Qin Shi Huang

Qin Shi Huang
Qin Shi Huang Qin Shi Huang
Ancestral name (姓):	Ying (嬴)
Clan name (氏):	Zhao¹ (趙),or Qin² (秦)
Given name (名):	Zheng (政)
King of the State of Qin
Dates of reign:	July 247 BC–221 BC
Official title:	King of Qin (秦王)
Emperor of Qin Dynasty
Dates of reign:	221 BC–Sept. 10, 210 BC
Official name:	First Emperor (始皇帝)
Temple name:	None³.
Posthumous name:	None⁴
proleptic Julian calendar. They are not in the proleptic Gregorian calendar.
———
1. This clan name appears in the Records of the Grand Historian written by Sima Qian. Apparently, the First Emperor being born in the State of Zhao where his father was a hostage, he later adopted Zhao as his clan name (in ancient China clan names often changed from generation to generation), but this is not completely certain.
2. Based on ancient Chinese naming patterns, we can infer that Qin was the clan name of the royal house of the State of Qin, derived from the name of the state. Other branches of the Ying ancestral family, enfeoffed in other states, had other clan names. Qin was thus possibly also the clan name of the First Emperor.
3. The royal house of Qin did not carry the practice of temple names, which were not used anymore since the establishment of the Zhou Dynasty, so the First Emperor does not have a temple name per se. However, his official name "First Emperor" can somehow be assimilated to a temple name, being the name under which the emperor would have been honored in the temple of the ancestors of the dynasty.
4. Posthumous names were abolished in 221 BC by the First Emperor who deemed them inappropriate and contrary to filial piety.

Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇; Hanyu Pinyin: Qín Shǐ Huáng; Wade-Giles: Ch'in Shih-huang) (November / December 260 BC – September 10, 210 BC), personal name Zheng, was king of the Chinese State of Qin from 247 BC to 221 BC, and then the first emperor of a unified China from 221 BC to 210 BC, ruling under the name First Emperor.

Having unified China, he and his prime minister Lǐ Sī passed a series of major reforms aimed at cementing the unification, and they undertook some Herculean construction projects, most notably the precursor version of the current Great Wall of China. For all the tyranny of his autocratic rule, Qin Shi Huang is still regarded by many today as the founding father in Chinese history whose unification of China has endured for more than two millennia (with interruptions).

Naming conventions

Qin Shi Huang was born in the Chinese month zhēng (正), the first month of the year in the Chinese calendar (in the 3rd century BC the Chinese year started before the Winter solstice, and not after as it does today), and so he received the name Zheng (政), both characters were being used interchangeably in ancient China. In Chinese antiquity, people never joined family names and given names together as is customary today, so it is anachronistic to refer to Qin Shi Huang as "Ying Zheng". The given name was never used except by close relatives, therefore it is also incorrect to refer to the young Qin Shi Huang as "Prince Zheng", or as "King Zheng of Qin". As a king, he was referred to as "King of Qin" only. Had he received a posthumous name after his death like his father, he would have been known by historians as "King NN. (posthumous name) of Qin", but this never happened.

After conquering the last independent Chinese state in 221 BC, Qin Shi Huang was the king of a state of Qin ruling over the whole of China, a previously unprecedented accomplishment. Wishing to show that he was no longer a simple king like the kings of old during the Warring States Period, he created a new title, huangdi (皇帝), combining the word huang (皇) from the legendary Three Huang (Three August Ones) who ruled at the dawn of Chinese history, and the word di (帝) from the legendary Five Di (Five Sovereigns) who ruled immediately after the Three Huang. These Three Huang and Five Di were considered perfect rulers, of immense power and very long lives. The word huang also meant "big", "great". The word di also referred to the Supreme God in Heaven, creator of the world. Thus, by joining these two words for the first time, Qin Shi Huang created a title on a par with his feat of uniting the seemingly endless Chinese realm, in fact uniting the world (ancient Chinese, like ancient Romans, believed their empire encompassed the whole world, a concept referred to as all under heaven).

This word huangdi was rendered in most Western languages as "emperor", a word which also has a long history dating back to ancient Rome, and which Europeans deemed superior to the word "king". Qin Shi Huang adopted the name First Emperor (Shi Huangdi, literally "commencing emperor"). He abolished posthumous names, by which former kings were known after their death, judging them inappropriate and contrary to filial piety, and decided that future generations would refer to him as the First Emperor (Shi Huangdi). His successor would be referred to as the Second Emperor (Er Shi Huangdi, literally "second generation emperor"), the successor of his successor as the Third Emperor (San Shi Huangdi, literally "third generation emperor"), and so on, for ten thousand generations, as the Imperial house was supposed to rule China for ten thousand generations ("ten thousand" is equivalent to "forever" in Chinese, and it also means "good fortune").

Qin Shi Huang had now become the First Emperor of the State of Qin. The official name of the newly united China was still "State of Qin", Qin having absorbed all the other states. The names Zhonghua (中華) or Zhongguo (中國) were never used officially for the country China until 1912 when the Republic of China (中華民國) was founded. Contemporaries called the emperor "First Emperor", dropping the "of the State of Qin", which was obvious without saying. However, soon after the emperor's death, his regime collapsed, and China was beset by a civil war. Eventually, in 202 BC the Han Dynasty managed to reunify the whole of China, which now became officially known as the State of Han (漢國), which can also be translated as the Empire of Han. Qin Shi Huang could no longer be called "First Emperor", as this would imply that he was the "First Emperor of the Empire of Han". The habit started to have his name preceded by Qin (秦), which does not refer to the State of Qin anymore, but to the Qin Dynasty, a dynasty now replaced by the Han Dynasty. The word huangdi (emperor) in his name was also shortened to huang, so that he became known as Qin Shi Huang. It seems likely that huangdi was shortened to obtain a three-character name, which matches the three-character name of Chinese people (it is rare for Chinese people to have a name made of four or more characters).

This name Qin Shi Huang (i.e., "First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty") is the name that appears in the Records of the Grand Historian written by Sima Qian, and is the name most favored today inside China when referring to the First Emperor. Westerners sometimes write "Qin Shi Huangdi", which is improper given Chinese naming conventions; it is more conventional to write "Qin Shi Huang" or "First Emperor".

Youth and King of Qin: the conqueror

At the time of the young Zheng's birth, China was divided into warring feudal states. This period of Chinese history is referred to as the Warring States Period. The competition was extremely fierce and by 260 BC there were only a handful of states left (the others having been conquered and annexed), but Zheng's state, Qin, was the most powerful. It was governed by Legalist philosophy and focused earnestly on military matters.

Zheng was born in Handan (邯鄲), the capital of the enemy State of Zhao. He was the son of Zichu (子楚), a prince of the royal house of Qin who served as a hostage in the State of Zhao under an agreement between the states of Qin and Zhao. Zichu later returned to Qin after many adventures and with the help of a rich merchant called Lü Buwei, and he managed to ascend the throne of Qin, Lü Buwei becoming chancellor (prime minister) of Qin. Zichu is known posthumously as King Zhuangxiang of Qin. According to a widespread story, Zheng was not the actual son of Zichu, but the son of the powerful chancellor Lü Buwei. This tale arose because Zheng's mother had originally been a concubine of Lü Buwei before he gave her to his good friend Zichu shortly before Zheng's birth. However, the story is dubious since the Confucians would have found it much easier to denounce a ruler whose birth was illegitimate.

Zheng ascended the throne in 247 BC at the age of 12 and a half, and was king under a regent until 238 BC when, at the age of 21 and a half, he staged a palace coup and assumed full power. He continued the tradition of tenaciously attacking and defeating the feudal states (dodging a celebrated assassination attempt by Jing Ke while doing so) and finally took control of the whole of China in 221 BC by defeating the last independent Chinese state, the State of Qi.

Then in that same year, at the age of 38, the king of Qin proclaimed himself First Emperor (see chapter above). Zheng was the empire's strongest warrior, extremely skilled in the use of the sword (he carried a two-handed sword with him at all times), the halberd, the crossbow, and other traditional Chinese weapons.

First Emperor: the unifier

File:ShiHuangDi1.jpg

"First Emperor"
(small seal script, 220 BC)

To avoid the anarchy of the Warring States Period, Qin Shi Huang and his prime minister Li Si completely abolished feudalism. They instead divided the empire into thirty-six commanderies (郡). Power in the commanderies was in the hands of governors dismissed at will by the central government. Civilian and military powers were also separated to avoid that too much power falls in the hands of a single civil servant. Thus each commandery was run by a civilian governor (守 shǒu) assisted by a military governor (尉 wèi). The civilian governor was superior to the military governor, a constant in Chinese history. The civilian governor was also reassigned to a different commandery every few years to prevent him from building up a base of power. An inspector (監 jiàn) was also in post in each commandery, in charge of informing the central government about the local implementation of central policies, reporting on the governors' exercise of power, and possibly resolving conflicts between the two governors.

This administrative system was only an extension to the whole empire of the system already in place in the State of Qin before the Chinese unification. In the State of Qin, feudalism had been abolished in the 4th century BC, and the realm had been divided into commanderies, with governors dismissed at will by the ruler.

Qin Shi Huang ordered all the members of the former royal houses of the conquered states to move to Xianyang (咸陽), the capital of Qin, in modern day Shaanxi province, so they would be kept under tight surveillance for rebellious activities.

The emperor also developed an extensive network of roads and canals connecting the provinces to accelerate trade between them and to accelerate military marches to revolting provinces.

Qin Shi Huang and Li Si unified China economically by standardizing the Chinese units of measurements such as weights and measures, the currency, the length of the axles of carts (so every cart could run smoothly in the ruts of the new roads), the legal system, and so on.

Perhaps most importantly, the Chinese script was unified. Under Li Si, the seal script of the state of Qin, which had already evolved organically during the Eastern Zhou out of the Zhou dynasty script, was standardized through removal of variant forms within the Qin script itself. This newly standardized script was then made official throughout all the conquered regions, thus doing away with all the regional scripts and becoming the official script for all of China. Contrary to popular belief, Li Si did not invent the script, nor was it completely new at the time. Edicts written in the new script were carved on the walls of sacred mountains around China, such as the famous carved edicts of Mount Taishan, to let Heaven know of the unification of Earth under an emperor, and also to propagate the new script among people. However, the script was difficult to write, and an informal Qin script remained in use which was already evolving into an early form of clerical script.

Qin Shi Huang also had most previously-existing books burned (excepting some held in the palace archives). Concomitant with this, he had many scholars executed.

Qin Shi Huang continued military expansion during his reign, annexing regions to the south (what is now Guangdong province was penetrated by Chinese armies for the first time) and fighting nomadic tribes to the north and northwest. These tribes (the Xiongnu) were subdued, but the campaign was essentially inconclusive, and to prevent the Xiongnu from encroaching on the northern frontier any longer, the emperor ordered the construction of an immense defensive wall, linking several walls already existing since the time of the Warring States. This wall, for whose construction hundreds of thousands of men were mobilized, and an unknown number died, is the precursor version of the current Great Wall of China. It was built much more north than the current Great Wall which was built only during the Ming Dynasty, when China had at least twice more inhabitants than in the days of the First Emperor, and when more than a century was devoted to building the wall (as opposed to a mere ten years during the rule of the First Emperor). Very little survives today of the great wall built by the First Emperor.

Death and aftermath

The emperor died while on a tour to Eastern China, searching for the legendary Islands of the Immortals (off the coast of Eastern China) and for the secret of eternal life. Reportedly he died of swallowing mercury pills, which were made by his court scientists and doctors, containing too much mercury. Ironically, these pills were meant to make Qin Shi Huang immortal.

His death occurred on September 10, 210 BC (Julian Calendar) at the palace in Shaqiu prefecture, about two months away by road from the capital Xianyang. Prime minister Li Si, who accompanied him, was extremely worried that the news of his death could trigger a general uprising in the empire, given the brutal policies of the government, and the resentment of the population forced to work on Herculean projects such as the great wall in the north of China or the mausoleum of the emperor. It would take two months for the government to reach the capital, and it would not be possible to stop the uprising. Li Si decided to hide the death of the emperor, and return to Xianyang.

Most of the imperial entourage accompanying the emperor was left uninformed of the emperor's death, and each day Li Si entered the wagon where the emperor was supposed to be traveling, pretending to discuss affairs of state. The secretive nature of the emperor while alive allowed this stratagem to work, and it did not raise doubts among courtiers. Li Si also ordered that two carts containing fish be carried immediately before and after the wagon of the emperor. The idea behind this was to prevent people from noticing the foul smell emanating from the wagon of the emperor, where his body was starting to decompose severely. Eventually, after about two months, Li Si and the imperial court were back in Xianyang, where the news of the death of the emperor was announced.

Qin Shi Huang did not like to talk about death and he never really wrote a will. After his death, Li Si and the chief eunuch Zhao Gao persuaded his eighteenth son Huhai to forge the Emperor's will. They forced his first son Fusu to commit suicide, stripped the command of troops from Meng Tian — a loyal supporter of Fusu — and killed Meng's family too. Huhai became the Second Emperor (Er Shi Huangdi), known by historians as Qin Er Shi.

Qin Shi Huang was buried in his mausoleum, with the famous Terracotta Army, near modern day Xi'an (Shaanxi province), but his burial chamber has yet to be opened. Though a magnetic scan of the site has revealed that a large number of coins are lying in the unopened tomb, occasioning speculation that the royal treasury was interred with the emperor, "Excavation sometimes means destruction," Michael Petzet has been quoted as saying. "Let them sleep underground. It's safer. No excavation should be done for fun or curiosity" [1]

Qin Er Shi was not nearly as capable as his father. Revolts against him quickly erupted. His reign was a time of extreme civil unrest, and everything the First Emperor had worked for crumbled away, for a short period. The imperial palace and state archives were burned: this has been disastrous for later historians, because after the burning of the books by his father, almost the only written records left were those in the palace archives.

Within four years of Qin Shi Huang's death, his son was dead. Thus did the Qin Dynasty come to an end. It was during Qin Er Shi's "rule" that powerful families came to war, with the strongest of them rising to power and bringing order back to the land, thus starting the next dynasty of emperors.

The next Chinese dynasty, the Han Dynasty, rejected legalism (in favor of Confucianism) and moderated the laws, but kept Qin Shi Huang's basic political and economic reforms intact. In this way his work was carried on through the centuries and became a lasting feature of Chinese society.

Qin Shi Huang in historiography

In traditional Chinese historiography, the First Emperor was almost always portrayed as a brutal tyrant, superstitious (a result of his interest in immortality and assassination paranoia) and sometimes even as a mediocre ruler. Ideological prejudices against the Legalist State of Qin were established as early as 266 BC, when Confucian philosopher Xun Zi compared itater, Confucian historians condemned the emperor who had burned the classics and buried Confucian scholars alive. They eventually compiled the list of the Ten Crimes of Qin to highlight his tyrannical actions. The famous Han poet and statesman Jia Yi concluded his essay The Faults of Qin with what was to become the standard Confucian judgment of the reasons for Qin'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.

Because of this systematic Confucian bias on the part of Han scholars, some of the stories recorded about Qin Shi Huang are doubtful and some may have been invented to emphasize his bad character. Some of the stories are plainly fictitious, designed to tarnish the First Emperor's image, e.g. the story of a stone fallen from the sky engraved with words denouncing the emperor and prophesying the collapse of his empire after his death. This makes it difficult to know the truth about other stories. For instance, the accusation that he had 460 scholars executed by having them buried with only their heads above ground and then decapitated seems unlikely to be completely true, but we have no way to know for certain.

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 Kuomintang historian Xiao Yishan emphasized the role of Qin Shi Huang in repulsing the northern barbarians, particularly in the construction of the Great Wall. Another historian, Ma Feibai (馬非百), published in 1941 a full-length revisionist biography of the First Emperor entitled Qin Shi Huangdi Zhuan (《秦始皇帝傳》). He called Qin Shi Huang 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 late 1920s, which directly preceded the new Nationalist government at Nanjing was compared to the unification brought about by Qin Shi Huang.

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 new interpretation given of Qin Shi Huang was generally a combination of traditional and modern views, but essentially critical. This is exemplified in the Complete 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 standardization 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 Qin 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 Qin Shi Huang has been given prominence throughout China. The reevaluation movement was launched by Hong Shidi's biography Qin Shi Huang. The work was published by the state press to be a mass popular history, and sold 1.85 million copies within two years. In the new era, Qin Shi Huang was seen as a farsighted ruler who destroyed the forces of division and established the first unified, centralized state in Chinese history by rejecting the past. Personal attributes, such as his quest for immortality, so emphasized in traditional historiography, were scarcely mentioned. The new evaluations described how, in his time (an era of great political and social change), he had no compunctions in using violent methods to crush counter-revolutionaries, such as the "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, seized power and used it to restore the old feudal order.

To round out this re-evaluation, 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 Qin 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 Qin Shi Huang'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 Huang was ranked #17 in Michael H. Hart's list of the most influential figures in history.

Qin Shi Huang in fiction

To be sure, Qin Shi Huang 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 Zheng 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.
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), the Argentine writer, has written one of his best essays on Qin Shi Huang, 'The Wall and the Books' (La muralla y los libros), included in the 1952 collection Other Inquisitions (Otras Inquisiciones). It muses on the opposition between large-scale construction (the Wall) and destruction (book-burning) that defined his reign, in order to make a point about 'the aesthetic experience'.

In 1956, the book Lord of the East portrayed a historical romance set in the Qin Dynasty. Qin Shihaung is and evil tyrant compared to Hitler in the foreward of the book. The story is about the emperor's favorite daughter, who runs away with the relative of Yen. The story uses Qin Shihuang to create the barrier for the young couple.

The 1963 Japanese movie Shin No Shikoutei portrays him as a battle-hardened Emperor with his roots in the military. He is shown lounging around a campfire with common men even though he is a king. A female character, Lady Chu, is also created in order to show the Emperor’s capability to convince a foil character that his cause is just. He transforms her from an enemy into a loyal concubine.

The 1984 book Bridge of Birds (by Barry Hughart) portrays him as a power-hungry megalomaniac who achieved immortality by having his heart removed by an Old Man of the mountain.

In 1984, the book The Chinese Emperor, by Jean Levi was written. The book is a historical fiction that moves from reality and legal discussions of politics in the Qin, to fantasy, where the First Emperor's Terracotta soldiers were robots to replace fallible humans.

The 1996 movie The Emperor's Shadow uses the various legends about him to make a political statement on Chinese Communism, and focuses on his relationship with the rebellious musician, Gao Jianli. Gao Jianli is historically known as a friend of Jing Ke's. He plays him a song before the assassin sets off on his quest to kill the Emperor.

The 1995 computer game Qin: Tomb of the Middle Kindgom depicts a fictional archeological mission to explore the First Emperor's burial site, and he is featured in several voiceovers in Mandarin.

The 1999 movie The Emperor and the Assassin focused on the identity of his father, his heartless treatment of his officials, and betrayal by his childhood lover, paving the way for Jing Ke's assassination attempt. The director of the film, Chen Kaige, wished to question the Emperor's motives and whether or not they were meritorious. A major theme in this movie is the struggle between the Emperor’s dedication to his family vow or his lover, Lady Zhao.

The 2001 Hong Kong TVB drama serial A Step into the Past, and the book it was based on, presents a whole new perspective on the emperor's story, with Raymond Lam Fung as Qin Shi Huang. In the show, Qin Shi Huang is actually a person named Zhao Pan from the Kingdom of Zhao who takes over the identity of Ying Zheng and rises to power with the help of a time traveller from the 21st century. The time traveller also interferes with a lot of important historical events related to the emperor.

The 2002 movie Hero, starring Jet Li, tells the story of assassination attempts of Qin Shi Huang (played by renowned Chinese actor Chen Daoming) by legendary warriors. It portrays him as a powerful ruler willing to take any steps to bring unification to his people.

Bob Bainborough portrayed Qin Shi Huang in an episode of History Bites.

In the Area 51 book series, Qin Shi Huang is revealed to be an alien exile stranded on Earth during an interstellar civil war. The Great Wall is actually the symbol for 'help' in his language, and the true reason for its construction was in hope that a passing alien ship would find it and rescue him.

The video game Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb Portrays Indiana Jones entering the tomb of Qin Shi Huang to recover an artifact hidden there.

Hong Kong Asia Television Limited (ATV) Channel made a TV drama simply called "Qin Shi Huang" (秦始皇) during the 1980s, it was one of ATV's most expensive projects. The series ran roughly 50 episodes, from Qin Shi Huang's youth to his death during his tour. The title song summed up most of the storyline: "Nobody shall be under my foot, nobody shall be equal than me."

Qin Shi Huang is one of the two playable leaders of China in the 2005 computer game Civilization IV; the other is Mao Zedong.

In 2005 The Discovery Channel ran a special on Qin Shi Huang called First Emperor: The Man Who Made China

Miscellaneous

Qin Shi Huang was interested in immortality and visited Zhifu Island. These deeds became a very popular story of the emperor sending a Zhifu islander, Xu Fu (徐福), as the religious leader of ships with hundreds of young men and women in search of the pill of immortality. These people never returned, as they knew that if they did return without the "immortality pill", they would surely be executed. The legend claims that they settled down in one of the Japanese islands. The emperor often took tours to major cities in his empire to inspect the efficiency of the bureaucracy and to symbolize the presence of Qin's prestige. (It was on one of these tours that he died). Nevertheless, these trips provided opportunities for assassins, the most famous of whom was Zhang Liang.

Late in life, after his assassination had been attempted too often for comfort, he grew paranoid of remaining in one place too long and would hire servants to bear him to different buildings in his palace complex to sleep in each night. He also hired several "doubles" to make it less clear which figure was the emperor.

Qin Shi Huang's three great achievements are unifying Chinese characters, unifying money, and unifying measurement units.