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 law and their disputatious counsels left the ruler in two minds. If indulged, they would assuredly bring ruin, wrote Han Fei.
Therefore in the state of an enlightened ruler there are no books written on bamboo strips; law supplies the only instruction. There are no sermons on the former kings: the officials serve as the only teachers. And there are no fierce feuds involving private swordsmen; cutting off enemy heads [in battle] is the only deed of valour. When the people of such a state speak, they say nothing in contradiction of the law; when they act, it is so as to be useful; and when they perform brave deeds, they do so in the army.15
Legalism, which is also sometimes called ‘Realism’, ‘Rationalism’ and ‘Modernism’, was nothing if not pragmatic. Only scholarship that strengthened the state, like that of the legalists themselves, was admissible. When in 213 BC a Confucian scholar suggested to the emperor that, since he was now all powerful, this might be the moment to revive the Shang and Zhou tradition of rewarding loyal kinsmen by granting them fiefs, it was Li Si’s turn to reach for the pen (actually the writer’s brush). Fief-granting had proved an unmitigated disaster, he memorialised. ‘Feudal’ rulers had risen against their superiors, and they had been encouraged to do so by scholars who pillaged antiquity to confuse the issue and disparage present authority. Now these same ‘adherents of personal theories’ would have Qin repeat the mistake. They were criticising the emperor’s territorial arrangements, forming cliques and undermining his authority. They must be stopped.
I request [then] that all writings, the [Books of] Odes, Documents and the sayings of the hundred schools of philosophy be discarded and done away with. Anyone who has failed to discard such books within thirty days…shall be subjected to tattooing and condemned to ‘wall-dawn’ [i.e. hard] labour. The [only] books to be exempted are those on medicine, divination, agriculture and forestry.16
The emperor concurred; and so began the great bamboo-book-burning of 213 BC. It was followed, according to later sources, by a purge in which some 460 scholars were either executed or buried alive. A far-fetched explanation offered for this second assault may simply disguise the need to halt any oral, as well as written, transmission of the texts. To a people who distinguished themselves from others on the basis of their historical awareness and essentially literary culture, the book-burning and the persecution of scholars were devastating blows. Popular sentiment would never forget them, scholarship never forgive them.
Yet the impact was certainly exaggerated. Books at the time were not numerous; nor were readers; and bamboo, though it burnt fiercely enough, also lasted well in concealment. Total suppression was probably impossible. In fact, give or take some of those ‘hundred schools of philosophy’, even the works specifically mentioned by Li Si survived. The historical records of Qin were exempted from destruction, and while those of the other ‘warring states’ were indeed depleted, the imperial archive is said to have retained copies of most ancient texts, including the Confucian classics. Several scholars have argued that a greater loss was sustained seven years later when Xianyang’s palaces, including the imperial archive itself, were ransacked by Qin’s victorious opponents.17 It could be another case of Qin’s reputation being burdened with the sins of its successors.
Seemingly the idea in 213 BC was not to abolish history and literature but to restrict access to them and so, as the Shiji puts it, ‘to make the common people ignorant and to see to it that no one in the empire used the past to criticise the present’.18 Yet the result was exactly the opposite: for in an effort to make good the supposed losses, Han scholars would scrutinise what survived even more intently. ‘Thus, if anything, its practical effect was to strengthen the tendency decried by Li Si of looking backward rather than toward the present.’19 In short, Qin’s ‘cultural revolution’ entrenched the culture it was supposed to discredit while discrediting the revolution it was supposed to entrench.
CRUMBLING WALL, HIDDEN TOMB
That the dynasty responsible for first uniting much of what we now call ‘China’ should have crowned its achievement by lending its own name to its territorial creation seems logical enough. ‘Qin’ (pronounced ‘chin’) gave us ‘China’ – or so it is said. The word first found its way into the Indo-Aryan languages of Sanskrit and ancient Persian as ‘Sina’ or ‘Cina’, from them into Greek and Latin as ‘Sinai’ or ‘Thinai’, and from them into French and English as ‘Chine’ and ‘China’. Spin-offs like ‘sino’-phile and ‘sini’-fication were coined from the same pedigree by ‘sin’-ologists. In the most satisfying of equations, Qin is revealed as China’s etymological ancestor as well as its imperial ancestor; and a centralised empire with a distinctive culture becomes the defining characteristic of both.
