China. John Keay
grandeur were afflicting the emperor: a sense of transcendence had overcome him; ‘all under Heaven’ was his, and that included natural features. When some 2,200 years later Comrade Mao’s Long Marchers sang songs about ‘painting the countryside red’, they may not have been aware of this ominous precedent.
More significant, because it resulted in the construction of the so-called Great Wall, was the empire’s extension northwards. Sima Qian’s Shiji continues to be vague about the geography and chronology, but it seems that the First Emperor’s conquests extended right along the northern perimeter of the erstwhile ‘warring states’ and that these conquests were undertaken continuously throughout his eleven years as emperor (221–210 BC). As in Sichuan, colonists were speedily dispatched to the newly conquered territories; and frequent mention of these deployments provides a few clues as to the advance. So does the alignment, insofar as it can be established, of the Qin wall, part of which was much farther north than most of its successors. On this basis, the First Emperor’s forces look to have mounted a three-pronged advance, pushing north of west to Lanzhou in Gansu province, north of east to the edge of the Korean peninsula, and due north across the Ordos, an undulating desert wilderness within the Yellow River’s great northern loop, towards Mongolia.
The last advance, that due north across the Ordos, is the only one of which Sima Qian has much to say – and most of that in the course of a biographical note on Meng Tian, the Qin general responsible. Meng Tian was sent north with either 100,000 men or 300,000 men, probably in 221 BC, to disperse the Rong and Di peoples and take control of the Ordos. Once established there, he set about building walls. At a time when in Europe Hannibal was overcoming the natural frontier that was the Alps, Meng Tian determined to construct an artificial frontier. Its line reportedly covered a distance of 10,000 li (c. 5,000 kilometres – 3,000 miles) from Lintao (near Lanzhou) to Liaodong (east of Beijing); and initially it ran north across Ningxia province until, on reaching the Yellow River, it followed round that river’s great northern bend. Thereafter Sima Qian says nothing about its alignment; nor does he anywhere mention its purpose. He did, though, visit the scene of Meng Tian’s labours, albeit a century later. On site he seems to have been as much impressed by the 850 kilometres (530 miles) of road that Meng Tian had constructed up through the badlands of the Ordos as he was by the wall itself.
I have travelled to the northern border and returned by the direct road. As I went along I saw the outposts of the long [i.e. Great] wall which Meng Tian constructed for the Qin. He cut through the mountains and filled up the valleys, opening up the direct road. Truly he made free with the strength of the common people.23
From this it would seem that Meng Tian’s ‘Great Road’ involved more engineering than his ‘Great Wall’. The former is said to have been ‘cut through the arteries of the earth’, while the latter ‘followed the contours of the land…twisting and turning’ and ‘used the mountains as defence’ and ‘their defiles as frontier posts’.24 If Sima Qian’s 10,000 li are to be taken literally, the wall was certainly longer than the road. On the other hand it is generally accepted that Meng did not start his wall from scratch. Wall-building, both as a demonstration of exclusive sovereignty and as a defensive precaution, had been practised by the ‘warring states’ for at least a century. In places Meng Tian had merely to repair these existing stretches and connect them up.25
The term used in Chinese literature for Meng Tian’s wall, as for the ‘Great Wall’ of later fame, is changcheng, literally meaning ‘long wall’ or, as with zhongguo (‘Central States’/‘Middle Kingdom’), ‘long walls’. Cities, palaces and even villages might be surrounded by changcheng. Thus according to another interpretation, Meng Tian’s wall was not in fact a continuous construction but a succession of the ‘outposts’ observed by Sima Qian, each surrounded by its own changcheng.26 This would certainly help to explain why Qin’s changcheng receives so little mention in later history and also why it was (or they were) apparently so ineffective as a defensive rampart. If the textual context provides a clue, the section north of the Ordos was more offensive than defensive. As the culmination of a major advance and as accommodation for a permanent garrison in what had previously been Rong and Di country, the wall was (or the walls were) meant to consolidate Qin aggression rather than forestall non-Qin incursion.
Needless to say, walls, outposts, watchtowers and whatever else may have been involved were constructed of hangtu. Layers of brushwood were sometimes incorporated into the tamped-down earth, but dressed stonework like that of the sixteenth-to-seventeenth-century Ming wall was not even contemplated. Though hangtu structures last long underground, above ground they are no match for the sandstorms, extreme frosts and occasional floods of twenty centuries. Archaeologists have identified only a few stretches of Qin wall, mostly in Gansu. Yet screeds have been written about the enterprise, and some startling statistics have been deduced as to the millions of men (they served in rotation) required to shift the trillions of tons of earth necessary for 10,000 li of chariot-width wall. The loss of life is reputed to have been horrific, although whether it resulted from the climate and conditions of service on the northern frontier, from the ancillary roadworks as implied by Sima Qian, or specifically from wall-building is not clear. Walls certainly got a bad name; so did Meng Tian and the First Emperor as those responsible for the most notorious example. But of late, scholarship has been chary of such deductions. It is more inclined to demolish the whole concept of a ‘Great Wall’ and to diminish the scale and significance of Qin’s pioneering effort.
This is in marked contrast to the indulgent treatment now afforded to Qin’s other extravaganzas. Stone Cattle Road, Li Bing’s irrigation works, a similar scheme on the Wei River, the Hunan canal and Meng Tian’s road have all been archaeologically authenticated. Other Qin highways have been charted, their combined length coming to something well in excess of Gibbon’s estimate for the entire road network of the Roman Empire. But until recently the colossal dimensions of the emperor’s new Opang (Epang, Ebang) palace (675 by 112 metres – 740 by 120 yards), the labour force required to excavate his tomb (700,000 men) and the almost incredible features ascribed to that lost mausoleum had occasioned only suspicion. Then in 1974 came the discovery of ‘the terracotta army’. The ‘grave’ doubts evaporated. An emperor who could join his ancestors at the head of an entire life-size army was capable of anything.
The dimensions of the Opang palace, though probably exaggerated, no longer seem quite so excessive; the scale of the imperial tomb, its location in Xianyang having finally been discovered, prompts excited speculation; and more generally the First Emperor’s alleged eccentricities are no longer airily dismissed as the self-serving exaggerations of later historians in thrall to a different dynasty and an adverse historiography. The emperor’s devotion to the theory of the Five Phases/Elements – and water in particular – seems less far-fetched; and Sima Qian’s account of the various imperial peregrinations, including the mountain encounter at Changsha, can more readily be taken at their face value.
Although the First Emperor seems never to have led his forces in battle – few emperors would – he made five extensive tours. The Zhou kings had occasionally done the rounds of their feudatories, and future emperors, especially the Qing Kangxi and Qianlong emperors, would make the grand tour a centrepiece of imperial ceremonial. It is assumed that, like them, the First Emperor travelled to see and be seen, to exercise political oversight and be observed performing ritual ceremonies. No doubt troops were inspected and local officials interrogated; certainly orders were issued for the settlement of new colonies and the construction of new public works. But to what extent the emperor actually engaged with his subjects on these occasions is uncertain.
According to Sima Qian, he was often rather particular about not being seen. In 219 BC, on a first visit to Mount Tai in Shandong, the most sacred of summits, he completed the ascent alone and performed whatever rites he deemed appropriate in secret and without any record being made of them. Seven years later, on the advice of a man who was pandering to his hopes of longevity, he furnished each of his palaces with what might be required in the way of entertainment and female company, and then linked these establishments with covered ways and walled corridors. His whereabouts were thereafter to be kept a closely guarded secret whose revelation was punishable by death. A couple