their weapons with them. So that was mentioned in the passage that you read and these weapons are melted down and they're converted into bells and into 12 bronze giant statues that are kind of erected as markers of his triumph and his process so symbols of his power yeah and his triumph over these other rival families and so the passage that you read as criticism and the passage that you know the ins and the passage that, you know,

the inscriptions that the first emperor himself puts up as a marker of praise is this idea that he standardizes everything. So he standardizes coinage. He standardizes weights and measurements, imposes it across what will become China. He standardizes the size of chariot axles. Yeah.

Well, you need to do that for roads if you're on a road system, right? You do need it for roads. And so again, like the Romans, the first emperor is a great, great road builder. Yeah. Or the Persians. Yeah, or the Persians. But he has access to all this forced labor.

You know, he can get kind of contingents of people to labor on the roads, kind of, you know, preparing the rubble, patting it down, lining it with ditches and trees and everything. And in the middle of these great highways, there is a kind of separate lane, which is only for the first emperor himself. And there's a story told of a nobleman who accidentally strays into it, who immediately gets executed. So very stern traffic laws. And it's very clear, I think, when he travels, who is the first emperor, because he's dressed all in black. This is his signature colour. When you have this great kind of, you know, he's going down the central lane of these highways.

He's got these huge wide black chariots with their perfectly matching wheel gauges, black banners, fluttering flags, officials, great tall conical hats, black robes. I mean, unbelievably impressive and overwhelming. And the sense that, you know, a new age has dawned in which everything is joined and supervised and everything has its place. So on the face of it, Tom, you could argue that this is precisely the kind of balance and order that a few centuries earlier, Confucius and then his acolytes, his successors, had called for. So why did they end up hating this first emperor? Because they see it as being upheld by, one of the Confucian scholars says, its mutilations and punishments. Right. So rather than everyone knowing their place, the labourer being happy to labour,

you know, the householder being happy to hold the house, whatever, it's dependent on forced labour, on conscription, on people being criminalised if they object to this. And the punishments are incredibly brutal and they kind of rise from having your beard shaved off. Shocking. So this is the penalty for beating your wife. And then you might have your head shaved. Right. Then you might be tattooed, which is a kind of marker of criminality.

Yeah. Then you might be castrated and then you might have limbs amputated. Okay. That's pretty strict. Yeah, it is strict. And it's expressive of this determination to control everything. The eye of the emperor is everywhere, and his reach extends into the humblest nook and cranny across all these lands that he's conquered. I think that that is why you did burn books, but that he didn't bury Confucian scholars alive. But the fact that they are told and believed is expressive of things that the Confucian scholars feel are terrible. Because obviously,

their objections to what the first emperor is doing is couched in terms of appeals to the past. They're drawing on Confucius, but they're also drawing on the kind of ideals of what previous rulers had done. And so this is what the first emperor is objecting to. He doesn't want that. And so he's advised in 213 by his leading advisor who says, in order to prevent dissent through endless harking back to the supposed glories of the past, books containing such information must be destroyed. So again, a kind of very totalitarian instinct. I mean, this is George Orwell, isn't it? Yeah. No other sources of information, no other sources of wisdom, but me,

effectively. Exactly. And the only manuals that are specified as being saved, they will save books of divination because the first emperor is obsessed by the occult and by looking into the future. Books on medicine and books on agriculture. And people who listened to our episode on Carthage may remember that we talked about how the Romans only allow agricultural manuals to be spared. Everything else is destroyed. And even though the scholars probably aren't buried alive, there's no question that Confucianism and Taoism, the first emperor is not in favour of them at all. So in the passage that you read, they talk about the hundred schools being banned.

These are all the sages who are essentially being told, you have no role to play in this new order. And against that background, one of regulation and control, building the great wall, which supposedly started in 214 BC, and the reading that we began the second half of the set is General Meng who does it. So the greatest general of the first emperor. So against that background, I mean, it's a bit like Hadrian's Wall, isn't it? Is it keeping the barbarians out or is it more simply just a demonstration of power and regulation and your ability to shape the landscape and to place a marker

on the earth and say, here I am, I can do whatever I like, I control this world. Well, that's why Borges is fascinated by it, isn't it? It's this sense that it's expressive of a will, of a purpose that is more than merely geopolitical. Yeah. I mean, I think clearly it is the idea of keeping barbarians out who are much more dangerous to the Chinese emperor than the Caledonians were to the Romans. Right. So it has a much more serious defensive purpose than Hadrian's Wall did. I think so. But I think it is also expressive of an ambition to regulate and control everything. And that which cannot be regulated, therefore,

shouldn't be tolerated and is to be kept out. And so in that sense, again, a bit like Hadrian's Wall, the Great Wall is a marker of contempt for everything that lies beyond it. So the Great Wall is not what immediately comes into mind when you think about it, which is much later, the stretches beyond Beijing. Richard Nixon. This is a Great Wall. Yeah, Richard Nixon. It's a Great Wall. Yeah. Actually, these are not built out of stone probably they're made out of of earth so

there's a phrase for it the earth dragon you know kind of sneaking across the landscape for thousands of miles and probably not a coherent line so julia lovell in her brilliant book on the great wall of china she says that wall building was more a case of joining ravines and precipices with stretches of wall or with fortresses and of erecting a brand new continuous line of defence. But even so, it is clearly an absolutely massive project. And you get testimony to this. So there's a very haunting contemporary poem. If you have a son, don't raise him. If you have a girl, feed her dried meat. Can't you see the long wall is propped up on skeletons so very eerie so a little bit like the pyramids or something yeah slave labor huge armies for this grandiose hubristic statement of supreme power yeah and there's a very haunting story that

kind of makes explicit this idea that actually the great wall has been made out of skeletons and the story is is that there is this woman she's got married. And on the very day of her marriage, the first emperor's agents come to seize him for his spell of duty doing forced labor on the Great Wall, right the way up on the kind of the northeastern side where the Great Wall meets with the ocean. And the poor man goes off and then winter comes and so the wife prepares him warm clothes she travels all the way up and when she gets there she discovers that her husband has already died of exhaustion and the bitter cold and she she sobs and she sobs and sobs and her tears dissolve the earth of the wall, and it all crumbles away and melts away.

And there are the bones of her husband, along with those of thousands of other people who have also died. These skeletons are kind of tumbling out, and she hurls herself into the sea. And her death, too, is expressive of the tyranny of the first emperor and i think that this desire to control everything is also what explains the stories that are told about his quest for immortality because if you can control everything in life you also want to keep death at bay yeah and so this is why he allows kind of necromantic manuals treatises written by magicians to be spared and not be burnt. And he goes to these magicians and he says, you know, how can I stay alive? I don't want to, I don't want to die.

Again, kind of echoes of Gilgamesh in Mesopotamian culture. And the magicians tell him that out in the ocean, there are three islands. And this is where people who are immortal live and we would love to go and look for them for you and to do that we will require thousands of young girls and boys to go with us right and um first emperor says brilliant off you go and so they they all set off and they never come back and so a few years pass and so some more magicians come and they say the same and so the first emperor rounds up more girls and boys and they all head off. And again, nothing happens. God, this is very dodgy behavior from the magicians, Tom, I think.

And then finally, one survivor comes back, one of the boys. Right. And he says, you know, we just can't get there. It's impossible. The ocean is full of monsters and the islands are guarded by giant sea monsters. How we going to get there and you know this is a very awkward question for the first emperor to answer yeah it's a bad blow for his ambitions and his anxiety to answer it is sharpened for him by the fact that in 211 a meteor crashes down lands on the earth and someone writes on it the first emperor will die and his lands will be divided up a chilling prophecy and obviously the emperor is not pleased about this

and so he has the stone crushed and everyone around wiped out but it incentivizes him to go in person in quest for the immortality and these islands and so he heads off to the coast with a massive great train in his wake. And because he's been told that there are sea monsters out there, he has batteries and batteries of crossbows. He arrives on the coast. The story is that he sees some of the sea monsters, successfully shoots them, but then he dies. And because they are so far from the capital and because his aides and his followers are so nervous about what will happen if the news gets out that he's dead, they put him inside a covered kind of chariot and veil it so that no one can see him. And they pretend that he's still alive and they kind of bring him papers and so on. And they then start heading back to the capital. but because obviously his body is starting to rot what they do is they pile great wagons full of fish

to go in front and behind so that no one can smell the rotting of the human corpse i like that story but tom it occurs to me that it probably isn't true no i mean so that story has the absolute i mean that clearly seems to be a kind of folk tale stroke parable about his hubris. Yeah. It's kind of Arabian Nights quality, isn't there? Arabian Nights quality, exactly. So that probably, I mean, I'm such a stuck record on this whenever we do ancient history, but that probably didn't happen. Am I right? I mean, I think that there are elements of what we've been talking about that are clearly true. There are contemporary inscriptions. There are intellectual trends that you can trace and map. So we know he lived, we know he was the first emperor, but the fish business. Completely. But I agree that there is around him the quality of

myth. And I think that that's what appealed to Paul Guest. I think that's why he's such a resonant figure still in contemporary Chinese culture. That he is a kind of intersection point where myth and history kind of meet and merge. And part of the reason for the mythic quality is that so much of what he laboured has survived, but also quite a lot of the stuff that would have enabled him to be portrayed as he would have wanted to be portrayed collapses. Because as we said, his regime goes within four years. He's succeeded by the second emperor, but then that's it. And so emperors throughout Chinese history, you don't have the 43rd emperor or whatever. That tradition fades with the first and second emperor. And so in that sense, the kind of the portrait that we have of him is not one that he would have wanted. And that's why throughout the span of. And they say, bad guy, tyrant, totalitarian. I mean, that guy, you quoted Jia He.

His thing is called the Faults of Qin. And he says, you know, Qin became a great power, but the ruler lacked humaneness and rightness. Preserving power differs fundamentally from seizing power. Yeah. In other words, this is a warlord, a jumped up warlord, who didn't know how to rule in a benevolent way. Yes, exactly. And so that's a tradition that the communists obviously inherit. You know, the communists are not in favour of autocratic emperors.

No. And so in the kind of early decades of the communist state, again, the first emperor is absolutely condemned, along with all the other emperors. But I think two things then change to present the first emperor in a kind of brighter light. And the first, of course, is the discovery of the terracotta army, which is just, you said about seeing those three statues in the British Museum when they came over. I mean, there are thousands and thousands of them. You have archers, crossbowmen, foot soldiers in armor, officers, people on horses, people riding chariots. Absolutely stupefying. And it has been suggested that they reflect a kind of very distant Hellenic influence. Because of course, this is the age of Alexander's conquests, Hellenistic kingdoms in the East, that craftsmen

in this period possibly are available. But to quote Frances Wood, who wrote a brilliant book on the first emperor of China, she says that the assembly of the buried army was an industrial rather than an artistic project. And what she means by that is that it's all mass produced. So you have eight different types of head, but only two types of legs, of armor, of feet. But Frances Wood is brilliant on how, despite this, when you look at the ranks of the terracotta army, you have this sense of incredible variety. So she says there are only two types of hand forms found amongst the 16,000 hands of the terracotta warriors, yet their use, their precise placing in the long sleeves of gown or tunic and the angles used help create

an illusion of individuality. I'm sure she's right. I mean, I can't think of another one. She says it is the most extraordinary example of creative mass production in the world. And the fact that the state can do that, the fact that the authorities have the power to order that is a sign of their muscle, isn't it? And of their bureaucracy and their administrative clout, I guess. He builds on an enormous scale. So the terracotta army is only a part of the huge tomb complex. Which hasn't fully been excavated, right? So the tomb itself has never been excavated. Well, so there's an account of it that it contains flowing rivers of mercury. There's an attempt to create an image of the world within the tomb. And they've kind of done geo scans and apparently there is a very high mercury level in it. So people are kind of

nervous of exploring it. Do you know why they haven't opened it up fully? I think that it's kind of polluted. I think it's felt to be dangerous to excavate because of all this mercury. And the story is that when his palace burns in the wake of his death, it takes five days to burn. His buildings are obviously on an enormous scale. So I think that the terracotta army give a face to what would otherwise be a figure without features, perhaps, you might say, because all the images of him are much later. But because it's like with Tutankhamen, the moment you see something brought from the earth, redeemed from obscurity, that is vivid and personal, it kind of brings that figure alive. Yes, it does.

So I think that that's one aspect. But the other, amazingly, as we talked at the beginning of this episode, is that over the recent decades, the first emperor has come to be promoted by the Communist Party in China. And it all originates in a story that we talked about, Dominic, in an episode that we did with Rana Mitter on the final days of mao and then the emergence of modern china which is this figure lin bao he had a key role in the civil war kind of very committed communist yeah at one point mao's heir apparent and he is the guy who compiles the little red book so the collection of mao sayings that then everyone kind of waves and brandishes but by the early 70s mao is starting to feel that perhaps he's too much of an heir apparent. It's obviously a very dangerous role to play and starts thinking, well, I don't know, maybe I should get rid of him.

And accusations start to float around that Lin Bao is preparing a coup. and whether he is or not he gets sufficiently alarmed by this that on the 13th of September 1971 he gets on a plane to try and get to the Soviet Union to escape Mao and it crashes in Mongolia and everything around the story is incredibly mysterious but anyway Lin Bao then has to be purged his memory has to be eliminated and one of the accusations that's levelled against him in the wake of his death by Mao's propagandists is that he had compared Mao to the first emperor. And so what Mao's propagandists do in the wake of this is to say, well, this is outrageous. The first emperor was brilliant. And the reason that the first emperor is framed as being brilliant is firstly, that he had built a state where there had been

chaos which is what Mao had done so Mao is to be compared to the first emperor in that sense but also the claim is that Lin Bao had been a secret enthusiast for Confucius right and so there is this maxim criticize Lin Bao criticize Confus. And Mao himself says all reactionary classes venerate Confucianism and oppose the first emperor. And so therefore, by an amazing process, to criticize the first emperor comes to seem sinister and counter-revolutionary. I mean, it's such an extraordinary maneuver. I looked this up because you told me about it before we recorded. So there was a biography published a couple of years i think after the death of lin biao by a guy called hong shi di and it was published by the state you know state sanctioned effectively and it was marketed as a

popular history the life of the first emperor so that we're in the early mid 70s it sold almost two million copies within two years. Of course, because China's a big place and it's being pushed by the party. And in this book, the first emperor Qin Shi Huang, he's a farsighted ruler. He establishes China as a modern state. It doesn't mention all the stuff about looking for immortality in the fish, because that's obviously- Disappointing omission. It messes up the narrative, but it absolutely presents him as the founding father of China. And actually, the criticism is that he wasn't tough enough, that he wasn't harsh enough.

And there's a quotation supposedly attributed to Mao, who's supposed to have said this in 1969, even before Lin Biao died, but how much this is true, it's hard to say. He says of the first emperor, he buried 460 scholars alive, but we have buried 46,000 scholars alive. This is Mao talking. You revile us for being Qin Shi Huangs, but you're wrong. We have surpassed Qin Shi Huang a hundredfold. And when you berate us for imitating his despotism, we are happy to agree. Now, whether or not Mao really said that, I don't know, but it's an interesting sign of how much the late stage Maoist regime was keen to associate itself with that first emperor and the sort of sense of order.

And that reminds me, Tom, of Stalin and Ivan the Terrible. Stalin was really keen to associate himself with mythic figures from Russian history, you know, to place himself in that continuum. I mean, that's pretty much the position that the Chinese are in now, isn't it? I think so. The first emperor seen as somebody to admire. I mean, I was amazed when I watched Hero because, of course, you know, we come from a tradition where the idea of an absolute emperor establishing a, you know, a terrifying order isn't something to be celebrated. But in

Hero, it absolutely is celebrated. And the Chinese state wouldn't be allowing endless television series about him to be run unless they were saying, no, there are lessons to be learned here. Slightly disturbing, I have to say, Tom. I like a strong government, but maybe not that strong. But also, it is very expressive of how close ancient history is in China compared, say, to us when we look back to Rome. Yeah. Because there's a sense of unbroken continuity, isn't there? Maybe falsely, but there was an impression of that, which obviously we don't have with

Rome. We don't regard ourselves. People sometimes try, perhaps slightly half-heartedlyedly to present themselves as the heir of Rome, but there's always been a sense of disjunction, partly because of Christianity, because of the fall of the Roman Empire and so on. But maybe in China, they don't really have that to the same degree. No. It's the same state, same place. And clearly the first emperor does play a massive role in that. And that's why I think

he's worth having a look at. Yeah. What a strange and interesting story. That stuff And that's why I think he's worth having a look at. Yeah. What a strange and interesting story. That stuff about the fish. I think that's my favorite bit. Yeah. I mean, imagine how large the crossbow was to deal with a giant fish. Yeah. And who knows what happened to those blokes who went off with all the boys and girls. Yeah, I know. That's left untold. Yeah. what happened to those guys right so tom that was brilliant that was a real tour de force and later this week we have a complete change of tone don't we we do because we'll be back in a few days with the history of tailoring and of men's fashion of suits ties you name it we'll be talking about it. Great, great fun. And then after that, we will be traveling to the United States for the last stand of the Lakota, the life of General Custer and the story of the Ghost Dancers.

So lots of exciting things to come. And on that bombshell, Tom, thank you very much. I should have foolishly, I should have looked up how to say goodbye in Mandarin. The master of tongues fails. But for once, I missed an opportunity to try and score a point. So I just have to say goodbye. Goodbye. That's a very positive note on which to end.

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