Qin dynasty
The state of Qin was the westernmost of the patrician states of China and had originally been
viewed as a non-Chinese tribe. Its ruler was granted an official Zhou title in the eighth century
BCE in consequence of political loyalty and military service provided to the young Zhou king in
Luo-yang, the new eastern capital, at a time when the legitimate title to the Zhou throne was in
dispute after the fall of the Western Zhou. The sustained reign of Duke Mu of Qin during the
seventh century did much to elevate the status of Qin among the community of patrician states,
but the basic prejudice against Qin as semi-“barbarian” persisted
Never during the Classical period did Qin come to be viewed as fully Chinese in a
cultural sense. Qin produced
great warriors, but no great
leaders after Duke Mu, no
notable thinkers or literary
figures. It's governmental
policies were the most
progressive in China, but these
were all conceived and
implemented by men from the
east who served as “Alien
Ministers” at the highest ranks
of the Qin court, rather than by
natives of Qin. Yet Qin
aspired to full membership in
the Chinese cultural sphere. Li Si, the minister who shepherded Qin’s conquest of the other
states captured a widely held view of Qin in a memorial he sent to the king. “To please the ear
by thumping a water jug, banging a pot, twanging a zither, slapping a thigh and singing woo-woo!--that is the native music of Qin. . . . But however during the Classical period did Qin come to be viewed as fully Chinese in a
cultural sense. Qin produced
great warriors, but no great
leaders after Duke Mu, no
notable thinkers or literary
figures. It's governmental
policies were the most
progressive in China, but these
were all conceived and
implemented by men from the
east who served as “Alien
Ministers” at the highest ranks
of the Qin court, rather than by
natives of Qin. Yet Qin
aspired to full membership in
the Chinese cultural sphere. Li Si, the minister who shepherded Qin’s conquest of the other
states captured a widely held view of Qin in a memorial he sent to the king. “To please the ear
by thumping a water jug, banging a pot, twanging a zither, slapping a thigh and singing woo-woo!--that is the native music of Qin. . . . But now
you have set aside jar-thumping and pot banging and turn to the music of Zheng and Wei.”
However, Qin’s outsider position provided it with certain distinct advantages. Most
obviously, its marginal location gave it defensive security against the other Chinese states, and
the valley of the Wei River was more than distant, it was a natural fortress, it's capital at Xianyang, very near the old Zhou homeland center of Zong-Zhou, easily guarded at the great
Hangu Pass just south of the Yellow River’s elbow.
Qin’s cultural marginality proved an advantage in the long run as well. The far less
developed customs of patrician privilege allowed Qin to advance the principles of central
government, bureaucratic administration, and appointment by merit far more rapidly than could
any other state.
The future comes in 221 BCE
The wars of conquest that brought the Qin Dynasty into being were surprisingly brief,
lasting under a decade. They are not recorded in great detail, perhaps a function of the
extreme social dislocations of the times, which may have hampered communications and
militated against detailed chronicles being kept outside of Qin, a state not known for
literary attention.
In understanding the nature of the
early Chinese empire, that is, the years
following the Qin conquest, it is important to
consider the impact of the events of the 220s.
That decade had begun with the dissolution of
the old state of Han by the armies of Qin. The
event surely shook the security of the elite in
every state in eastern China. Yet all the other
major powers still remained in place, their
weakness not yet evident. Even men who
proclaimed that the end was near were surely
thinking in terms of a generation or two, rather than nine short years. The decade was
perhaps the greatest cataclysm in Chinese history. One after another, the five hundred
year-old ruling houses of the Eastern Zhou states fell before the armies of Qin – the state
that had been least regarded as a possible heir to the Zhou and the sage kings of antiquity.
The Qin revolution
The First Emperor wished to be the founder of dynasty that would last forever. The
accomplishments of the Qin were, as this section will make clear, astonishing.
Nevertheless, he has traditionally been regarded as a failure and his ambitions mocked as
the grossest form of megalomania. It is true that the Qin Dynasty lasted a mere fifteen
years and that the First Emperor himself completed the last of his many imperial tours as
a decomposing corpse whose smell was camouflaged by cartloads of rotting fish. How
much more astonishing, then, that in so brief a time the Qin managed to thoroughly
transform the nature of the Chinese state and establish the structures that would organize
and constrain political life in China until the end of the Imperial era in 1911. All this was
accomplished before the First Emperor died in 210, at the age of forty-nine, having seen
the sun set upon his empire no more than 4,000 times.
Abolition of feudalism. After the conquest, the central issue was how the empire of Qin was to be related to the state of Qin. Now that King Zheng occupied the imperial throne, was he to revive the “feudal” structure of the Zhou and guide it towards its next historical stage, or was he to impose upon the empire the radically different political forms that had come to characterize the “Legalist” state of Qin?
At the time of the conquest, some ministers of Qin proposed to the king-turnedemperor that the only feasible way to administer a polity the size of China would be on
the model of Zhou feudalism. These men urged the king to do what the Zhou founders
had done 800 years earlier: establish his sons as kings in various realms at some remove from the capital and so begin the process of reviving the system of rule by dispersed clan
leaders.
The minister Li Si, one of the most influential Legalist thinkers, opposed this plan
in strident terms. He maintained that the system of bureaucratic autocracy that had been
established in the old state of Qin a century before was fully adequate to administer the
empire, and, moreover, he believed that only such a system could avoid the dispersion of
power that had, in the end, brought down the Zhou.
It was Li Si’s plan that prevailed, and the result was a transformation of China
that was may have been the most sudden, widespread, fundamental, and long lasting
social revolution in history. During the first months of Qin rule, a new administrative
map of China was drawn, which divided the land into 36 military districts called
“commanderies.” Each commandery was administered by a military governor, whose
principal attentions were devoted to regulating his portion of a system of garrisons
constructed throughout the empire, with particular attention to regions subject to attack
by non-Chinese nomads.
Within each of the 36 commanderies a much larger number of counties were
demarcated. Each county was administered by a chief magistrate, who supervised
subordinate magistrates in every city, town, and significant village within his domain.
The city magistrate was the lowest level of government appointed administrator, but his
locally recruited staff and representative headmen designated for neighborhoods and
small villages also served the central government.
Relocation of the patrician clans To ensure that no wealthy clans who represented
existing sources of local power could rival the government’s influence in the counties, the
Qin court financed a massive removal of the patrician clans to the region surrounding the
capital city of Xianyang, where they could be closely supervised. The historical annals
tell us that 120,000 clans were relocated in this way, and provided with incomes that
would keep them uninterested in fomenting revolt. The walls of their former estate
fortress-cities were demolished, both the inner walls surrounding their palaces and the
outer walls of military defense, and a massive program to collect and melt down weapons
was instituted--there was to be no more civil war in China!
Design of a nationwide government. With the states abolished and the hereditary
patrician class curtailed, the Qin needed to put into place new forms of administrative
management that would allow them to control so large a country as China. The forms
that they created became a basis for later generations of imperial Chinese governments.
Qin government can be conceived as an interlocking of four elements: the
emperor at the apex; a nationwide civil and military bureaucracy that was managed by the
civil ministers at court through their well-staffed bureaus; a group of nine to eleven
palace chamberlains, who managed an extensive and compartmentalized palace
bureaucracy; district officers and clerks selected from the local populace by low-level
civil officials.
Under this scheme the prime minister held enormous power. The office of the
Censorate was commissioned as an investigative arm of the government, empowered to
evaluate the conduct of all officeholders and report directly to the emperor. The Prime
Minister, Chief Censor, and General-in-Chief were termed the “Three Dukes,” and
enjoyed the highest of state ranks. The “Nine Chamberlains” were, in some cases, more
intimate with the emperor and could exercise influence beyond their apparent function.
Economic standardization. During this period, the Qin also set out to erase the diversity
that had distinguished the various regions of China. Massive programs intended to unify
standards and customs were instituted. Carts and carriages were hereafter to be
constructed with uniform axle measurements so that roads throughout the empire would
be suitable for travel by vehicles from any place. Old forms of locally minted currency
were taken out of circulation in favor of universally distributed imperial coinage.
Weights and measures were unified so that goods produced and marketed were in all
places priced and taxed equivalently.
Legal standardization. The Qin system of law was now enforced in all regions of the
empire. This meant the promulgation of vast codes of administrative regulations,
directives concerning proper forms of criminal investigation and prosecution, and norms
for sentencing. The mutual responsibility system that registered five families together as
legal units was extended to all regions, and the Qin systems of official appointments and
salaries regulated all levels of offices. In addition, the system of eighteen ranks was
extended. All official designations of social prestige and privilege were now to be
regulated according to this non-hereditary ranking of merit, based on contributions to the
state.
Writing reform. Li Si’s name is connected with all these reforms, but most closely with
one particular feature of Qin universalization that was entirely new. During the Classical
period, the various regions of China had evolved different versions of written script,
sometimes making documents unintelligible across state borders. Li Si supervised a
project to rationalize the Zhou scripts and create an entirely new version, suitable for use
throughout the empire. This new script became a legal standard for all official
documents and for instruction, and is the ancestor of modern Chinese characters. More
than any other reform, the standardization of script symbolized the cultural unity that Qin
intended to bring to the empire.
Internal improvements. In addition to the programs of standardization, the Qin began a
massive program of internal improvements intended to modernize China and facilitate
commercial and military strength. This program took two principal forms: road building
and wall building
During the brief span of the Qin, the government sponsored the construction of
over 4,000 miles of highways. These were designed for rapid transit; they were built to
high specifications, broad and tree-lined, constructed to last. In terms of length, the Qin
in fifteen years constructed a highway system far lengthier than the famous roads of
Rome. Like the Roman roads, these highways were so durable that many stretches
remain clearly visible today.
It is even more remarkable to realize that these highways were built at the same
time as the Qin was erecting the Great Wall. Although the wall that was constructed by
the Qin was neither as long nor as solidly built as the currently existing wall, which is a
Ming Dynasty restoration only about five hundred years old, it still represented the
greatest single construction feat recorded up to that time.
The greatest of the Qin generals, Meng Tian, was entrusted with the task of
supervising the construction of the wall and of the branches of the road system that would
serve it. Meng Tian’s plan was to make use of extensive sections of defensive walls that
had been constructed earlier by all four Classical states that defined China’s northern
borders: Qin, Wei, Zhao, and Yan. He was empowered to recruit up to 300,000 men to
serve as a standing army of construction workers. The logistics of the task were
forbidding. The lands where the wall was to stretch were distant from the centers of
Chinese population and agriculture. Massive amounts of food and goods would need to
be shipped long distances. The wall was erected not over fertile plains, but over very
steep mountain ridges and desert wastes, where construction difficulties were maximized.
And the length of the wall stretched over 2,000 miles, which was not only a huge area to
supervise, but which was also precisely the line along which China was vulnerable to
raids by nomads.
Military expansion and colonization. Legalist ideology conceived the goals of the state
and its ruler solely in terms of increases in wealth and in territory. Now that China was a
unified state, the imperative to increase territory took on a new meaning. Whereas it had
previously been conceived entirely in terms of the competition among the patrician rulers
of the Chinese polity, it now meant extension of that polity itself. Although the Qin
enforced a policy of domestic peace and internal disarmament, it also maintained a
network of standing armies and border garrisons. The militaristic culture of the Qin was
now turned outward rather than in.
In the north and west, the Qin made it clear to the nomadic tribes of that region,
by means of the Great Wall project, that China meant to lay permanent claim to lightly
settled regions of land from the Ordos plain within the great loop of the Yellow River in
the west to the mountains of Korea in the east. In the south and east, the Qin actively
pursued policies of expansion into areas that had previously been, for China, terra
incognita. Some of these regions were unsettled pockets within the reach of the
traditional settled lands of China. For example, the First Emperor ordered the removal of
30,000 families to the coastal region along the south of the Shandong peninsula, which
had been for centuries homeland to tribes known as the Eastern Yi. But the most
dramatic resettlement projects were designed to extend the borders of China far to the
south, where Chinese administration was established south of the Yangzi in the fertile
rice-growing areas along the branches of the West River, all the way to modern Canton
and Chinese magistrates operated in areas as remote as northern Vietnam. Under the Qin the total area under at least some form of Chinese control was increased by perhaps forty
percent.
The First Emperor
It is difficult to find significant information concerning the character of the First Emperor
prior to the Qin conquest; his role in the politics of Qin is unclear, and there is little
specifically pertaining to his personal conduct. This situation is dramatically reversed
when we come to the years following the conquest, when, for a time, Ying Zheng, the
first “emperor” of China, was by far the most powerful man on earth, overseeing a
revolution of unprecedented scale and with an impact lasting to this day. Most of what
we know of the First Emperor after the conquest reflects an increasing tendency towards
self-aggrandizement, religious obsession, despotism, paranoia, and secrecy.
Religious observances.
The First Emperor’s tours were an indication of the seriousness
with which he took his role as a dynastic founder. Another manifestation of this was the
urgency with which the emperor sought to fulfill the religious role of the Son of Heaven.
The most famous of his exploits in this regard was his enactment of the feng-shan
sacrifice to Heaven.
Only the holder of the Mandate of Heaven could perform this holy rite. Only at
the summit of the sacred peak of Mt. Tai, on the border of the regions of Qi and Lu on the
Shandong peninsula, could this solemn ritual be enacted. At enormous expense, the
emperor, accompanied by a vast entourage, made a ritual journey from the capital west of
the Yellow River’s bend, to Mt. Tai in the far east. There, battling furious winds and
rains, the Emperor climbed to the peak of the mountain to commune with the highest
powers and fulfill his image as a world-transforming Son of Heaven.
The death of the First Emperor
The gruesome circumstances surrounding the death of the First Emperor delighted
Confucian historians throughout the centuries of traditional Chinese history.
The First Emperor died near Langye, the point from which he had first dispatched
Xu Fu to seek the isles of the immortals. The emperor returned there in 210, accompanied
by Li Si, his most intimate eunuch attendant, a man named Zhao Gao, the emperor’s
favorite son, a younger boy named Huhai, and a large entourage of eunuchs and palace
guards. While at Langye, he dreamed that he was fighting with the spirit of the sea, who
appeared to him as a man. A soothsayer of dreams interpreted this as a sign that the
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emperor’s quest for immortality was, in fact, being obstructed by the spirit of the sea.
“The water spirit cannot himself be seen,” he told the king, “but he may appear as a huge
fish.”
This seemed to confirm the reports that the emperor had received from Xu Fu. He
ordered that all future expeditions to Penglai be equipped with gear for capturing so great
a fish. In the meantime, he himself marched north along the coast, searching for his
enemy, the spirit of the sea. At length, he did indeed see a huge fish swimming in the
waters near the coast, and using a powerful crossbow, he killed it. But soon thereafter, he
fell ill.
Apparently, the spirit of the sea exacted swift revenge. The emperor died within
days. The only people who were aware of the emperor’s death were his son Huhai, Li Si,
the eunuch Zhao Gao, and a few of Zhao’s eunuch subordinates. Hu-hai and the two
ministers found themselves faced with a perilous choice. The emperor’s rightful heir was
a man of good reputation and a close intimate of General Meng Tian, the most powerful
of the Qin military leaders. It was clear to all three men that as soon as the prince was
informed of the death of his father, he would cast off Li Si and Zhao Gao and appoint
Meng Tian -- no friend to either -- as prime minister. Huhai, one of twenty sons of the
emperor, would live out his life in obscurity. The three hatched a plan.
They informed no one among the imperial entourage of the emperor’s death.
They continued to carry food to the emperor’s curtained tent or carriage as before.
Meanwhile, they forged a letter to the heir apparent in the emperor’s name, instructing
him to commit suicide for his unfilial admonitions to his father, and Meng Tian to do
likewise. After that had been sent north, they forged a testimonial edict, said to have
been entrusted by the emperor to Li Si, designating Huhai as the new heir apparent.
Then they ordered the imperial procession to return to the capital. As the weather
was hot, the emperor’s corpse soon began to decay, and the plotters ordered that fish be
loaded on the carts near the imperial carriage in order to mask the smell.
Great Wall of China
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Great Wall of China |
The Great Wall of China was built over many centuries. The wall was begun during the Qin dynasty in the 3rd century BCE, and additions were made during subsequent dynasties. The last work was completed during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). The wall, which was built to keep out invaders, stretches 2,150 miles (3,460 km) across North China. Made of earth, stones, and brick, the wall is 25 feet (7.6 m) high and 12 feet (3.7 m) wide. It is the world’s longest fortification and, in fact, the longest structure ever built and the only human-made structure that can be seen from outer space.
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