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QIN SHI HUANG DI

Death toll: a million¹

Rank: 46

Type: despot

Broad dividing line: First Emperor vs. tradition

Time frame: 221–210 BCE

Location: China

Who usually gets the most blame: Qin Shi Huang Di (born Zheng)

The First Emperor

Once Zheng became lord of all China, he invented a brand new title by which he is known to history: First (Shi) August (Huang) Emperor (Di) of China (Qin).

At his side, Prime Minister Li Si set new standards for all of the conniving, ruthless chief counselors in history. Li Si had very definite ideas on how to remodel China into a peaceful and orderly empire for all eternity. He had the ear of the First Emperor and plenty of suggestions. For the most part, these reforms spread Qin’s well-established totalitarian system into the newly conquered lands.

To keep power out of the hands of ambitious nobles, Shi Huang Di broke up the old aristocracy and abolished feudalism. After collecting weapons from the defeated nobles, he divided his domain into thirty-six commanderies run by officials he appointed. For each commandery, the First Emperor had three autonomous officials running part of the government: a governor running the civil branch, an independent military commander, and an inspector to spy on the other two. For lower jobs, he created a professional civil service that was filled by applicants who had passed impartial tests of their education.

To spread unity across the previously warring states, the First Emperor reduced all regional variations to one official version of everything. He standardized Chinese writing to the system in use today. He reissued money and decreed one system of weights and measurement. He required all wagons to have the same axle length so they would fit on the new roads he built all over China, roads that made it easier for him to rush his armies to any hot spot.

Whenever Shi Huang Di tried to make changes, academics fussed and insisted that there was no precedent—the law forbade it. Well, the obvious solution was to remove all those pesky precedents and start from scratch. He ordered every book in China brought to him, and he had all of them, except for a few technical manuals, burned. When scholars howled at this, he buried 460 of them alive so he wouldn’t have to listen to their howling anymore. Many years later, after Shi Huang Di was safely gone, scholars gathered and tried to write down whatever they could remember of the lost literature.²

Sealing Himself In

The First Emperor needed to protect the northern frontier against raids by the nomadic horsemen known as the Xiongnu (who were once believed to have been forerunners of the Huns, but now are not). He connected several local walls that blocked strategic passes into one big wall dividing the known world into Us and Them. To build this wall, he sent a general to the frontier with 300,000 soldiers and a million conscripted laborers, most of whom were said to have died in the construction. A steady flow of workmen traveled north to replace the dead. Legend says that every stone in the wall cost a human life.

The purpose of the Great Wall wasn’t to keep the Xiongnu from crossing. It was easy enough for them to prop a ladder up against any long unmanned stretch. But they couldn’t get horses up the ladder and over the wall, so they would have to invade China on foot, without the military advantage that made them so formidable.

Although Shi Huang Di was the first to build a Great Wall of China, he didn’t build the Great Wall of China. The wall has been expanded, dismantled, neglected, and rebuilt so many times in the past two thousand years that the current wall stretching across north China is newer—a mere five hundred years old or so—and often follows a very different path than the original.³

Search for the Secret of Eternal Life

When he gave himself the title of First Emperor, Shi Huang Di intended that all subsequent emperors would continue the naming scheme. His son would become Er Shi Huang Di (Second Emperor), followed by the Third, Fourth, and so on. However, deep down, Shi Huang Di really wanted to become the Only Emperor. He spent a great deal of effort seeking immortality.

The court alchemist told the emperor that mercury was the key to eternal life, and provided him with potions that would grant him eternal life. Shi Huang Di also sent the Taoist sorcerer Xu Fu to search eastward for the secret of immortality. The Eight Immortals, Taoist saints who had learned the secrets of the universe, were said to live on Penglai Mountain beyond the eastern seas. Xu Fu was given a fleet of sixty ships, five thousand crewmen, accompanied by three thousand virgin boys and girls because it was believed that their purity would aid the quest. Several years after he had disappeared over the horizon, Xu Fu returned and reported that a large and frightening sea monster blocked the way, so Shi Huang Di sent a boatload of archers to kill the monster. Then Xu Fu tried again, but he was never heard from again.

Modern historians trying to make sense of this tale suggest that Xu Fu simply discovered Japan and settled down. Archaeology shows that Chinese culture began to appear in Japan around this time.⁴

Failure in the Search for Eternal Life

When Shi Huang Di died in 210 BCE on a tour of the provinces—possibly poisoned by the mercury in his magic elixirs—Li Si kept the news secret for two months until he could return to the capital and tie up some loose ends. Among them, he had to strip command from a dangerously conservative general and to force Shi Huang Di’s eldest son to commit suicide. To keep the empire from dissolving into chaos, Li Si kept up a pretense of a live ruler by arriving at the emperor’s carriage every day and ducking behind the curtain to consult with him. A wagonload of fish joined the entourage to disguise the smell of the emperor’s corpse.⁵

The First Emperor had begun building his tomb many years earlier, employing seven hundred thousand workmen on the project and working many of them to death. The tomb complex measured three miles across, reputedly protected with booby-trapped crossbows. To protect the secret locations, the men who installed these were locked in the tomb as well. In 1974, excavation uncovered an underground army of eight thousand terra cotta statues of soldiers guarding the tomb, and that may be only a small part of treasures buried there. The tomb is reputed to contain a replica of the world floating in a sea of mercury, and a 2006 soil analysis suggests that a substantial amount of mercury is still buried in the unexcavated section.⁶

Once Li Si removed all of the conservatives from any possible influence over the succession, he announced the death of the emperor and allowed the throne to pass to a prince who agreed with all of the radical changes of the previous decade. Er Shi Huang Di (the Second Emperor), however, ruled only a few years before China fell into civil war.

How Bad Was He?

As with most ancient individuals, there are only a handful of original sources, all filtered through centuries of copying and recopying, censoring, fictionalizing, moralizing, and sensationalizing, so there’s a very good chance that everything we know about Shi Huang Di is wrong, or at least more complicated than we are led to believe. If you go around burying scholars alive, you won’t fare well in the writings of subsequent scholars.⁷

We can’t be certain how many people he killed, but for the sake of ranking, I’m following the common accusation of a million.