The Many Legacies of the First Emperor (I)

By Sam Meston

Zhao Zheng, aka Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor of Qin. (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

National heroes matter. While the “great man” theory of history, first articulated by Thomas Carlyle in 1840, has long fallen out of favour to readings with a greater emphasis on social and material factors, there is no doubt that in the popular consciousness, the characters of history evoke impassioned responses from us in a way that more voguish historical readings cannot. Note that even the fundamentally materialist Marxism cannot escape being named after its founder. People to this day will argue passionately about Napoleon and Stalin, Columbus and Churchill, eager to make heroes and villains of each. We can debate endlessly about the virtues and vices of those we could never possibly know on a personal level, but that belies the point: ‘great men’ become symbols, and we argue over what those symbols represent. These symbols are especially useful for understanding national identity, and accordingly each nation has its own cast of heroes. The ‘founding father’ archetype is a prominent one: Washington, Atatürk, etc. - these figures are said to embody the values of the nations they established. With this in mind, it may come as a surprise that the world’s rising superpower, China, has traditionally harboured an enduring animosity toward its own founding father figure. Reviled as a tyrant for two thousand years, the First Emperor has more recently been given a reevaluation by the nation that owes its very existence to him.

Firstly, some historical background. The First Emperor was born Zhao Zheng, a prince of the Qin state during the Warring States period (476 - 221 BC), a chaotic period of incessant warfare between competing kingdoms. Ascending to the throne aged thirteen, Zheng, like his predecessors, was an ambitious man. Regarded as a backwater by the more ‘cultured’ states of the central plains, the Qin was the rising star of the era. The state had reformed itself into a hyper-efficient military machine, based upon principles of the Legalist (Fajia) school of political philosophy. This was a cynical take on political philosophy, a precursor of the Machiavellis and the more hard-boiled realpolitik thinkers of later times. Legalism’s core principles dictated that the law is to be used as an instrument to subordinate all to the service of the ruler, while rival powers are to be subdued with a combination of manipulation and brute force. King Zheng accelerated his predecessors’ expansionist ambitions to new heights as he conquered his remaining rivals one by one. They proved no match for the might of the Qin, and by 221 BC King Zheng had crushed all remaining rivals and unified China (the name itself a derivative of ‘Qin’) under one state for the first time.

The Qin before Zhao Zheng’s conquests. (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

The Qin after Zhao Zheng’s conquests. (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

This world conqueror (at least in the sense of the ‘world’ that was understood by the Chinese at the time) indeed had much to be proud of, and needed a fitting title to match his achievement. He was no mere ‘king’ (王 wang), he was the Emperor (皇帝 Huangdi). This newly coined title, with its spiritual overtones, effectively raised him to deified status. This set the tone for the consolidation of his domain, a hitherto unprecedented achievement of state power in world history. Everything was rigidly standardised - weights, measures, script, taxes, currency, law, philosophy, and more. The old aristocracy of the ‘central states’ was overturned and replaced with a strict meritocracy. The traditional account of Qin Shi Huang’s reign was that he was a tyrant who ruthlessly crushed opposition and treated his subjects as if they were dispensable. In one notorious incident, he supposedly had all books of dissenting schools of thought confiscated and burned, while their scholars were killed en masse. Thousands of peasants were sent to exhausting and dangerous labour building his projects, most notably his extravagant tomb, home to the famous Terracotta Army.

Close-up of the Terracotta Army. Buried with the First Emperor, they were intended to serve him in the afterlife. The estimated 8,000 soldiers are the most enduring testament to the sheer power of the Emperor and his ability to mobilise mass labour. The mausoleum itself has yet to be excavated. (Image: Aaron Greenwood, via Unsplash)

It was the excesses of the Emperor’s system that led to its own undoing. Many colourful stories surround the Emperor’s paranoia and search for immortality, which is ironically reckoned to have caused his death via mercury poisoning. A scheming eunuch named Zhao Gao seized the opportunity and chose a weak prince to place on the throne as his puppet. The death of such a singularly powerful leader without a clear and competent successor naturally invites strife. Rebellions flared up across China. As the story goes, the eventual leader, Liu Bang, was a law enforcement officer tasked with escorting penal labourers. The convicts rebelled and escaped, for which Liu was held responsible - punishable by death. Between a rock and a hard place, Liu chose to take his chances and fight.

Liu Bang, aka Emperor Gaozu of Han, founder of China’s second, and far longer lasting, dynasty. (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

Liu proved a competent leader and, upon toppling the crumbling Qin, eliminated his rivals to found the Han dynasty as Emperor Gaozu. The Han, while inheriting Qin Shi Huang’s empire and its institutions, would welcome a revival of traditional Chinese civil society, and of Confucianism in particular. Confucian scholars formed an elite class of literati officials and would retain that status in Chinese society for the following two thousand years. It is thus the Han literati that wrote the history on their predecessors, and unsurprisingly this history was not forgiving to the First Emperor. More recent reassessment has cast doubt upon the Han version of history, however. The ‘burning of books and burying of scholars’ is generally discredited in veracity and impact, given the survival of these opposing philosophies. As for the legal code, uncovered documents show a surprising degree of nuance and leniency, granting, for example, a lighter punishment for manslaughter than murder. This contrasts with the conventional narrative of wanton killing. Furthermore, similar documents from after the Han usurpation give an impression of surprising continuity as opposed to a total overthrow of the Qin system. There seems to be a good case to take the standard version of events with a grain of salt - I will investigate this in the second part of this article.