I. CHINA’S BISMARCK
The Period of Contending States—The suicide of Ch’u P’ing—Shih Huang-ti unifies China—The Great Wall—The “Burning of the Books”—The failure of Shih Huang-ti
PRESUMABLY Confucius died an unhappy man, for philosophers love unity, and the nation that he had sought to unite under some powerful dynasty persisted in chaos, corruption and division. When the great unifier finally appeared, and succeeded, by his military and administrative genius, in welding the states of China into one, he ordered that all existing copies of Confucius’ books should be burned.
We may judge the atmosphere of this “Period of the Contending States” from the story of Ch’u P’ing. Having risen to promise as a poet and to high place as an official, he found himself suddenly dismissed. He retired to the countryside, and contemplated life and death beside a quiet brook. Tell me, he asked an oracle,
whether I should steadily pursue the path of truth and loyalty, or follow in the wake of a corrupt generation. Should I work in the fields with spade and hoe, or seek advancement in the retinue of a grandee? Should I court danger with outspoken words, or fawn in false tones upon the rich and great? Should I rest content in the cultivation of virtue, or practise the art of wheedling women in order to secure success? Should I be pure and clean-handed in my rectitude, or an oil-mouthed, slippery, time-serving sycophant?1
He dodged the dilemma by drowning himself (ca. 350 B.C.); and until our own day the Chinese people celebrated his fame annually in the Dragonboat Festival, during which they searched for his body in every stream.
The man who unified China had the most disreputable origin that the Chinese historians could devise. Shih Huang-ti,’ we are informed, was the illegitimate son of the Queen of Ch’in (one of the western states) by the noble minister Lü, who was wont to hang a thousand pieces of gold at his gate as a reward to any man who should better his compositions by so much as a single word.2 (His son did not inherit these literary tastes.) Shih, reports Szuma Ch’ien, forced his father to suicide, persecuted his mother, and ascended the ducal throne when he was twelve years of age. When he was twenty-five he began to conquer and annex the petty states into which China had so long been divided. In 230 B.C. he conquered Han; in 228, Chao; in 225, Wei; in 223, Ch’u; in 222, Yen; finally, in 221, the important state of Ch’i. For the first time in many centuries, perhaps for the first time in history, China was under one rule. The conqueror took the title of Shih Huang-ti, and turned to the task of giving the new empire a lasting constitution.
“A man with a very prominent nose, with large eyes, with the chest of a bird of prey, with the voice of a jackal, without beneficence, and with the heart of a tiger or a wolf”—this is the only description that the Chinese historians have left us of their favorite enemy.3 He was a robust and obstinate soul, recognizing no god but himself, and pledged, like some Nietzschean Bismarck, to unify his country by blood and iron. Having forged and mounted the throne of China, one of his first acts was to protect the country from the barbarians on the north by piecing together and completing the walls already existing along the frontier; and he found the multitude of his domestic opponents a convenient source of recruits for this heroic symbol of Chinese grandeur and patience. The Great Wall, 1500 miles long, and adorned at intervals with massive gateways in the Assyrian style, is the largest structure ever reared by man; beside it, said Voltaire, “the pyramids of Egypt are only puerile and useless masses.”4 It took ten years and countless men; “it was the ruin of one generation,” say the Chinese, “and the salvation of many.” It did not quite keep out the barbarians, as we shall see; but it delayed and reduced their attacks. The Huns, barred for a time from Chinese soil, moved west into Europe and down into Italy; Rome fell because China built a wall.
Meanwhile Shih Huang-ti, like Napoleon, turned with pleasure from war to administration, and created the outlines of the future Chinese state. He accepted the advice of his Legalist prime minister, Li Ssü, and resolved to base Chinese society not, as heretofore, upon custom and local autonomy, but upon explicit law and a powerful central government. He broke the power of the feudal barons, replaced them with a nobility of functionaries appointed by the national ministry, placed in each district a military force independent of the civil governor, introduced uniform laws and regulations, simplified official ceremonies, issued a state coinage, divided most of the feudal estates, prepared for the prosperity of China by establishing peasant proprietorship of the soil, and paved the way for a completer unity by building great highways in every direction from his capital at Hien-yang. He embellished this city with many palaces, and persuaded the 120,000 richest and most powerful families of the empire to live under his observant eye. Traveling in disguise and unarmed, he made note of abuses and disorders, and then issued unmistakable orders for their correction. He encouraged science and discouraged letters.5
For the men of letters—the poets, the critics, the philosophers, above all the Confucian scholars—were his sworn foes. They fretted under his dictatorial authority, and saw in the establishment of one supreme government an end to that variety and liberty of thought and life which had made literature flourish amid the wars and divisions of the Chou Dynasty. When they protested to Shih Huang-ti against his ignoring of ancient ceremonies, he sent them curtly about their business.6 A commission of mandarins, or official scholars, brought to him their unanimous suggestion that he should restore the feudal system by giving fiefs to his relatives; and they added: “For a person, in any matter, not to model himself on antiquity, and yet to achieve duration—that, to our knowledge, has never happened.”7 The prime minister, Li Ssü, who was at that time engaged in reforming the Chinese script, and establishing it approximately in the form which it retained till our own time, met these criticisms with an historic speech that did no service to Chinese letters:
The Five Sovereigns did not repeat each other’s actions, the Three Royal Dynasties did not imitate each other; . . . for the times had changed. Now your Majesty has for the first time accomplished a great work and has founded a glory which will last for ten thousand generations. The stupid mandarins are incapable of understanding this. . . . In ancient days China was divided up and troubled; there was no one who could unify her. That is why all the nobles flourished. In their discourses the mandarins all talk of the ancient days, in order to blacken the present. . . . They encourage the people to forge calumnies. This being so, if they are not opposed, among the upper classes the position of the sovereign will be depreciated, while among the lower classes associations will flourish. . . .
I suggest that the official histories, with the exception of the Memoirs of Ch’in, be all burnt, and that those who attempt to hide the Shi-Ching, the Shu-Ching* and the Discourses of the Hundred Schools, be forced to bring them to the authorities to be burnt.8
The Emperor liked the idea considerably, and issued the order; the books of the historians were everywhere brought to the flames, so that the weight of the past should be removed from the present, and the history of China might begin with Shih Huang-ti. Scientific books, and the works of Mencius, seem to have been excepted from the conflagration, and many of the forbidden books were preserved in the Imperial Library, where they might be consulted by such students as had obtained official permission.9 Since books were then written on strips of bamboo fastened with swivel pins, and a volume might be of some weight, the scholars who sought to evade the order were put to many difficulties. A number of them were detected; tradition says that many of them were sent to labor on the Great Wall, and that four hundred and sixty were put to death.10Nevertheless some of the literati memorized the complete works of Confucius, and passed them on by word of mouth to equal memories. Soon after the Emperor’s death these volumes were freely circulated again, though many errors, presumably, had crept into their texts. The only permanent result was to lend an aroma of sanctity to the proscribed literature, and to make Shih Huang-ti unpopular with the Chinese historians. For generations the people expressed their judgment of him by befouling his grave.11
The destruction of powerful families, and of freedom in writing and speech, left Shih almost friendless in his declining years. Attempts were made to assassinate him; he discovered them in time, and slew the assailants with his own hand.12 He sat on his throne with a sword across his knees, and let no man know in what room of his many palaces he would sleep.13 Like Alexander he sought to strengthen his dynasty by spreading the notion that he was a god; but as the comparison limped, he, like Alexander, failed. He decreed that his dynastic successors should number themselves from him as “First Emperor,” down to the ten thousandth of their line; but the line ended with his son. In his old age, if we credit the historians who hated him, he became superstitious, and went to much expense to find an elixir of immortality. When he died, his body was brought back secretly to his capital; and to conceal its smell it was convoyed by a caravan of decaying fish. Several hundred maidens (we are told) were buried alive to keep him company; and his successor, grateful for his death, lavished art and money upon the tomb. The roof was studded with constellations, and a map of the empire was traced in quicksilver on the floor of bronze. Machines were erected in the vault for the automatic slaughter of intruders; and huge candles were lit in the hope that they would for an indefinite period illuminate the doings of the dead emperor and his queens. The workmen who brought the coffin into the tomb were buried alive with their burden, lest they should live to reveal the secret passage to the grave.14