Qin Shi Huang
Qin Shi Huangdi (秦始皇帝, Pinyin: Qín Shǐ Huángdì, or WG: Ch'in Shih Huang-ti) (259 - 210 BC), named Ying Zheng (嬴政 Yíng Zhèng), was King Zheng of Qin during the Warring States Period prior to becoming an emperor. In 221 BC he unified China and proclaimed himself the First (shi) Emperor (huangdi) of the Qin Dynasty, as he was the first Chinese sovereign able to rule the whole country. He reigned from 246 BC to 210 BC.
"Huang" and "Di" were titles once reserved for the eight legendary kings (three Huang and five Di), so by employing the term "Huangdi", Ying Zheng indicated that he was even greater than the eight legendary kings combined. He believed that his family would rule China forever and so he wanted his successors to be titled "Emperor of China II", "Emperor of China III", etc.
He gave China a common currency and a standardized systems of weights and measures, writing characters and local prefecture administration. Endless labor in the later years of his reign (including the link-up of the Great Wall of China and construction of the first canal (Lingqu) in today's Guangxi Province, an inconclusive campaign against the Huns, and the widening and paving of countless roads all over China) started to provoke widespread discontent. The emperor was still barely able to maintain stability by his tight grip on every aspect of lives of the Chinese. He also travelled frequently to large cities in Northern China to inspect the efficiency of the bureaucracy and to symbolize the presence of Qin's prestige. Nevertheless his trips provided chances for assassins, the most famous of whom was Zhang Liang.
He did not like to talk about death and he never really had written a will. When he died suddenly at the palace in Shaqiu prefecture, two of his high officials (the Imperial Secretariat Li Si and the chief eunuch Zhao Gao) persuaded his second son Ying Huhai to forge the Emperor's will. They forced his first son Ying Fu Su to commit suicide, stripped the command of troops from Meng Tian-a loyal supporter of Ying Fu Su-and killed Meng's family also. Ying Huhai became the second emperor. The Qin Dynasty soon collapsed, three years after Qin Shihuangdi's death.
He was believed to be buried with the Terracotta Army near Xi'an, but his body has yet to be discovered (The artificial mountain where his body is believed to rest has not been excavated).
He was interested in immortality and visited the Zhifu Island. His such deeds became a popular story of him sending a Zhifu islander as the religious leader of ships with hundreds of young men and women in search of the pill of immortality. These people never returned, and the myth said they settled down in one of the Japanese islands.
Qin Shi Huangdi in historiography
In traditional Chinese historiography, Qin Shi Huangdi was almost always portrayed as a brutal tyrant. Ideological prejudices against the Legalist kingdom of Qin were established as early as 266 BC, when Confucian philosopher Xun Zi compared it to barbarian tribes and wrote "Qin has the heart of a tiger or a wolf … [and is] avaricious, perverse, eager for profit, and without sincerity" Later Confucian historians condemned the emperor who had burned the classics and buried Confucian scholars alive. The famous Han poet and statesman Jia Yi concluded his essay The Faults of Qin with what was to become the standard Confucian judgement of the reasons for Ch'in's collapse. Jia Yi's essay, admired as a masterpiece of rhetoric and reasoning, was copied into two great Han histories and has had a far-reaching influence on Chinese political thought, as a classic illustration of Confucian theory. He explained the ultimate weakness of Qin as a result of its ruler's ruthless pursuit of power, the precise factor which had made it so powerful; for as Confucius had taught, the strength of a government ultimately is based on the support of the people and virtuous conduct of the ruler.
This Confucian bias on the part of Han scholars rendered some of the stories recorded about the First Emperor in the Han period to be of doubtful historical value and many were probably invented to emphasize his negative traits. For instance, the accusation that the First Emperor had 460 scholars executed by having them buried with only their heads above ground, and then decapitated is at the very least unlikely to be completely true and it is probable that the incident was fabricated to create a legend of Confucian martyrdom. There are also many varying tales of Heaven's anger against Qin Shi Huangdi, such as the story of a stone fallen from the sky engraved with words denouncing the emperor and prophesizing the collapse of his empire after his death. Almost all of these have been discredited as hearsay and legend. Other stories are designed to tarnish the First Emperor's image.
Only in modern times, were historians able to penetrate beyond the limitations of traditional Chinese historiography. The political rejection of the Confucian tradition as an impediment to China's entry into the modern world, opened the way for changing perspectives to emerge. In the three decades between the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the outbreak of the Second World War, with the deepening dissatisfaction with China's weakness and disunity, there emerged a new appreciation of the man who had unified China. In the time when he was writing, when Chinese territory was encroached upon by foreign nations, leading Nationalist historian Xiao Yishan emphasized the role of the First Emperor in repulsing the northern barbarians, particularly in the construction of the Great Wall. Another historian, Ma Feibai, published in 1941 a full-length revisionist biography of the First Emperor entitled Qin Shi Huangdi Zhuan, whom he called one of the great heroes of Chinese history. Ma compared him with the contemporary leader Chiang Kai-shek and saw many parallels in the careers and policies of the two men, both of whom he admired. Chiang's Northern Expedition of the early 1920s, which directly preceded the new Nationalist government at Nanking was compared to the unification brought about by Qin Shi Huangdi.
With the coming of the Communist Revolution in 1949, new interpretations again surfaced. The establishment of the new, revolutionary regime meant another re-evaluation of the First Emperor, this time following Marxist theory. The interpretation given of Qin Shi Huangdi of the new era was generally a combination of traditional and modern views; but essentially critical. This is exemplified in General History of China, which was compiled in September 1955, as an official survey of Chinese history. The work described the First Emperor's major steps toward unification and standardisation as corresponding to the interests of the ruling group and the merchant class, not the nation or the people, and the subsequent fall of his dynasty a manifestation of the class struggle. The perennial debate of the fall of the Ch'in dynasty was also explained in Marxist terms, the peasant rebellions being a revolt against oppression - a revolt which undermined the dynasty, but which was bound to fail because of a compromise with "landlord class elements" .
Since 1972, however, a radically different official view of the First Emperor has been given prominence throughout China. The reevaluation movement was launched by Hong Shidi's biography Qin Shi Huang, published by the state press to be a mass popular history, and sold 1.85 million copies within two years. In the new era the First Emperor was seen as a farsighted ruler who destroyed the forces of division and established the first unified, centralised state in Chinese history by rejecting the past. Personal attributes, such as his quest for immortality, so emphasized in traditional historiography, are scarcely mentioned. The new evaluations described how, in his times, an era of great political and social change, he had no compunctions in using violent methods to crush counter-revolutionaries, such as the an "industrial and commercial slave owner" chancellor Lü Buwei. Unfortunately, he was not as thorough as he should have been and after his death, hidden subversives, under the leadership of the chief eunuch Zhao Gao, siezed power and used it to restore the old feudal order. To round out this reevaluation, a new interpretation of the precipitous collapse of the Qin Dynasty was put forward in an article entitled "On the Class Struggle During the Period Between Ch'in and Han" by Luo Siding, in a 1974 issue of Red Flag, to replace the old explanation. The new theory claimed that the cause of the fall of Qin lay in the lack of thoroughness of the Qin Shi Huangdi's "dictatorship over the reactionaries, even to the extent of permitting them to worm their way into organs of political authority and usurp important posts."
Qin Shi Huangdi in fiction
To be sure, Qin Shi Huangdi could always be seen as relevant in fiction and folklore. During the Korean War, the play Song of the Yi River was produced. The play was based on an actual historical event, the attempted assassination of Ying Zheng by Jing Ke of Wei, at the request of the Prince of Yan, in 227 BC. In the play Ying Chêng was portrayed as a cruel tyrant and an aggressor and invader of other states. Jing Ke, in contrast, was a chivalrous warrior and one of his lines was "tens of thousands of injured people are all my comrades." A huge newspaper ad for this play proclaimed: "Invasion will definitely end in defeat; peace must be won at a price." The underdog fighting against the aggression of a cruel and powerful foreign invader and being supported by a sympathetic volunteer from another country was obviously a theme with considerable contemporary relevance.
The movie The Emperor and the Assassin focused on the identity of his father, his heartless treament of his officials, and betrayal by a concubine, paving the way for Jing Ke's assassination attempt.
The 2002 movie Hero tells the story of assassination attempts of Qin Shi Huangdi by legendary warriors.
The book Bridge of Birds portrays him as a power-hungry megalomaniac who has achieved immortality by having his heart removed by an Old Man of the mountain.
Bob Bainborough portrayed Qin Shi Huangdi in an episode of History Bites.