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Qin Shi Huangdi (秦始皇帝, Pinyin: Qín Shǐ Huángdì, or WG: Ch'in Shih Huang-ti) (259 - 210 BC), named Ying Zheng (嬴政 Yíng Zhèng), was King Zheng of Qin during the Warring States Period prior to becoming an emperor. In 221 BCE he unified China and proclaimed himself the First (shi) Emperor (huangdi) of the Qin Dynasty, as he was the first Chinese sovereign able to rule the whole country. He passed a series of important reforms stabilizing the unification and undertook ambitious construction projects, most notably the Great Wall of China. This makes him sort of a founding father in Chinese history, as his unification endured for millennia (with interruptions). He reigned from 246 BCE to 238 BCE as king of Qin under a regent, to 221 BCE without a regent, and as emperor of China from 221 BCE to 210 BCE.
At the time of Prince Zheng's birth, China was divided into a milieu of warring feudal states. The competition was extremely fierce and by 259 BCE there were few states remaining (the others having been conquered and annexed), but Zheng's state, Qin, was the most powerful. It was governed by Legalist philosophy and focused earnestly on military matters.
According to a common story, Zheng was not the actual son of the King of Qin, but of the powerful chancellor Lu Buwei. This tale arose because Zheng's mother had originally been a concubine of Lu's before he gave her to his good friend Zi-chu (later the King of Qin) shortly before Zheng's birth. However, the story is dubious since the Confucians would have found it much easier to denounce a ruler whose birth was illegitimate.
Zheng ascended the throne of Qin in 246 BCE, although a regent ruled in his stead until 238 BCE. Zheng continued the tradition of tenaciously attacking and defeating the feudal states (dodging a celebrated assassination attempt by Jing Ke while doing so) and finally took control of all China in 221 BCE.
King Zheng of Qin now declared himself "Shi Huangdi," first emperor. "Huang" and "Di" were titles once reserved for the eight legendary kings (three Huang and five Di), so by employing the term "Huangdi", Ying Zheng indicated that he was even greater than the eight legendary kings combined. He believed that his family would rule China forever and so he wanted his successors to be titled "Emperor of China II", "Emperor of China III", etc.
To avoid the anarchy of the Warring States Era, Shi Huangdi completely abolished feudalism. He instead divided the empire into thirty-six provinces run by three governors: one civilian, one military, and a moderator between them. Each was appointed by the emperor and could be dismissed by him. The civilian governor was also reassigned to a different province every few years to prevent him from building up a base of power.
Shi Huangdi ordered the surviving aristocrats to move to Xian Yang (the capital) so they would be kept under tight surveillance for rebellious activities.
The emperor also sponsored an extensive network of roads and canals connecting the provinces to accelerate trade between them and to accelerate military marches to revolting provinces.
Shi Huangdi unified China economically by standardizing weights and measures, currency, various implements, the axle lengths of wagons (so every wagon could run smoothly on the new roads), the legal system, and Chinese script.
Qin Shi Huangdi continued military expansion during his reign, annexing regions to the south and fighting nomadic tribes to the north and northwest. These tribes (the Xiongnu) were subdued, but the campaign was essentially inconclusive, and to prevent the Xiongnu from irritating the northern frontiers any longer, Shi Huangdi constructed the Great Wall of China from existing walls in the area.
Although the abolition of the feudal system was often regarded as a farsighted achievement in later years, around Shi Huangdi's time rulers yearned for their previous way of life.
The emperor conducted renowned construction projects, most notably the Great Wall, his imperial palace, and his tomb, but also many roads and canals, (including the first canal, Lingqu, in today's Guangxi Province), widening and paving of the roads, and replicas of palaces from the Warring States Era. These projects required many years and a large amount of the population, and they were infamous for their high death toll, especially the Great Wall.
The action of Shi Huangdi considered most heinous from a scholar's point of view was the burning of all books in China, carried out in 213 BCE. The emperor had grown weary of hearing disputes from rival schools of philosophy and sought to diminish their influence by destroying their books. All other books (except for those on agriculture, Legalism, mysticism, medicine, Qin history, and science) were also incinerated. However, Shi Huangdi did keep a copy of each censored book in the imperial library.
Shi Huangdi was supposed to have ordered hundreds of (mostly Confucian) scholars buried alive to silence their complaints forever; however, this may be a legend concocted after his reign.
Shi Huangdi's conquering state, Qin, had ruled by Legalist guidelines. This was based on the principle of humanity being inherently evil, and recommended harsh laws to keep them in line, along with cruel punishments to avoid crime. It also tolerated tyrants who changed the laws at their whims. Shi Huangdi's Imperial Secretariat and chief advisor, Li Si, was a Legalist philosopher and was fundamental in inspiring many of the reforms and laws the emperor passed. (He might be thought of as the power behind the throne, even.) Naturally, such policies bred resentment.
It should also be noted that Shi Huangdi's constant projects and ventures necessitated high taxes, which further added to the discontent which led to his dynasty's demise.
Emperor Shi Huangdi did not like to talk about death and he never really wrote a will. When he died suddenly at the palace in Shaqiu prefecture in 210 BCE, two of his high officials (Li Si and the chief eunuch Zhao Gao) persuaded his second son Ying Huhai to forge the Emperor's will. They forced his first son Ying Fusu to commit suicide, stripped the command of troops from Meng Tian — a loyal supporter of Ying Fu Su — and killed Meng's family also. Ying Huhai became the second emperor ("Er Shi Huangdi").
Qin Shi Huangdi was believed to be buried with the Terracotta Army near Xi'an, but his body has yet to be discovered (the artificial mountain where his body is believed to rest has not been excavated).
Er Shi Huangdi was not nearly as capable as his father was. Revolts quickly erupted, and within four years after Qin Shi Huangdi's death, his son was dead, the imperial palace and library were burned, and the Qin Dynasty came to an end.
The next Chinese dynasty, the Han Dynasty, rejected Legalism (in favour of Confucianism) and moderated the laws, but kept Shi Huangdi's basic political and economic reforms intact. In this way his work was carried on through the centuries and became a lasting feature of Chinese society.
He was interested in immortality and visited Zhifu Island. These deeds became a popular story of the emperor sending a Zhifu islander as the religious leader of ships with hundreds of young men and women in search of the pill of immortality. These people never returned, and the myth claims that they settled down in one of the Japanese islands.
The emperor often took tours to major cities in his empire to inspect the efficiency of the bureaucracy and to symbolize the presence of Qin's prestige. (It was on one of these tours that he died.) Nevertheless, these trips provided opportunities for assassins, the most famous of whom was Zhang Liang.
Late in life, after his assassination had been attempted too often for comfort, he grew paranoid of remaining in one place too long and would hire servants to bear him to different buildings in his palace complex to sleep in each night. He also hired several "doubles" to make it less clear which figure was the emperor.
In traditional Chinese historiography, Qin Shi Huangdi was almost always portrayed as a brutal tyrant, superstitious (a result of his interest in immortality and assassination paranoia) and even as a mediocre ruler. Ideological prejudices against the Legalist kingdom of Qin were established as early as 266 BC, when Confucian philosopher Xun Zi compared it to barbarian tribes and wrote "Qin has the heart of a tiger or a wolf ? [and is] avaricious, perverse, eager for profit, and without sincerity" Later Confucian historians condemned the emperor who had burned the classics and buried Confucian scholars alive. They eventually compiled the list of the "Ten Crimes of Qin" to highlight his tyrannical actions. The famous Han poet and statesman Jia Yi concluded his essay The Faults of Qin with what was to become the standard Confucian judgement of the reasons for Qin's collapse. Jia Yi's essay, admired as a masterpiece of rhetoric and reasoning, was copied into two great Han histories and has had a far-reaching influence on Chinese political thought as a classic illustration of Confucian theory. He explained the ultimate weakness of Qin as a result of its ruler's ruthless pursuit of power, the precise factor which had made it so powerful; for as Confucius had taught, the strength of a government ultimately is based on the support of the people and virtuous conduct of the ruler.
This Confucian bias on the part of Han scholars rendered some of the stories recorded about the First Emperor in the Han period to be of doubtful historical value and many were probably invented to emphasize his negative traits. For instance, the accusation that the First Emperor had 460 scholars executed by having them buried with only their heads above ground, and then decapitated is at the very least unlikely to be completely true and it is probable that the incident was fabricated to create a legend of Confucian martyrdom. There are also many varying tales of Heaven's anger against Qin Shi Huangdi, such as the story of a stone fallen from the sky engraved with words denouncing the emperor and prophesying the collapse of his empire after his death. Almost all of these have been discredited as hearsay and legend. Other stories are designed to tarnish the First Emperor's image.
Only in modern times were historians able to penetrate beyond the limitations of traditional Chinese historiography. The political rejection of the Confucian tradition as an impediment to China's entry into the modern world opened the way for changing perspectives to emerge. In the three decades between the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the outbreak of the Second World War, with the deepening dissatisfaction with China's weakness and disunity, there emerged a new appreciation of the man who had unified China. In the time when he was writing, when Chinese territory was encroached upon by foreign nations, leading Nationalist historian Xiao Yishan emphasized the role of the First Emperor in repulsing the northern barbarians, particularly in the construction of the Great Wall. Another historian, Ma Feibai, published in 1941 a full-length revisionist biography of the First Emperor entitled Qin Shi Huangdi Zhuan, whom he called one of the great heroes of Chinese history. Ma compared him with the contemporary leader Chiang Kai-shek and saw many parallels in the careers and policies of the two men, both of whom he admired. Chiang's Northern Expedition of the early 1920s, which directly preceded the new Nationalist government at Nanking was compared to the unification brought about by Qin Shi Huangdi.
With the coming of the Communist Revolution in 1949, new interpretations again surfaced. The establishment of the new, revolutionary regime meant another re-evaluation of the First Emperor, this time following Marxist theory. The interpretation given of Qin Shi Huangdi of the new era was generally a combination of traditional and modern views, but essentially critical. This is exemplified in General History of China, which was compiled in September, 1955, as an official survey of Chinese history. The work described the First Emperor's major steps toward unification and standardisation as corresponding to the interests of the ruling group and the merchant class, not the nation or the people, and the subsequent fall of his dynasty a manifestation of the class struggle. The perennial debate of the fall of the Qin Dynasty was also explained in Marxist terms, the peasant rebellions being a revolt against oppression - a revolt which undermined the dynasty, but which was bound to fail because of a compromise with "landlord class elements" .
Since 1972, however, a radically different official view of the First Emperor has been given prominence throughout China. The reevaluation movement was launched by Hong Shidi's biography Qin Shi Huang, published by the state press to be a mass popular history, and sold 1.85 million copies within two years. In the new era the First Emperor was seen as a farsighted ruler who destroyed the forces of division and established the first unified, centralised state in Chinese history by rejecting the past. Personal attributes, such as his quest for immortality, so emphasized in traditional historiography, are scarcely mentioned. The new evaluations described how, in his time (an era of great political and social change), he had no compunctions in using violent methods to crush counter-revolutionaries, such as the "industrial and commercial slave owner" chancellor Lü Buwei. Unfortunately, he was not as thorough as he should have been and after his death, hidden subversives, under the leadership of the chief eunuch Zhao Gao, seized power and used it to restore the old feudal order. To round out this reevaluation, a new interpretation of the precipitous collapse of the Qin Dynasty was put forward in an article entitled "On the Class Struggle During the Period Between Ch'in and Han" by Luo Siding, in a 1974 issue of Red Flag, to replace the old explanation. The new theory claimed that the cause of the fall of Qin lay in the lack of thoroughness of Qin Shi Huangdi's "dictatorship over the reactionaries, even to the extent of permitting them to worm their way into organs of political authority and usurp important posts."
To be sure, Qin Shi Huangdi could always be seen as relevant in fiction and folklore. During the Korean War, the play Song of the Yi River was produced. The play was based on an actual historical event, the attempted assassination of Ying Zheng by Jing Ke of Wei, at the request of the Prince of Yan, in 227 BC. In the play Ying Zheng was portrayed as a cruel tyrant and an aggressor and invader of other states. Jing Ke, in contrast, was a chivalrous warrior and one of his lines was "tens of thousands of injured people are all my comrades." A huge newspaper ad for this play proclaimed: "Invasion will definitely end in defeat; peace must be won at a price." The underdog fighting against the aggression of a cruel and powerful foreign invader and being supported by a sympathetic volunteer from another country was obviously a theme with considerable contemporary relevance.
The 1984 book Bridge of Birds (by Barry Hughart) portrays him as a power-hungry megalomaniac who achieved immortality by having his heart removed by an Old Man of the mountain.
The 1996 movie The Emperor's Shadow uses the various legends about him to make a political statement on Chinese Communism, and focuses on his relationship with the rebellious musician, Gao Jianli.
The 1999 movie The Emperor and the Assassin focused on the identity of his father, his heartless treatment of his officials, and betrayal by a concubine, paving the way for Jing Ke's assassination attempt.
The 2002 movie Hero tells the story of assassination attempts of Qin Shi Huangdi by legendary warriors.
Bob Bainborough portrayed Qin Shi Huangdi in an episode of History Bites.
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