Most
famous of all the Emperors of China was Ying Zheng, King of the state of Qin,
who united the Warring States and took the title Qin Shihuang-di, the First
Emperor. The thousands of
life-sized terracotta warriors buried with him are described by tour guides as
the Eighth Wonder of the World. Their sight proclaims China on tourist posters
all over the world, and heads of state visit to have themselves photographed
with China’s new rulers alongside the terracotta army. Qin Shihuang-di ended
the anarchy of the feudal lords, bringing order out of chaos by imposing
uniform laws, standardizing the writing scripts, unifying the currency, even
regulating the length of cart axels so that the ruts of roads everywhere might
be equally passable. He established the rule of centralized bureaucracy which
became the stamp of Chinese civilization, and began the cycle of dynasties that
fall only to rise again. He built
the Great Wall to keep out the Northern Barbarians, sending 700,000 workers
whose bones were buried under the Wall to make it strong. His tomb took 38
years to build, the length of his entire reign, consuming another 700,000
workers. They surrounded it with underground caverns filled with terracotta
warriors and battle chariots lifelike in every detail, and also with real
horses and household servants who were buried with him, along with incalculable
treasures in jade and gold. To deter grave-robbers, crossbows were cunningly
set to kill any intruder in the underground passageways, and the craftsmen who
knew the secrets of the tomb were buried inside it.
Qin Shihuang-di
was a tyrant, but a great one.
Even
his enemy Jia Yi, writing in the Han Dynasty which overthrew the Qin after the
death of Qin-Shihuang-di, extolled him.
According to the ancient text: “After this the First Emperor arose to
carry on the glorious achievements of six generations. Cracking his long whip,
he drove the universe before him, swallowing up the eastern and western Zhou
and overthrowing the feudal lords. He ascended to the highest position 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 of Yüeh and made of it the
Cassia Forest and Elephant commandaries, and the hundred lords of Yüeh bowed
their heads, hung halters from their necks, and pleaded for their lives with
the lowest officials of Qin. Then he caused General Meng Tian to build the
Great Wall and defend the borders, driving back the Huns over seven hundred li so that the barbarians no longer dared
to come south to pasture their horses and their men dared not take up their
bows 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 destroyed the
fortifications of the states, assassinated their powerful leaders, collected
all the arms of the empire, and had them brought to his capital where the
spears and arrowheads were melted down to make twelve human statues, in order
to weaken the people of the empire. 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 question all who passed
back and forth. When he had thus pacified the empire, the First Emperor
believed in his heart that with the strength of his capital within the Pass and
his walls of metal extending a thousand miles, he had established a rule that
would be enjoyed by his descendants for ten thousand generations.”
Nevertheless,
the old chronicles tell us, the great Emperor came close to being assassinated
before all this could be done.
None of this might have come about: China unified, cart axels, pottery
soldiers and all. The Grand Historian, Sima Qian tells the story, which he
verified from those who had talked to eyewitnesses at the scene. Qin had not
yet destroyed the six remaining great feudal states, but pressure was growing.
His generals inflicted defeated on the state of Zhao to the east, and buried
alive the 400,000 soldiers who surrendered. The state of Yan, in the north, was
the weakest of the states; its prince, Dan, knew that if the other states fell,
Yan could not survive. At this time Fan Yuqi, a Qin general, knowing that his
master Ying Zheng, King of Qin, was unforgiving of failure but jealous of
success, fled to the protection of Yan. Knowing that receiving Fan Yuqi would
provoke Qin even more, nevertheless Prince Dan took him in.
His
worries redoubled, Prince Dan sent for a famous assassin, Jing Ke, and asked
him to eliminate the tyrant. But the King of Qin sat always in fear for his
life; how would Jing Ke come armed into his presence? Only one way: the Prince
must send a secret envoy, offering alliance; to assure good faith, he must
carry the head of the traitor Fan Yuqi. He would also offer a map of the Yan
fortresses, wrapped up in which would be the dagger Jing Ke would use to kill
Ying Zheng.
Jing
Ke agreed to the plan and called on Fan Yuqi. The ex-general received the assassin courteously. He had
been thinking, he said, of how he could contribute to revenge on the King of
Qin. Now he understood; and with that, he cut his own
throat,
offering his head to Jing Ke.
Jing
Ke now journeyed to Qin, offering bribes and gifts to the appropriate officials
to arrange an audience with King Ying Zheng. Ushered into the royal chamber, he
took the head of Fan Yuqi from the box in which it was packed with salt, and
brandished it before King Ying Zheng. The king beckoned Jing Ke forward to
unroll the map of the Yan fortifications. Seizing the dagger that appeared at
the end of the roll, Jing Ke sprang forward. Now the king, terrified of
assassination, allowed no one armed to enter his inner hall; so the courtiers
and attendants were unable to defend against Jing Ke.
The
king alone had a sword, but it was a ceremonial sword, longer than anyone
else’s because he was the king; its scabbard was so long that he could not draw
the blade as Jing Ke rushed at him. They darted around the pillars of the court
chamber, Jing Ke giving chase with the dagger, King Ying Zheng fleeing and
trying to draw his sword, while his courtiers watched in horror. Or perhaps
indifference. No one gave orders to call armed soldiers from the outer halls,
and since they had not been called, no one risked punishment by entering the
upper hall. Only the court
physician, Xia Wuqie, battered at Jing Ke’s dagger with his medicine kit. At
last the king unsheathed his sword and managed to cut down Jing Ke’s legs.
Falling, Jing Ke hurled the dagger at the king, but missed him and struck a
pillar. Thus King Ying Zheng of Qin escaped assassination. The assassin Jing Ke
was hacked to pieces and his head displayed on the city walls. The king of Yan,
hoping to appease the wrath of Qin, ordered the head of Prince Dan cut off and
sent to Qin, but a massive Qin army destroyed Yan, and soon after unified the
Middle Kingdom.
Such
is the story as reported by Sima Qian, Grand Historian of the Han dynasty, who
lived 100 years ater Ying Zheng, the First Emperor. In truth, the story went
differently. As the courtiers stood paralyzed, or indifferent, while Jing Ke
brandished his dagger, only the court physician Xia Wuqie attempted to protect the king. But as
he moved forward to place his medical kit between the king and the assassin’s
dagger, he was held back by a pull of the long sleeve of his gown by the Prime
Minister, Li Si . The tyrant king Ying Zheng was unable to draw his sword from
its scabbard, and as he dodged behind the pillars, Jing Ke’s dagger found its
target. The tyrant was dead. Only then did the Prime Minister Li Si call the
guards from the lower chamber, who rushed in and killed Jing Ke. At a sign from
Li Si, they killed too all the courtiers who were close enough to see what had
happened -- whether as punishment for not protecting
their soverign, or to eliminate witnesses of the deed, no
one would ever know.
Now
Prime Minister Li Si and court physician Xia Wuqie held conference over the
king’s corpse, out of sight behind a pillar.
“The
situation is thus,” observed Li Si. “King Ying Zheng was suspicious of
everyone. That is why our most successful general, Fan Yuqi, fled to Yan. Ying
Zheng has been king since he was twelve years old. As he has grown up, it has
begun to dawn on him that we ministers, who flatter him as the great and
tyrannical king, have always controlled the state of Qin. Soon he would have
turned his suspicions on us. It is better we are rid of him.”
“In
that case,” remarked the physician Xia Wuqie, “are we not now superfluous? Or
do you intend to make yourself king?”
“Not
at all,” said Prime Minister Li Si. “Who I am is known to everyone. It is
preferable to remain Prime Minister, and replace the king.”
“To
replace a king is not easy,” replied Xia Wuqie.
“On
the contrary,” said Li Si, “this very king, Ying Zheng, was just such a
replacement. You may recall my predecessor, the Prime Minister Lü Buwei. He was
once a common man, merely a wealthy merchant. But he befriended one of the
grandsons of a previous king of Qin; standing nearly lowest out of more than 20
sons of the royal concubines, Prince Zichu had little chance of receiving the
succession on his own. By distributing bribes and gifts at court, Lü Buwei had
the king’s favorite concubine, who was childless, adopt this prince as her own
son, and by her wiles prevail upon the old king to put aside his first son and
name Prince Zichu as his heir. Then Lü Buwei, promoted to Prime Minister, gave
one of his own beautiful concubines to Prince Zichu; in fact she was already pregnant
by Lü Buwei, but Prince Zichu believed he himself quickly impregnated her with
a son. It was this son, Ying Zheng, who succeeded his father as king of Qin.
“Being
only twelve years old when he ascended the throne, Ying Zheng was naturally
under the advice of Prime Minister Lü Buwei. As we know, for six generations
the state of Qin has followed a policy of expansion. Ministers have come from
every state, offering their clever plans, and the shrewdest have been given
office here in Qin. Our generals have built the most massive armies, scouring
territories of the outlying marchlands west of the Pass and south into Sichuan
to build up our population. Our ministers have established laws regulating the
people, concentrating power in the tentacles of the court, while the other
feudal states have allowed a free hand to their unruly barons. Our policy has
worked well, as long as no ruler was allowed to interfere with it. Therefore,
in order to occupy the attention of young King Ying Zheng, Prime Minister Lü Buwei
encouraged him to take an interest in magic, and flattered him to believe
himself a cruel tyrant. As soon as Ying Zheng took the throne, the Prime
Minister set before him plans to build his tomb, greater than any predecessor.
Three hundred years before, King Jingsong of Qin buried hundreds of horses and
attendants in his tomb; King Ying Zheng of Qin would have thousands more. Lü
Buwei sent to him alchemists and sorcerers, filling his ears with tales of
magic potions bringing immortality. Thus the King of Qin thought more of his
tomb than of anything else; he would have an army underground to accompany him
in the afterlife -- and protect him too, since already in his young life his
cruelty surrounded him with enemies, and the world of immortality in the grave
is in this respect no different than our mortal life.
“Thus
young King Ying Zheng enjoyed his cruelties and took pleasure in building his
huge underground toy. But Lü Buwei let himself become too grand. He began
secretly to take back his beautiful concubine, aged though she was. Finding her insatiable, he arranged
other lovers for her, choosing a man with a giant penis who they secretly
passed into the women’s quarters as a eunuch. On reaching the age of
twenty-two, King Ying Zheng grew suspicious; he had his mother imprisoned, and
her suspected lovers killed, along with their relatives through the third
degree of kinship. Lü Buwei, realizing he had overreached himself, offered to
retire. But even on his vast country estate, King Ying Zheng suspected Lü Buwei
of being too grand; taking a hint, Lü Buwei killed himself. It is thus that I,
Li Si, became Prime Minister.
“I
have guarded King Ying Zheng since he was twenty-two. I have changed nothing
suddenly, only extended previous precedents. King Ying Zheng I have kept
occupied with filling his vast tomb with precious objects and building his army
of terracotta warriors, while I have continued plans of previous Prime
Ministers to build the state of Qin and unify the Middle Kingdom. Our armies grow steadily stronger than
any of the feudal states. They are stronger, too, even off the battlefield,
since they are drawn from a population where everyone is harnessed to the will
of the state. Elsewhere the feudal nobles do what they wish, following their honor
codes of loyalty to friends and sworn vengeance to enemies. Here in Qin no one
stands above the law. Only one, the king appears to stand above. But he too
does not escape the law; he is merely the name in which all others are leveled.
"The king of Qin is at the center of this circle
we are constructing, because we need one point on which all eyes are focused.
But the king does this for Qin only as long as I control him, I the Prime
Minister, just as another Prime Minister did before, and another Prime Minister
will after me. At times I have considered: if this child ever realizes what we
are doing, he will ruin everything.
“Of
late, it has come close to that. Ying Zheng’s suspicions were growing. His
cruelties were striking everywhere, ever closer at hand. It was time to replace
him. Heaven has sent this assassin at the right time. Truly, Heaven looks down
on the state of Qin, and on its destiny to unify the Middle Kingdom.”
Court
physician Xia Wuqie bowed his head to Prime Minister Li Si in the kowtow. “You are truly wise, Prime
Minister. But what shall we do
with the corpse of Ying Zheng? And
who shall we put in its place?”
“There
is a servant in my household,” said Li Si. “Low-born, lacking confidence in himself, he will do what I
suggest. His face and body match the late King Ying Zheng well. He is superstitious too, a halfwit. He
is also a coward, fearful of enemies, so we can easily make him Ying Zheng,
fearful of assassins. I have detected in him signs of cruelty, and that too we
can encourage, giving him petty victims to begin with. Let him start by
executing his fellow servants of my household, who might recognize him, and the
former servants of Ying Zheng. They can be executed for treason, for failing to
fend off the assassin. After that, let him move on to bigger cruelties. We can
use him to cut off any rivals who might appear at court, who have designs on
our own offices.”
So
it was done. The young halfwit was dressed in the robes of the king, and taught
to brag how he killed the assassin with his own sword while his cowardly
courtiers watched. To get him in the right spirit, Li Si and the physician Xia
Wuqie had him hack at the body of the dead king Ying Zheng, after it had been
stripped of its clothes, until it was mutilated beyond recognition. This they
represented as a henchman of the assassin; and its head too was displayed on
the city wall.
And
so the halfwit was set on the throne. Qin’s armies resumed their task of
reducing the state of Zhao in the northwest and Yan in the north, Han and Wei
in the center, Chu in the south, and finally the mighty king of Chi in the
east. In 221 B.C. the halfwit was
named emperor of all the Middle Kingdom.
On the advice of his ministers (Li Si standing in the front row not too
far forward, showing due humility as no more than foremost among the ranks
below the emperor), he took the title of Qin Shihuang-di. Being told repeatedly
by everyone of his great achievements, he came to believe in them himself.
For
Li Si, there remained one chief problem. Only the court physician, Xia Wuqie,
knew the secret. The thought began
to trouble Li Si’s mind: had he told anyone? The scholars too seemed to have an
air of knowing something, both Li Si’s old schoolmates in the School of Rigidly
Enforced Laws, as well as the advocates of the other systems, the followers of
Confucius and Modi and Laozi, the theorists of the Yin-Yang and of the Five
Processes, the debaters and the School of Names. The solution was simple. Li Si
insinuated to the emperor that the scholars were plotting against him, using
their books (which he could not read) as evil portents against his rule. The
emperor obligingly ordered all books collected and burned. When the scholars
protested, 460 of them were buried alive.
The
emperor became steadily more cruel, and more concerned with magic. The Prime
Minister, extending old policy, suggested connecting all the walls of the older
states of the north into one Great Wall to keep the Huns beyond the borders.
The Emperor accepted the suggestion, but believed the magicians who told him
that the wall would be strong only if thousands of living persons were buried
alive beneath the wall. His tomb became a maze of caverns beneath an enormous
mound. The emperor began to meld in his halfwit mind the idea of immortality in
the grave and immortality above the ground, through magic potions that would
enable him to mount to the sky as equal of the gods. He sent expeditions into
the Eastern Sea, toward the Land of the Rising Sun, where alchemists told him the
potion of immortality would be found, if only the ships were manned by 4000
beautiful boys and girls. These were taken from their wailing parents and sent
off, but the ships always wrecked and never came back successfully.
The
two old conspirators, Li Si and the court physician Xia Wuqie, grew
increasingly suspicious of each other.
Xia Wuqie acted first; in his straightforward way, he decided to explain
to the emperor the true circumstances of how Li Si had put him on the throne.
Affronted by a dim recollection that no longer fit his sense of himself as the
great Qin Shihuang-di, the emperor had Xia Wuqie struck down. But the thought lingered in his mind;
perhaps Li Si was plotting against him. Others, quick to see how the wind was
blowing, began to spread rumours about Li Si. The burning of the books and
execution of the scholars had increased the numbers of his enemies. It ws not
difficult, with a distribution of gifts and bribes, to have stories circulate
that would reach the emperor behind the back of Li Si. One day Li Si found himself on the
execution ground, the emperor watching from one tower, the new Prime Minister
(a hitherto unnoticed court official) from the other, while the relatives of Li
Si through three degrees of kinship were lined up to be executed, and Li Si was
sentenced to be cut in half.
* * * * * * * * *
Does
the story end here? Like a cycle that is the history of China (and the pattern
of the world, according to some sects of the scholars), events turn on a wheel.
Sometimes faster: after ten years
of the reign that was to last ten thousand generations, the First Emperor died,
poisoned by mercury which was the principal ingredient of the immortality
potions he was taking. After his death, revolt broke out. Peasants exhausted by work on the Great
Wall and on the enormous tomb with its terracotta warriors, flocked to join
rebel armies. The court at the emperor’s magnificent city of Xianyang broke into factions; no one
gathered in his fist all the reins of power like the Prime Ministers Li Si, Lü
Buwei, or their predecessors; each turned on each, betraying them to the
rebels. The city of Xianyang and its palace were destroyed. The underground
caverns of terracotta warriors were broken into, their weapons stolen to arm
the rebels, the statues smashed into shards, not to be reassembled until
archeologists twenty-two centuries later began to reconstruct their own myth.
The
empire of the great tyrant was shattered. On its ashes, the leaders of the
peasant revolt built a new empire and a new city, Changan (which later
generations would call Xi’an), a few kilometers east of the city of Xianyang.
The glorious Han dynasty arose, taking over the laws of the Qin -- its
mutilations and punishments, its conscript armies, its people condemned as
criminals and sent as slave labor to build new walls, or march in ranks like
live terracotta warriors to extend the frontiers of the Middle Kingdom in every
direction. Sima Qian, who preserved the stories of the the evil Qin emperor and
his would-be assassin, himself lived under a newer and greater Emperor,
Wudi. Angering the emperor for
some offense -- could it have been protesting against repeating the policy of
the tyrannical First Emperor, when the Han emperor Wudi conscripted new
millions to build walls and extend even further the Middle Kingdom? However that may be, Sima Qian offended
the emperor enough to be sentenced to castration -- not to death by being cut
in two, nor to having his head displayed on the city walls, since the Han
dynasty was a more progressive time, and laws were adjusted to circumstances.
Thus Sima Qian survived, to give us the records of the Grand Historian, and to
hide from us (although, we believe, with guarded omissions and hints), the
truth of the assassination of the First Emperor, Qin Shihuang-di.
Sometimes
the wheel turns slower: more than twenty centuries later, another period of
Warring States returned, followed by yet another unification. Some date it to the time of the Opium
Wars with the Western Barbarians, some to the rebellion of the Taiping
tian-guo, the Kingdom of Great Heavenly Peace, some to the warlords of the
1920s and the invasion of the Japanese from the Land of the Rising Sun. After
this came another turn of the wheel, the unification of the Middle Kingdom.
Righteous and militant, its leaders proposed a rule of rigorously enforced
laws, with all people in equality beneath the state. Here again ministers
struggled at court over who should be the point on which all eyes are focused,
the picture on the front of the Imperial Palace in the capital city. In the
struggle, one minister in emulation of Li Si launched another burning of the
books. This too, like all burnings of books, flared up unstoppably and then
burned itself out. During a period of twelve years (the length of the Qin
dynasty itself, from 221 B.C. to the death of the First Emperor in 209 B.C.),
the book burners buried in peasant villages those who wrote books and those who
read them. And since books are written not only on strips of bamboo and on
paper, but also on stone steles and inscribed on walls and in very shape of the
statues and the tile roofs of temples and all the monuments of culture, there
was a formidable task of destruction to be done, too much for the book burners
to carry it all out before they themselves burned out.
Fortunately
-- or not, since in the great turnings of the wheel nothing happens by chance
-- in 1974 A.D., exactly twenty-two hundred years after the assassin threw his
dagger at the First Emperor, peasants digging a well in the countryside near
the old imperial cities of Xianyang and Changan, came across the underground
caverns and Qin Shihuang-di’s armies of terracotta warriors. The book burners
were flickering, their leader aging and about to die. The new regime, eager to
divert attention from the emblem of the leader whose picture looked down from
every wall, seized on the new discovery of the old emblem. An army of archeologists reconstructed
and reassembled the terracotta army, and in 1979 -- the year China opened a new
policy and pierced its own walls to the world -- the Eighth Wonder of the World
was announced. Foreign heads of state, and tourists bringing money for
development and admiration to rebuild the prestige of China’s ancient culture, were invited to Xi’an and
photographed in front of the terracotta warriors of Qin Shihuang-di. The First
Emperor, great builder and great tyrant, who was himself but another terracotta
warrior, now took the place of the great leader, great picture on the wall of the
Imperial Palace in the capital city.
The wheel turned.
