China. John Keay
emperor. Meanwhile their armies were disbanded and all surplus weapons melted down; the metal was recast not into ploughshares but into twelve colossal pieces of statuary, all of them later rendered down for other uses. Qin’s copper coins fared better. They became standard tender throughout the empire, and their design – flat and circular with a square hole in the middle so that they could be easily strung together – would last more than two thousand years. The standardisation of weights and measures was also extended throughout the empire, heavy penalties being prescribed for any variation beyond an acceptable factor that was carefully specified in the case of each measurement.
To ensure universal implementation of these orders and to promote bureaucratic efficiency, it remained only to standardise the script in which they were written and read. In the course of the first millennium BC the so-called ‘Large Seal’ script of the Shang and Zhou had acquired local characteristics in the various ‘warring states’. Moreover, in states outside the ‘central plain’, such as Shu and Chu, some still-undeciphered fragments of pictography suggest a regional challenge from quite unrelated writing systems. The First Emperor’s introduction of what came to be known as the ‘Small Seal’ script was designed to counter all such diversity. It involved eradicating obsolete or offensive characters, simplifying and rationalising others, and standardising each and every one. Although destined for an early and more lasting revision by Han scholars, ‘Small Seal’ script established the principle of a written language that was common to the literate elite throughout the empire regardless of spoken dialects, and which was recognised as the medium of both government and scholarship. It was a principle of incalculable significance. Regional distinctions were thereby subsumed, although social distinctions, particularly as between the lettered classes and the unlettered, were engrained. Without this standardisation China’s bureaucrats would today need as many interpreters as the European Union; and that claim to several thousand years as a single ‘continuous civilisation’ would scarcely be sustainable, or even enunciable.
Such measures, accompanied by a programme of gargantuan public works that would dwarf ‘Stone Cattle Road’ and Li Bing’s waterworks, secured the cause of integration more effectively than mere conquest and ensured its survival beyond the fall of Qin. There was no precedent for such a vast and substantially non-Xia empire comprising not only the Yellow River basin but Sichuan, the Yangzi and much of southern China and Inner Mongolia. In applying to all of it without distinction the same standards of administrative control and mass mobilisation, the First Emperor seems to have been aware that he was breaking new ground. In a series of inscriptions, whose texts were faithfully recorded by the historian Sima Qian, the emperor dwelt more on his administrative than his military achievements.
In his twenty-eighth year [219 BC] the August Emperor made a new beginning.
He adjusted the laws and the regulations [and set] standards for the ten thousand things…
The merit of the August Emperor lies in diligently fostering basic concerns, exalting agriculture, abolishing lesser occupations, so the black-headed people may be rich.
All under Heaven are of one mind, single in purpose.
Weights and measures have a single standard, words are written in a uniform way.
Wherever sun and moon shine, where boats and wheeled vehicles bear cargo, all fulfil their allotted years, [and] none do not attain their goal.
To initiate projects in season – such is the August Emperor’s way.
Empire, a product of surplus resources, new technologies (metallurgical, agricultural and military) and individual initiative, had already swept through other parts of Asia. Darius and Xerxes of the Persian Achaemenid dynasty had created a territorial colossus stretching from the Aegean to the Indus in the late sixth century BC; Alexander of Macedon had briefly exceeded it in the fourth century BC; and in the early third century BC, while Qin was flexing its muscles in Sichuan prior to China’s first ‘unification’, the Maurya dynasty of Pataliputra was effecting a first ‘unification’ of India.
Ashoka, the third of the Maurya emperors and a near-contemporary of Qin Shi Huangdi, also favoured stone-cut inscriptions. Gouged into India’s bedrock or neatly engraved on monolithic stone columns, they have lasted better than the First Emperor’s stelae, of which only one remaining fragment is reckoned authentic. On the other hand the Indian empire they memorialised would vanish within a decade of Ashoka’s demise, while the Chinese empire of Qin Shi Huangdi would be reconstituted as the long-lasting Han empire and would survive, in principle when not in practice, for over 2,000 years.
Similarly, history’s verdict on the two emperors could not be more different. Ashoka is revered as a benevolent reformer who renounced violence, championed monasticism, proclaimed a universal dharma and dispatched evangelists instead of armies. By contrast, Qin Shi Huangdi is seen as the worst of tyrants, an ‘oriental despot’ at the helm of a totalitarian state, by nature violent, superstitious and prone to megalomania. Yet his inscriptions claim that he too ‘brought peace to the world’, ‘implemented good government’, ‘showed compassion to the black-headed people’ and ‘worked tirelessly for the common good’, not to mention decommissioning weapons and administering justice without favour or remorse. They in fact contain sentiments from which Ashoka would not have shrunk plus phrases which in translation seem to mimic those of the Maurya.
But because so little is known of Ashoka beyond what is contained in his inscriptions, he is usually taken at his own evaluation. The First Emperor, because so much is known of him from other sources, is not. Falling victim to a prolific historiographical tradition that would habitually disparage ephemeral dynasties and which was gravely offended by some of his actions, the First Emperor, were he to have emerged from his underground mausoleum, would have found his stone-cut words ignored. He might then reasonably have complained about double standards; for had works like the Shiji and those based upon it been destroyed and only his epigraphy survived, history might have been as kind to him as it has to Ashoka.
In 213 BC the destruction of other texts constituted the incident mainly responsible for consigning the First Emperor’s reputation to abiding ignominy – abiding, that is, until Red Guards tore a leaf from his book, so to speak, in the late 1960s and thus helped to rehabilitate China’s first cultural revolutionary. For though his reformation of the script was welcomed by the literate, the First Emperor showed nothing but contempt for traditional scholarship. History was there to be made, he seemed to say, not to be repeated. To those who prattled about the grand old Duke of Zhou and Heaven’s Mandate, he extended neither respect nor favour; and when they continued to snipe at the legalist emphasis on law rather than precedent, and on a ruler’s strength rather than his virtue, the literary pogrom of 213 BC was his typically unequivocal response.
After Lu Buwei, the merchant-minister who was probably not the First Emperor’s father, fell from grace in 238 BC, he had been replaced in the imperial favour, and eventually as chancellor, by another upstart. Described as ‘a man from the black-headed people of the lanes and alleys’, this was Li Si, whose twentieth-century biographer considers him the éminence grise behind the First Emperor’s throne and calls him ‘China’s First Unifier’.14 An arch-practitioner of legalism and probably the composer of the emperor’s triumphalist inscriptions, Li Si had once studied under the philosopher Xunzi. So had Han Fei, legalism’s most eloquent exponent. Both Li Si and Han Fei then embraced a scruple-free code that was anathema to their mentor but welcome enough in Qin, a state of which the philosopher had been highly critical. One can only suppose that the quality of Xunzi’s instruction left something to be desired.
In the assault on tradition Han Fei led the way, famously satirising Confucian scholars as ‘stump-watchers’; for according to Han Fei, in urging the emperor to adopt the ways of the ancients, such scholars would have His Majesty behave like a doltish farmer who, chancing to see a rabbit collide with a tree stump, lays down his plough and spends the rest of his days watching the stump in expectation of repeat pickings. In other words, past precedent was no guide to present exigencies, and the state could ill afford scholars who preached such nonsense. Since they neither tilled nor fought, such pedants were parasites. Their elegant phrases undermined the