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The tumultuous last years of China’s Zhōu Dynasty (period 4 in the numbering used on this web site) are called the Period of Warring States (Zhànguó 战国, period 4e) for good reason. The feudal order that had prevailed, after a fashion, for many centuries had completely fallen apart, and a number of independent states contended to dominate each other and to protect themselves from being dominated by their neighbors.
The state of Qín 秦 emerged as the strongest of these. It was ruled, when our story opens, by King Zhuāngxiāng 庄襄, who had employed a certain Lǚ Bùwéi 吕不韦 (died 235 BC), originally from the rival state of Zhào 赵, as his principal adviser. Lǚ Bùwéi was very friendly with Zhuāngxiān’s wife, whose son (235-210 BC) was said to have been fathered by him. The lad was therefore given the surname of Zhào. His personal name was Zhèng 政 (or Yīngzhèng 赢政)
Little Zhào Zhèng 赵政, a precocious if slightly bloodthirsty lad, was destined to be the unifier of China, calling his dynasty Qín, after the name of his home state, and calling himself the first (shǐ 始) sovereign emperor (huángdì 皇帝). In modern Chinese he is called Qín Shǐ Huángdì 秦始皇帝. The romanized syllable division varies, but most English editors have settled on Qín Shǐhuángdì.)
Linguistic Note: In later dynasties, the word huángdì came to be the standard term for an emperor. Confusingly, the homonymous name Huáng Dì 黄帝 or “Yellow Emperor” refers to a specific legendary king believed to have reigned about 2600 BC. The second Qín emperor is called Qín Èrshì Huángdì 秦二世皇帝, or “Second-Generation Emperor of Qín.”
The First emperor is credited with building the Great Wall to keep northern tribes from invading his territory and with building the Grand Canal to link the Yellow River valley with the Yangtze River valley, China’s most important commercial transit routes. Both of these accomplishments, while beneficial through later centuries (especially in the second case), came at enormous human cost.
He is also credited with unifying currency, writing, weights, and measures, which was probably undertaken mostly to impose Qín standards or the new dynastic “brand” throughout his empire, but which were also of huge benefit to future generations.
He also had books burned and scholars executed, acts which later generations of Chinese thinkers by no means admired, although some revisionist writers today have sought to cast doubt on the historicity of these acts. And hundreds of thousands of people died, were ruined, or were forcibly moved to other regions in connection with his wars, his construction, and his whims.
A paranoid megalomaniac, the First Emperor also created what appears to be the largest tomb in Chinese history, of which only the famous “underground army” of life-sized pottery soldiers and horsemen has been excavated, a favorite with tourists to the city of Xī’ān 西安 in Shāanxī 陕西 Province.
His régime is associated with a philosophical school called “legalism,” manifested especially by the first emperor’s famous principal counselor, LǏ Sī 李斯, seen as one of the most rigid, power-hungry, and heartless figures in Chinese history. Earlier in his life, Lǐ Sī had been a student of Xún zǐ, a Confucian scholar with whom Lǐ largely disagreed. A chapter from the ancient writings linked to Xún zǐ is available on this web site (link).
Legalism, associated with Lǐ’s name more than any other, is usually contrasted with Confucianism. The former is seen as the support of tyrants, the later as the way of honorable ancestors and benevolent monarchs. (For more on Chinese philosophy and prominent philosophers, click here.)
It can be argued that the First Emperor was quite modern in his (and Lǐ Sī’s) dismissal of precedent and of the established hereditary privileges of “great families” in favor of appointment and promotion based on merit (or anyway based on perceived ability, tempered by a strong concern for loyalty to the régime). In this argument, Confucianism, with its concern for ancestors and ancestral ways, often lacked the ability to select talent over connections in public appointment. Therefore, it is reasoned, Confucianism, with its "unrealistic" principle that people would naturally follow the strong personal example of a moral leader, could become workable as a state ideology only when tempered with Legalism, with its stress upon punishments for failure to follow instructions. The argument concludes that it is this alloy of Confucianism and Legalism, usually under the flag of Confucianism alone, that provided later Chinese history with its most successful political thinking.
The historian to whom we are indebted for much of our knowledge of early China is a certain Sīmǎ Qiān 司马迁 (145-86± BC), the outspoken author of the Record of the Historian (Shǐjì 史记), composed a century after the dust had settled on the Qín period. His accounts set the standard for most historical writing in China from his own day to the mid-XXth century. Sīmǎ had access to far more materials than survive today, and quotes extensively from stone stelae that no longer exist.
Sīmǎ organized his history into biographical chapters, and the reading here is his text covering the rise and career of the First Emperor. Here we learn of the emperor’s bloodyrise to power and his endorsement of severe Legalism. We learn about rebellions against him, and about his construction projects, including the tomb he created. And we find estimates of the hundreds of thousands of people killed in the course of his time in power. We also learn of his death, the illegitimate succession of his favorite son (and the murder of the same) and the collapse of China’s first imperial dynasty.
Sǐmǎ had better reason than most to understand the horrors of unrestrained power. From his father, Sǐmǎ Tán 司马谈 (died 110 BC) he inherited the post of Grand Astrologer and Grand Historian at the court of Hàn dynasty 汉 emperor Wǔ 武 (reign 06b-6, 141-87 BC). (History and astrology were considered to be closely allied topics of study.) He oversaw a major calendar reform in 104. His historical writing continued the work of his father.
Unfortunately, Sǐmǎ's willingness to criticize emperor Wǔ provoked the emperor's ire and he was ordered castrated. Apparently this was such a severe mark of shame to a courtier, that most aristocrats faced with such a sentence would discretely commit suicide, but Sīmǎ Qiān decided that finishing his history for the benefit of posterity was a more honorable course of action.
It would have taken a superhuman generosity of spirit for Sīmǎ Qiān to have felt no resentment toward his emperor, and it is difficult to avoid the hunch that Sīmǎ's careful account of the viscious excesses of the First Emperor, presented here, must surely imply criticism of the totalism of Emperor Wǔ as well.
For the modern reader, especially the non-Chinese reader, this chapter contains far too many place names, and perhaps even too many personal names, for comfort. My advice is to ignore most of the place names and notice instead the general process: What is happening here is that these exotically named locations are being unwillingly conquered by the growing and rather vicious Qín state, until a single political entity is formed, and then they are serving as rallying points for rebellions, the same process we see in many countries in our own day. And, as in most Bronze Age empires, the process of conquest, or even the process of governance, is merciless and extremely bloody. Throughout the text, the players do reveal both their interests and their various contending visions of human nature, of power, and of what the ideal political order ought to be like.
The text provided here is in English, with or without the full Chinese original, which may be toggled on and off as you please. To facilitate on-line reading and in-class discussion, I have arbitrarily divided the text into Parts and Chapters and have added titles and line numbers. The Table of Contents contains a full listing, as well as links to interactive review quizzes for each Part.
Sīmǎ Qiān arranged his account in historical order (as was done with earlier historical records), dating entry after entry in years since the accession of the First Emperor not as emperor, but as king of the pre-imperial state of Qin. Thus year 1 was roughly 246 BC. Later historians date the Qin dynasty from the year 221, Sīmǎ Qiān's Year 26. I have used both dates in the chapter titles.
(I have added BC dates, but Western and Chinese years do not share a New Year, so the years are only roughly comparable. This web site contains a separate page describing the Chinese calendar: link.)
The translation is anonymous, found in a bilingual “pseudo-pirate” volume reprinted in Taiwan in 1975 by 文聲出版社 of Taipei. I have updated its obsolete and often incorrect spellings, and made occasional other minor editorial changes in it, but its origin remains unknown. The Chinese text can also be found on various Internet sites. The internet site http://ctext.org/shiji/qin-shi-huang-ben-ji is configured to provide character by character glosses for interested readers. In the pages offered here, the simplified characters and Romanization have been computer-generated and only lightly proofed and probably occasionally contain mechanical errors. Errors of capitalization, word division, or alternative readings in the Romanized version are particularly likely.
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The picture of Sīmǎ Qiān at his desk is by WĒNG Jiànmíng 翁建明 and is from a children's book: CÀI Míngfán 蔡名凡 n.d. 中華五千年。 (Five Thousand Years of Chinese Culture.) Hong Kong: 精英出版社. Volume 1., p. 157.
The criminal being split into four pieces by riders on horseback is from a film produced by the Cultural Relics Bureau in Beijing.
Other pictures are by LIÚ Ānlì 刘安利 in ZHĀNG Yántú 张延图 (ed.) 2007 中国上下五千年。 Five thousand years of [the] Chinese nation. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press 外文出版社. Pp. 51-53.