The First Emperor
Creating the empire
Li Si, who had arrived as a young scholar when the emperor had come to the Qin throne, was now the power behind it. He had spent the last 20 years perfecting a system that would sweep away China’s feudalist past.
But even after unification, not everyone was ready for the revolution. It had been expected that the feudal order would continue, with power and privilege being taken from the emperor’s enemies and given to his family and friends. Only Li Si had correctly read the new political climate – because he had created it.
Totalitarian philosophy
Qin kings had spent centuries enduring endless warfare at the hands of feudal lords, but to the fury of Li Si, now that the warlords had finally been put down, Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s ministers wanted to create more of the same. To Li, the only force in 1,000 years that had been able to create peace was the divine power of the emperor, and to maintain that peace, that power had to remain undiluted by family ties. Loyalty was owed only to the emperor, and his divine power had to be executed in the most efficient manner possible – through officers who had no other interests except to fulfil the emperor’s divine orders. Without this, chaos and warfare would return.
Li Si’s totalitarian philosophy, which is now called ‘legalism’, wasn’t wholly without merit. It established for the first time the ‘rule of law’ – the concept that laws reign supreme over every individual and that individuals have authority only to administer the law. However, there is evidence that shows how pernicious the power of the new regime was.
‘The tentacles of Qin law’
Dr Roel Sterckx, lecturer in Chinese studies at the University of Cambridge, has deciphered a series of legal texts from the tomb of a minor official in the distant reaches of the new empire. These texts set down the rules that governed every part of every citizen’s daily life, and listed the punishments for every transgression.
‘If you look at the punishments in the Qin legal system,’ says Dr Sterckx, ‘physical punishments – which included mutilation, tattooing the body and the face, cutting off parts of the limbs – were traditionally among the severest. For example, there’s one provision that says: “If a male and a female fornicate, they shall to be sent to the market” – which is a polite way of saying that they will be beheaded in the market square. So even private life was touched by the tentacles of Qin law. It was now to be universally applied to everybody who was a subject of this new world order called the Qin empire.’
A wall and a tomb
In 220 BC, Emperor Qin Shi Huang set off to survey his new empire, which was, for the first time ever, a secure and peaceful land. He intended to keep it that way. The empire had been won, but it must be secured.
For centuries, the northern edges of civilised China had been ravaged by nomadic tribes, but although the frontier towns had defensive walls, there were always plenty of gaps. Now that would change. With the major wars over and millions of demobbed soldiers now freed from fighting, labour was plentiful and building began on the greatest engineering project of the ancient world. A single impregnable barrier to seal the empire: the Great Wall of China.
Made of compacted earth, it was 10 metres (33 feet) high and 5,000 kilometres (3,107 miles) long. At the peak of production, the records say, more than a million people were enslaved to build it, perhaps a quarter of whom would die in the process.
And the emperor’s demands on labour continued to grow. With the empire secure, he turned his eyes to the fulfilment of his next great vision: a tomb befitting the first divine ruler of all of China.
Qin Shi Huang’s tomb is at the centre of an enormous necropolis …
