The calendar was also realigned and recalibrated. This was a ritual responsibility for every new ruler but one that, in this case, saw the New Year and its celebrations being put back to the tenth month so that they coincided not with the solstice or the beginning of spring but with the onset of winter.
Such meticulous attention to detail, to quantification, standardisation and regulation, advertised dynastic regard for the ‘Five Phases/Elements’ while according neatly with what was the most obvious feature of the legalist state. It was once supposed that oppressive laws, accompanied by their tariff of graded rewards and draconian punishments, were what distinguished legalism. But the 1970s recovery of a cache of bamboo documents from a tomb outside Wuhan deep in what had been Chu territory (Hubei province) prompted qualification. In part constituting a local official’s handbook of Qin statutes and legal practice, the documents did not exactly dispel the idea of a ferocious justice. Under some circumstances the theft of a single coin could result in the amputation of a foot, plus tattooing of the torso (a particularly degrading form of disfigurement) and hard labour. But straight fines or short spells of unpaid corvée service appear to have been the more usual punishments; and whatever the case, justice was anything but arbitrary. The nature of the offence, the degree of intent, any extenuating circumstances, and the bureaucratic procedures to be observed throughout the legal process, were minutely addressed even for misdemeanours of little apparent consequence. Likewise statutes dealing with agriculture clearly listed not only the different types of cereal crop to be sown but the quantity of seed required to sow a given area with each. Reports on the state of the fields were to be submitted whenever there was anything to report – when it rained, when it didn’t rain, when pests were detected and so on. There were also annual prizes for the overseer, stockman and labourer responsible for the district’s best ox, plus of course penalties for the worst (typically two months corvée).12
As originally in the state of Qin, then in Sichuan, in conquered parts of Chu, Wei and Zhao, and now throughout the empire, the emphasis was on ‘efficiency, precision, and fixed routine in administrative procedure…[plus] exact quantification of data, and attention to the improvement of agricultural production and conserving of natural resources’.13 Households were registered for taxation purposes, and the population organised into grouped families for military and civil conscription. All newly acquired territories were reconstituted as directly administered ‘commanderies’, of which there were thirty-six in 221 BC, each of them further divided into ‘counties’. Lest the former ruling families of the no longer ‘warring states’ cause trouble in the commanderies, their scions were summoned to the Qin capital at Xianyang and installed in replicas of their erstwhile palaces under the watchful eye of the 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’,
