Shi Huangdi

Chinese emperor (r. 221-210 b.c.e.)

• Born: 259 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Qin, China
• Died: 210 b.c.e.
• Place of death: China

Shi Huangdi established the first unified empire that ruled China. His short-lived Qin Dynasty was marked by uniform laws, harsh justice, massive public works, and the ruler’s elevation into an almost divine figure. Shi Huangdi redefined the Chinese notion of the state, and his conduct established a model that all later Chinese emperors attempted to emulate, modify, or avoid.

Early Life

The future Shi Huangdi (shur hwahng-dee) was born into the family of a secondary prince of the state of Qin (Chin) in 259 b.c.e.China was divided into a number of feudal states, and Qin was a formidable power with a strong army, an efficient administration, and an excellent geographical location in the Wei River valley, west of the center of Chinese civilization on the North China plain. The future First Emperor’s father, Prince Zichu (Tzu-ch’u), lived as a hostage in the state of Zhao (Chao). He was a living pledge that Qin would uphold its agreements with the ruler of Zhao.

Prince Zichu had no male heirs, but he acquired a concubine from his confidant, the merchant Lu Buwei (Lu Pu-wei), and she bore him the son who was to become Shi Huangdi. After his son’s birth, Zichu made the child’s mother his legitimate first wife.

Both Prince Zichu and his son grew up in an era known as the Warring States Period (475-221 b.c.e.), which was marked by almost continuous warfare that eliminated small feudal territories, leaving seven large states ruled by kings. In spite of the lack of peace, ideas and technology flourished. The state of Qin’s importance grew in the fourth and third centuries b.c.e. because of its association with a school of thinkers called Legalists, who emphasized simple administration, harsh justice, and mobilization of the state’s subjects to enhance the kingdom’s power. This Legalist approach contrasted with Confucianism, which stressed that the ruler and his officials must be good men of high moral character who sought peace, prosperity, and justice for the common people. The Legalist style, so named for an emphasis on rules rather than good men, appeared more than a century before Shi Huangdi’s birth but reached its height during his rule. It has thus been associated with him ever since.

Prince Zichu’s chief supporter, Lu Buwei, returned to Qin, where he spent his wealth freely to gain advantage for the prince and himself. Lu Buwei managed to have Zichu placed in direct line of succession for the Qin throne. In 251 b.c.e., Zichu’s grandfather died, and the throne passed to his adoptive father (actually his paternal uncle), who ruled for less than a year. Zichu then ascended to the kingship, but ruled for only four years (250-246 b.c.e.). On his death, Lu Buwei ensured that the future Shi Huangdi, then a boy of thirteen, would be crowned King Zheng (Cheng) of Qin.

For nine years, Lu Buwei continued as King Zheng’s chief minister, but in 237 b.c.e. a scandal linked him to a plot to overthrow his young charge. The historian Sima Qian (c. 145-86 b.c.e.) produced an account of these events that has shaped the contemporary view of Shi Huangdi as a morally bad man. Sima Qian, an advocate of Confucianism and an opponent of Legalism, wrote that Lu Buwei was Shi Huangdi’s biological father because, when he had given the concubine to Prince Zichu, she was already pregnant. Sima Qian further tarred the First Emperor’s parentage by claiming that his mother, after the death of her spouse Zichu, resumed sexual relations with Lu Buwei. Unable to satisfy her, he provided a highly virile but uncouth partner named Lao Ai, who fathered children with her. She is said to have plotted with Lao Ai to remove her illegitimately conceived son from the throne and substitute one of their children as king of Qin.

These lurid tales paint Shi Huangdi as the bastard son of a déclassé merchant and loose woman who was so base that she could join a plot to kill her own first-born son. Such behavior violated the prevailing moral standards of the time, which stressed the importance of proper blood descent for rulers, the strong ties between parents and children, and the propriety of female chastity, especially for widows. Sima Qian, as the official historian of the succeeding Han Dynasty (206 b.c.e.-220 c.e.), surely meant to defame Shi Huangdi with this account.

Life’s Work

Whatever the truth of these stories, the events of 237 b.c.e. mark the beginning of King Zheng’s active rulership. First, he ordered the deaths of Lao Ai and his family, required his mother to return to live in the Qin court under supervision, and banished Lu Buwei, who, fearing further punishment, committed suicide. For the next sixteen years, King Zheng of Qin focused on defeating his rivals. He relied on civilian ministers to run his kingdom and on generals to fight his wars, while living in grand style. His most important adviser was a former protégé of Lu Buwei, Li Si (Li Ssu), whom many historians have seen as a Legalist genius for his role in creating the empire. Li Si became chief minister after the Qin Dynasty was established in 221 b.c.e. and served in that post until 208 b.c.e., two years after the First Emperor’s death.

Beginning in 230 b.c.e., Qin conquered all six of its rival states. These states, realizing the ambitions of Qin, had attempted alliances, but these always failed. Qin won a reputation of being as ferocious as a wolf or tiger. In 221 b.c.e., the last of these states, Qi (Ch’i), located in China’s present-day eastern coastal Shandong Province, fell, and King Zheng declared himself a new kind of ruler, an emperor, with the title “Shi Huangdi.”

Over the next eleven years, Shi Huangdi fashioned a remarkable new political order by applying the Legalist approach to governing, which had worked in Qin, to the whole of China. He divided the empire into a hierarchy of territorial administrative units: thirty-six commandaries and one thousand counties. Appointed officials, serving at the emperor’s pleasure, administered the law, meted out justice, and collected revenue. In Legalist fashion, the Qin worked through simple but oppressive statutes applied to common people with uniform harshness.

During the Warring States era, different practices had grown up in the feudal states, but, under Shi Huangdi, the Qin ways became the standard through the empire. He established one set of weights and measures, one coinage, one standard way of writing Chinese characters, and one standard width for cart axles.

The First Emperor required the wealthy and powerful families from the East—meaning the survivors in the six defeated rival states—to reside in his capital of Xianyang (Hsien-yang; near the modern city of Xi’an in Shaanxi province). He let them live privileged lives but forestalled their participation in plots of rebellion in their old homelands. He confiscated weapons from around the empire and brought them to Xianyang, where they were melted down into twelve great statues. He also ordered the burning of the archives in the former rival states, thereby destroying many philosophical works of ancient China and acquiring a reputation as an anti-intellectual tyrant.

At Xianyang, as a reflection of his own megalomania, he began work on an enormous palace and a huge tomb of unprecedented size and magnificence. It is said that 700,000 workers were employed at the tomb site alone. The First Emperor seemed to care nothing for the cost and the sacrifices his subjects made for these extravagances.

Among his most remarkable achievements were a series of great public works undertaken by huge armies of corvée laborers and tens of thousands of families uprooted and relocated as colonists at the First Emperor’s whim. Impressive roads connected Xianyang with the territory of the empire that extended east, north, and south of the original state of Qin. Newly dug canals moved grain to the capital, where it was used to feed its large population or dispatched to armies and workers. In the Warring States period, the rival states had raised walls and earthen dikes for defensive purposes. Shi Huangdi had some of these removed but ordered the walls along the northern border of the empire, meant to protect against the Turkic people called Xiongnu (Hsiung-nu), linked together into the Great Wall, which remains one of the best-known features of ancient China.

Shi Huangdi thought himself omniscient and ruled in a highly autocratic manner. Following a challenge from a Confucian in 212 b.c.e., he ordered four hundred Confucian scholars killed. It was this, along with the burning of Confucian texts on the advice of Li Si, that earned him the undying enmity of Confucianists for the next two thousand years.

Shi Huangdi undertook imperial tours to the far reaches of his newly won empire. These trips served to unify his control and acquaint him with the various parts of his great state. On these journeys, he visited mountain temples associated with local gods for whom he conducted proper ceremonies, thus fulfilling a key responsibility of the rulers he had defeated and replaced.

Shi Huangdi had great personal interest in the Daoist theories of nature. These notions embodied both protoscientific ideas and superstitious occult beliefs centered around yin-yang dualism, which saw the world in terms of an unceasing alteration of forces operating through five elements or powers (wuxing). Shi Huangdi delighted in the elaborate systems of correspondence developed by devotees of this approach and, during his imperial tours, sought out those claiming to be able to prolong life or to unlock the secret of immortality.

Returning from one of these trips in 210 b.c.e., Shi Huangdi became ill and died at Shachu (Sha-ch’iu), on the North China plain, some distance from his capital at Xianyang. Shi Huangdi intended for his eldest son to succeed him, but his chief traveling companions—a favorite younger son named Hu Hao, the chief minister Li Si, and a court eunuch named Zhao Gao (Chao Kao)—attempted to hide the First Emperor’s death until they could return to Xianyang and put Hu Hao on the throne. By the crude but effective ruse of loading the imperial entourage with dead fish to cover the odor of the putrefying First Emperor’s corpse, the plotters managed to make the court think the First Emperor was still alive and that he had declared Hu Hao to be his successor before his own death.

The First Emperor was buried in his vast and splendid tomb along with many palace women, who were to accompany him in the afterlife, and the chief builders of the tomb, who died so they could not reveal its secrets. In the 1970’s, Chinese farmers digging a well accidentally revealed portions of a huge army of terracotta soldiers ranged in front of the tomb. The main tomb mound itself remained unexcavated, but the newly opened sections yielded a major attraction for Chinese and foreign tourists alike at Xi’an.

As Er Huangdi (Second Emperor), Hu Hao aped the style of his father and murdered several of his brothers on the recommendation of the eunuch Zhao Gao, who thus won a place in history as the first of a long series of notorious eunuchs who have harmed various Chinese ruling houses. Revolts broke out around the empire, the most important led by commoners drafted for corvée service. At the Qin court, Zhao Gao became chief minister and engineered an attack on the Second Emperor, who committed suicide. One of Shi Huangdi’s surviving sons succeeded to the Qin throne, but with the title of king (wang), not emperor. This ruler quickly surrendered to Liu Bang (Liu Pang) in late 207 b.c.e. Liu Bang went on to consolidate his power and established the Han Dynasty, which endured for four centuries.

Significance

Shi Huangdi is the most famous and best-known of all China’s emperors. Some features of his rule became generally accepted by Confucianist rulers and scholars, including appointed officials administering territorial units organized in a hierarchical fashion, uniform laws throughout the society, canals for grain transportation, wall construction to mark China’s northern boundary, extravagant magnificence at court, and grand imperial tours around the empire. Still, later Confucians always added condemnation of his ruthlessness, his anti-intellectualism, and his lack of concern over the common people’s suffering. Nevertheless, many dynamic rulers in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam emulated the style and substance of the First Emperor in their own careers. Shi Huangdi’s influence lasted into the twentieth century when, in the 1970’s, Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) accepted comparisons of his own attempts to revolutionize China with those of the First Emperor.

Bibliography

Bodde, Derk. “The State and Empire of Ch’in.” In The Ch’in and Han Empires 221 B.C.-A.D. 220. Vol. 1 of The Cambridge History of China, edited by Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. The best summary of Shi Huangdi’s life in English.

Cottrell, Arthur. The First Emperor of China. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981. A well-illustrated volume emphasizing early excavations at the First Emperor’s tomb. Contains a long section summarizing the Qin conquest and Shi Huangdi’s life.

Guisso, R. W. L., Catherine Pagani, and David Miller. The First Emperor of China. New York: Birch Lane, 1989. A book to accompany the National Film Board of Canada’s docudrama film The First Emperor of China. Lavishly illustrated, but the text is somewhat disjointed.

Li Yu-ning, ed. The First Emperor of China: The Politics of Historiography. White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences, 1975. Emphasizes Chinese fascination with Shi Huangdi during the Maoist era in China (1949-1976 c.e.). Contains a translation of Hong Shidi’s popular biography of Shi Huangdi, which was first published in Chinese in 1972.

Sima Qian. Records of the Grand Historian: The Qin Dynasty. Translated by Burton Watson. 3d ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Contains translation of thirteen sections of Sima Qian’s famous first century b.c.e. work Shiji, which include his accounts relating to Qin Shi Huangdi. Extracts from the Records of the Grand Historian of China dealing with Qin Shi Huangdi are frequently included in various anthologies concerning Chinese history and literature, but this is the best.