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ALTHOUGH QIN SHI HUANGDI (the Qin ‘First Emperor’) is invariably described as the architect of China’s earliest integration, his achievement was not quite as remarkable as might be supposed. The Qin edifice would last barely a generation, after which the empire would have to be laboriously reconstructed; it covered little more than ‘core’ China, and that not entirely; and although the First Emperor certainly outdid all his predecessors in aggressive universalism, his success was largely down to others. Shang Yang and his ‘legalist’ associates had devised the interventionist framework of what amounted to a totalitarian state; various rationalists and ministers continued to fine-tune this machinery: and it was the kings of Qin prior to the First Emperor who had instigated the policy of expansion and had substantially realised it while assembling the resources for its completion.

In c. 330 BC – so a century before King Zheng of Qin assumed the title of ‘First Emperor’ – his great-great-great-grandfather King Hui of Qin had allowed his attention to wander away from the east, from the lower Yellow River and its ever ‘warring states’, to focus on an inviting but remote and apparently unattainable prospect in the far south-west. There, over the switchback mountains of the Qinling range (now a last redoubt of the Giant Panda), across the valley of the upper Han River, and beyond the misty Daba Hills, lay what one scholar calls the ‘land of silk and money’.¹ This was Sichuan, the great upper basin of the Yangzi that is today the country’s most populous province. Two administrations then controlled it – as indeed they do now following a 1997 bisection of the province: Ba in the south-east roughly corresponded to the modern Chongqing region and Shu in the centre to the modern Chengdu region.

Neither Shu nor Ba figure much in the ‘Spring and Autumn’ or the ‘Warring States’ Annals. Distance, gradients and climate conspired to isolate Sichuan from the Yellow River states, while the Sichuanese peoples were deemed too alien and uncultured to participate in the cynical manoeuvrings and bloodlettings of the high-minded Xia. Outside this charmed circle, the great bell-casting southern state of Chu had on occasion pushed up the Han and Yangzi valleys into Ba; but it was Shu which was the larger of the two Sichuanese states, the more cohesive and the richer (if one may judge by the opulence of its earlier occupants as revealed in the sacrificial pits at Sanxingdui). It was also the nearer to Qin’s homeland in the Wei valley, though even by high-flying crow the distance between Xi’an, near where was situated the Qin capital of Xianyang, and Chengdu is a good 500 kilometres (310 miles).

King Hui of Qin had nevertheless established cordial relations with his distant neighbours. He exchanged presents with the king of Shu, encouraged small-scale trade with his kingdom and nursed big-scale designs upon it. Access remained a challenge, but according to a later and scandalously slanted account, he sought to resolve this problem by adopting a ruse of which gift-bearing Greeks would not have been ashamed. Five life-size stone cows – rather than a wooden horse – were commissioned and, when sculpted to naturalistic perfection, were mischievously embellished by spattering their tails and hindquarters with gobs of purest gold. The herd was then put to grass where emissaries from Shu might observe it and reflect.

Shu people being, even by Qin’s doubtful standards, unenlightened in the ways of civilisation and so somewhat credulous, the emissaries reported this remarkable phenomenon to their king; and he of course, excited by the idea of an unlimited supply of gold cowpats, indented for ‘the stone cattle’ as a gift. King Hui of Qin assented. But because of the impossibility of hauling such a herd up the scree-trails and panda-paths of two major mountain ranges, he graciously offered first to construct a suitable drove road. The king of Shu applauded and the work began.

Whatever its origins, this ‘Stone Cattle Road’, of which archaeologists have since uncovered some convincing traces, was a major undertaking and the first of Qin’s great civil-engineering feats. It was also a revolutionary departure in ‘warring states’ strategy and the earliest mountain highway in China. Like the trans-Himalayan jeep-track that linked Xinjiang with Pakistan (until Chinese engineers obligingly replaced it with the 1970s Karakoram Highway), much of the new road was of carpentry. Where modern engineers would cut or tunnel, the makers of ‘Stone Cattle Road’ traversed. (Not even in China had the blast of gunpowder yet been heard.) It teetered along galleries cantilevered out of the sheer hillsides. Holes were bored horizontally into rock faces and plugged with sturdy poles that projected far enough to accommodate the planking of the carriageway. Elsewhere rivers were bridged and forest felled. King Hui’s solicitude for the cattle’s safe passage could not be faulted; and in time his counterpart in Shu welcomed the stone herd to Sichuan’s lushest pastures – and then returned it. There was no ill feeling; it was just that the ruminants failed to perform as expected.

Not so easy to repel, though, were the heavily armed and armoured Qin storm-troopers with their chariots and supply wagons who followed along ‘Stone Cattle Road’. Clattering over the planked galleries, Qin’s forces invaded Shu in 316 BC. On the flimsiest of dynastic pretexts, King Hui of Qin had abandoned his bluff and now put his road to the purpose for which it had all along been intended. Comprehensively outwitted in the hills, Shu was easily outfought on the plains. After consecutive defeats, its king fled, while the ruler of neighbouring Ba was taken captive. Save for slivers of territory in the south and the east (where Chu retained an interest) all of cultivable Sichuan was at the mercy of the king of Qin. It was the largest territorial acquisition in China since the Western Zhou had overrun the Shang domain following the c. 1045 BC battle of Muye.

Only elsewhere in Asia had a comparable feat of arms been recorded. Just ten years earlier Macedonian infantry had erupted into India in similar fashion. Without the benefit of a mountain highway Alexander the Great had led his men on a circuitous route through the Hindu Kush before descending to no less promising victories in the basin of the upper Indus. Panj-ab, meaning the ‘five-rivers’ tributary to the Indus, lay at Alexander’s mercy much as Si-chuan, meaning the ‘four-rivers’ tributary to the Yangzi, did at King Hui’s mercy. Yet in the case of the would-be world-conquering Alexander, there the odyssey had ended. His Indian escapade proved to be no more than a historical hiccup. Within a year he was gone, and within three he was dead. His arrangements for India’s richest province collapsed as soon as he withdrew; so did much of his army as thirst took its toll on the desert march back to Babylonia; and within the subcontinent his incursion left so little impression that no surviving Indian source contains so much as a mention of it.

The Chinese outcome was very different. It brought Sichuan within the ambit of Xia culture and so, imminently, of Chinese empire – where it would remain. For Qin, if not for Alexander, victory marked a point of no return. The conquest had doubled Qin’s territory and elevated its status from that of ‘warring state’ to warring superstate. There could be no question of relinquishing a land as rich in minerals as it was in cereals, as well served by rivers as it was by climate, and as advantageous strategically as it was economically. Rebellions were ruthlessly suppressed, and after a brief experiment in feudal dyarchy, directly administered ‘counties’ and ‘commanderies’ were carved out across the country. Qin methods of registration and recruitment were imposed, the ‘legalist’ tariff of rewards and punishments was introduced, and weights, measures and calendar were standardised. At Chengdu the massive walls, said to have been 23 metres (75 feet) high by 6.4 kilometres (4 miles) long, of a new provincial stronghold soon proclaimed Qin’s permanent intent. Compounded as usual of layered earth that had been tamped between wooden shuttering into the concrete-like hangtu, the fortifications left deep excavations, or borrow-pits, scattered about the Chengdu plain which were large enough, when flooded and stocked, to feed the city on fish. However demanding and intrusive, Qin rule was not indifferent to the welfare of the ‘black-haired commoners’; on the docility of the masses depended their mass mobilisation.

Meanwhile, across ‘Stone Cattle Road’ and other hastily constructed roadways poured pioneers from Qin’s harsher climes in the Wei and Yellow rivers – land-hungry colonists, corvée-serving conscripts, labour-sentenced convicts, mineral-seeking prospectors and career-in-crisis exiles. ‘Of all the regions [that would be] unified by Qin, Shu underwent the longest and most sustained transformation,’ writes a persuasive champion of the process.² Comparatively undisturbed for eighty years, Qin here had a chance to field-test the policies and experiment with the projects that would characterise its all-China dominion.

The ‘land of silk and money’ lay ripe for development. In addition to linens and other fabrics, Sichuan’s vast silk output, especially of brocades, would provide both a tradeable commodity and, when packed in bales of standard weight, a convertible currency. More recognisable coinage came from the great mineral deposits to be found throughout the province and that of neighbouring Yunnan. Here ‘making money’ meant just that. Mined, minted and managed locally, copper coins, now of a more familiar and pocket-friendly shape, filled the coffers of Qin, and to judge by their ubiquity at contemporary grave sites found ready acceptance among the ancestors. Salt and iron-ore deposits were also extensively worked, both of them under state direction but with ample scope for private initiative. The salt brought in wealth; the iron was wrought into tools and weaponry.

Cereal production, the mainstay of every settled economy and the measure of its success in that it governed the availability and mobilisation of manpower, received the highest priority. Cadastral surveys were conducted, a grid of plots interspersed by paths and dykes was imposed, and much land was re-allocated. If one may judge from the scant documentation, the state even attempted to dictate what crops were planted and when. This may have applied especially to newly irrigated land; for in c. 270 BC Li Bing, as the Qin governor of Shu, conceived a means of partially diverting the Min River (one of Si-chuan’s ‘four rivers’) into the Chengdu plain.

Li Bing’s Dujiangyan system of weirs and races was extremely ambitious. The labour requirement can only be guessed at, but both deep-cutting and hill-contouring were involved, plus some bridge-building and an elaborate distribution network. ‘The largest, most carefully planned public works project yet seen anywhere on the eastern half of the Eurasian continent’, it reduced the danger of floods, provided a commercial waterway, and in time converted central Sichuan into the great rice-bowl of inland China.³ It also made Li Bing himself into a legend, and though now enveloped in the steel and concrete of later improvements, the scheme survives to this day. In fact it is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Like ‘Stone Cattle Road’, Li Bing’s Min River waterworks anticipated the later earth-moving feats of the First Emperor. But unlike them, it would be neither forgotten, like the First Emperor’s tomb, nor misconstrued, like his wall. If China had its own ‘seven wonders of the ancient world’, Li Bing’s waterworks would be one of them.

While Li Bing was busy with his sluices, Zhaoxiang, the longest-reigning king (306–251 BC) of the now resource-rich Qin, had already been flexing his new military muscle. Primed on Sichuan’s growth steroids, Qin burst from the blocks of Sichuan’s strategic location. Command of the upper Han and Yangzi valleys constituted a direct threat to any state or states based on their middle and lower reaches: and this, in the third century BC, meant the great southern state of Chu. As early as King Hui’s time, while debating the pros and cons of building ‘Stone Cattle Road’, a Qin minister had observed that of all the ‘warring states’ only Qin and Chu had the resources to prevail over the rest. By the 280s BC the pressing question was simply which had the resources to prevail over the other.

At around the time that Qin’s forces had been subduing Sichuan, Chu’s had been subduing Yue. Yue was even farther from the Yellow River and its ‘warring states’ than Sichuan. It lay south of the Yangzi delta and adjacent to Wu, a state on and about the delta itself that had been the scourge of Chu back in the sixth century BC when the marquis of Zeng had offered sanctuary to Chu’s king. Courtesy of what amounted to an interstate food chain, matters had been getting slightly simpler. Wu had been devoured by Yue in the early fifth century BC, and then Yue (including Wu) had been overrun by Chu in the late fourth century BC. Naturally if Chu (now including Yue and Wu) were to succumb to Qin, the entire Yangzi valley, including its far-reaching feeders such as the Han River, would be united. Qin would be practically invincible, two-thirds of ‘core’ China would be under its rule and, quite incidentally, an excruciating era of same-sounding states would be nearly at an end.

Well aware of the threat posed by Qin’s outflanking move into Sichuan, Chu had first tried to cobble together an anti-Qin alliance. When this failed, in c. 285 BC a Chu force thrust up the Yangzi, pillaged in Ba and Shu and then veered south into either Guizhou or Yunnan province. The geography is uncertain but the motivation is clear: to outflank the outflanker. Qin responded with a countermove that severed this Chu tentacle. Cut off in the far south-west, the Chu expeditionary force settled down among the indigenous people, and while advancing the process of casual cross-culturation, played no further part in the tug-of-war between Qin and Chu.

Seizing the moment, in 280–277 BC Qin hit back with a pincer movement involving two amphibious advances, one down the Han valley and the other down the Yangzi. The first struck deep into Hubei province and captured both the Chu capital and the ancestral tombs of its kings. The second ended Chu influence in Ba and secured the Yangzi down to below its famous gorges. Chu never recovered from these twin disasters. The loss of territory was severe, and the subsequent drift of Chu’s domain towards the coast and Shandong should be seen as less in the nature of compensation, more of dissipation. Worse was the loss of prestige and legitimacy. Deprived of his capital and unable to perform the sacrificial rites at the tombs of his ancestors, Chu’s king had clearly forfeited Heaven’s favour. In terms of moral authority as much as military clout, his state could no longer be regarded as a serious contender for supremacy.

Yet Chu would stagger on for another fifty years before finally being extinguished; nor was it even then forgotten. To cries of ‘Great Chu shall rise again’, it would do just that when the Qin experiment in empire foundered. From Chu would come the contenders for a new dynastic dispensation; and under one of them, the founder of the Han dynasty, its softening southern mix of extravagant expression, encrusted artistry, shamanic mysticism and lachrymose verse would colour the mainstream of northern Chinese culture. Once regarded by the Yellow River’s ‘warring states’ as uncivilised ‘barbarians’, both Chu and Qin pursued trajectories that converged on the ‘central plain’, so belying the idea of all political power and high culture radiating outwards from it. The dynamic was as often centripetal as centrifugal; ‘Chinese civilisation’ was as much compounded as diffused.⁴

Unlike Chu’s king, King Zhaoxiang of Qin must have been vastly encouraged by the success of his arms in Hubei. Qin’s star was clearly in the ascendant; its resources had been further augmented; and from the middle Yangzi to distant Shanxi its territories now wrapped themselves around the Yellow River’s ‘warring states’ in a maw-like embrace. But despite every strategic advantage, King Zhaoxiang’s final triumphs were dearly bought. As already noted, appalling slaughter accompanied the defeat of Zhao, Wei and Han (the Jin successor states) in the 250s BC. Even the 256 BC overthrow of the ancient house of Zhou was not without its bloody aftermath in that six years later the last Zhou king, now a pensioner of Qin, was put to death on suspicion of plotting a comeback.

In the previous year, 251 BC, but of natural (if long-overdue) causes, old King Zhaoxiang of Qin had himself died. In quick succession his son and then his grandson succeeded. When the latter died in 247 BC, the succession passed to this latter’s presumed son, the thirteen-year-old Zheng, who would become the First Emperor. But because of his age, Zheng did not actually take up the reins of power – or ‘receive the cap of manhood and put on the girdle and sword’ – until 238 BC.

Royal longevity being an important factor in the stability of any dynasty, this interlude of seldom uncontentious successions, plus a nine-year minority, could well have been fatal to Qin’s prospects. Disappointed court factions mounted rebellions, outlying ‘commanderies’ wavered in their allegiance, and the surviving ‘warring states’ hastened to take advantage. But fortune, no less than unrivalled wealth and a compliant populace, favoured Qin. The rebellions were suppressed and the external attacks heavily punished. ‘At this time’, says the Shiji, referring to Zheng’s accession in 246 BC,

Qin had already annexed the regions of Ba, Shu and Hanzhong [the ‘middle Han’ river] and extended its territories to Ying [the Chu capital], where it set up Nan [‘Southern’] Province. In the north it had taken possession of the area from Shang province east, which comprised the provinces of Hedong, Taiyuan and Shangdang, and east as far Xingyang…setting up the province of Sanchuan.

These northern acquisitions extended up to the steppes of Mongolia and gave Qin command of more than half the lower Yellow River basin. They were further extended during Zheng’s minority as Qin generals took some thirty more cities and set up yet another new province.⁵

Thus when young King Zheng came of age in 238 BC, Qin was in effect already supreme. It possessed over half of its future empire and regarded most of the surviving states as inferiors or vassals. Apart from the massacre of a suspiciously approximate 100,000 in Zhao in 234 BC, the Shiji is unusually reticent about casualties during this final phase of unification. Presumably they were not significant. Zheng himself characterised his campaigns as essentially corrective – ‘to punish violence and rebellion’. The object was no longer annihilation but annexation. Han and Zhao’s submission was followed by that of an already fractured Wei in 225 BC, of the displaced and enfeebled Chu in 223 BC, and finally of Yan in the extreme north-east and Qi in the Shandong peninsula in 222–221 BC. ‘Thanks to the ancestral spirits, these six kings have all acknowledged their guilt and the world is now in profound order,’ gloated the victor.⁶

It remained only to mark the achievement by a suitable upgrading of King Zheng’s title. Deliberations were held and a form of words meaning ‘Greatly August One’ was proposed. Zheng, acutely aware of his newly won precedence, had a better idea. ‘We will drop the “Greatly”, keep the “August”, and adopt the title used by the emperors of high antiquity [that is the mythical Five Emperors], calling ourselves Huangdi or August Emperor.’

An official proclamation immediately confirmed the new designation: from now on there were to be no more posthumous names; emperors were to be known only by the numerical titles they inherited. ‘We ourselves shall be called First Emperor [Shi Huangdi], and successive generations of rulers shall be numbered consecutively, Second, Third, and so on for 1000 or 10,000 generations, the succession passing down without end.’⁷ But posterity would decline to be bound by this ruling. One of the First Emperor’s most sensible innovations proved to be one of his least regarded; the sequence would stop at ‘Second Emperor’.