Chinese History for White People - Warring States and Qin Dynasty
Technically, the Warring States period is the last 200 years of Zhou dynasty, but it was during this time that seven generations1 of Kings of the Qin family brilliantly outmaneuvered, conquered, and united all the provinces. Ying Zheng would be the first among them to crown himself Emperor Qin Shi Huang, and when he inherited the throne from his father, the last Zhou King had already been slain and the Qin Kingdom was already an economic and military superpower among the remaining 7 Kingdoms (Qin, Qi, Chu, Yan, Han, Zhao, and Wei). So in many ways, the great achievements of the Qin occurred during the Warring States period. Yin Zheng2 would unite the realm in an 11 year campaign, but his dynasty would only last 15 years beyond that.
Despite it being a period of perpetual war and turmoil, the warring states period brought about an immense surge in philosophy- primarily because many of these philosophers were aggressively promoted by the Qin themselves. Fun facts about notable Chinese heroes of the Warring States era include:
Sun Wu: known for “The Art of War” which is actually titled “Sunzi's Art of War” because just about every noteworthy Chinese general wrote their own Art of War. China is baffled that he is weirdly popular with westerners, since there's dozens of more brilliant military scholars throughout Chinese history and he wouldn't make a top 10 list of Chinese generals, but might make a top 5 list of generals who wrote a book on it. Nonetheless, this one was written first, at the very beginning of the Warring States period and very pretty influential in that particular period.
King Goujian of Yue: a King whose kingdom was burnt to the ground and was taken as a POW. He managed to escape, build a coalition, and restore his Kingdom from literal ashes. That said, he's also really renown for his legendary sword, but unlike Excalibur, it's real. When his tomb was accidentally unearthed in 1965, the bronze sword they discovered therein was untarnished and sharper than anything archaeologists believed was possible for a bronze weapon. When dropped on a phone-book, it cut through 34 pages, and the scabbard had an air-tight fit, which in addition to a chemical coating protected the sword from 2700 years of decay. Historians still don’t know how to recreate the sword only using contemporary technology.
Xi Shi: first of the “Four Great Beauties” of Chinese history. Known for her “sickly beauty” similar to Victorian sensibilities, and also for inventing Chinese tap dance. When Goujian lost his kingdom, part of his revenge was to train women in espionage and send them as tribute to the King Fuchai of Wu, who had conquered him. Xi Shi was successful, and managed to get Fuchai to execute his most brilliant general. Once liberated, she retired to a life of fishing with Goujian's advisor.
Song Yu: first of the “Four Great Heartthrobs”, notable for writing “The Poem of the Degenerate Pervert”. A man named Deng Tuzi warned the King of Chu never to let the beautiful Song Yu enter his harem or he'd seduce all of his wives. Song Yu responded by describing to the King how his neighbor is super hot and stares at him all day, but he never touched her, while his accuser has an ugly wife with messy unkempt hair that he had 5 kids with, so clearly between the two of them, Deng Tuzi is the pervert. Because Deng Tuzi will sleep with women who aren’t even good looking. To this day, Deng Tuzi is synonymous with pervert. Song Yu is the earliest Chinese writer on record to write about women—most of the mythological stories about goddesses were penned by him.
Bian Que: A nickname that literally means “harpy”, as his real name is lost to history (Wikipedia gets this embarrassingly wrong btw, listing his name as “someone from Qin”). He was an extremely famous doctor, and for as much shit as I'm inclined to give Chinese medicine, most of it was actually just medicine and we only call something Chinese medicine today if it specifically doesn't work. Bian Que wrote books on diagnostics, pulse taking, and quarantine, which back then involved burning the entire village and everyone in it to the ground if prognosis looked unmanageable. But it was effective- plagues were less common than in Europe.
Laozi: known for the “Dao de Jing”, an essay that gave the most definitive proposal on what Daoist morality should consist of. For this he was awarded the 3rd highest position in the Celestial Bureaucracy. The opening line is “People are fundamentally good”, which if you know anything about China at all, is so egregiously wrong it must obviously be a malicious deception. He doesn't even justify it—he just thinks it’s obvious. Clearly a trap so he can sell you fireproof potions (actually available from local Daoists today but you have to take them for 900 days without missing a day or they won't work).
Kong Qiu: a 189cm tall musclebro philosopher from Shandong (which is not Korea, no matter what a Korean tells you) notable for converting most of his disciples by beating the shit out of them with a solid iron walking stick. He was pretty popular at the time for actively proselytizing that aristocrats had to practice noblesse oblige, just as serfs had duties to their masters. And that everyone had a right to education. Mostly venerated for the radical and innovative idea that education was something everyone should pursue if possible. At one point is quoted as saying, “it's polite for men and women to keep their distance”, which future generations would interpret as “only scoundrels associate themselves with women”, which by the 20th century was understood to mean: “women should be locked in a separate room of the house and if it catches fire, it is morally wrong for you to unlock the door”. Better known in the west as Confucius.
Mengzi: philosopher considered second only to Confucius—the Plato to his Socrates. Believed the citizens of a nation were more important than a ruler, and developed the idea of a civil servant. Advocated for mercy, lighter punishments, lighter taxes, and made a case that cruel rulers fall to ruin without fail. Expanded the Mandate of Heaven to say that not only was the rule of the Emperor contingent on his competence and prosperity, but that peasants have an obligation to criticize and usurp him. Believed territory shouldn't be acquired through war, but rather each state should pay tribute in hopes of joining your empire.
Mozi: founded the philosophical school of “Mohism”, considered at the time to be the main rival to Confucianism. Mohists believed in the almost Christian idea of caring about the welfare of strangers as much as you would anyone else- and as such were pacifists. They advocated for democratic elections and “state utilitarianism”, which unlike hedonic utilitarianism that prioritizes the utils of persons, prioritizes the health and survival of society. They also spilled a lot of ink on logic and mathematics. Mozi specifically is credited with developing axioms of Euclidian geometry, maths in different bases, Newton's 1st and 3rd laws of motion, built prisms and lenses, the idea of acoustics, the idea of an atom, a glider capable of 2 consecutive hours of flight, and described a “mechanical bird” wind-up flying toy. Mohists disciples were incredibly useful as siege engineers, since building ingenious fortifications didn't violate their pacifist ideals. Once Qin ended the war, there wasn't much use for them anymore- politicians found their logic pursuits to be trivial and the next generation of scholars found their written dialect impenetrable- and without disciples their school faded into history.
Shi Lu, Zheng Guo, and Li Bing: the 3 Great Hydraulic Engineers of the Qin Kingdom. Their works are all still maintained to this day. Shi Lu made the world's oldest contour canal, and the first canal to connect to river basins (the Yangzi and the Pearl River). Zheng Guo was sent by an enemy kingdom to get Qin to waste money on a massive irrigation system, but it backfired when he actually completed the project and greatly expanded the fertile plains of the Yellow River. Li Bing diverted a portion of the Yangzi entirely that was known for perennial floods, and made Sichuan the most agriculturally productive region in China. I told you China takes its hydraulic engineer heroes very seriously.
King Hui of Wei: known for having possibly the best ministers in Chinese history, and then removing every legendarily talented person with surgical precision. People banished from his court include Mengzi, Shang Yang, Zhang Qi (an important diplomat for Qin), and Sun Bin—the grandson of Sunzi—who became the Kingdom of Qi's (not Qin) greatest general and wrote his own Art of War.
Bai Qi: Qin Kingdom's most notorious general. He gained the nickname “Human Butcher,” and it's estimated he's responsible for over 1 million deaths—due to the King's policy of accepting no surrenders. Undefeated in battle, but was ultimately executed for refusing to to command battles he thought were lost causes; he preferred execution to losing his perfect record. When he died, Qin very deliberately changed to a more merciful policy to appear magnanimous without needing to be generous.
Shang Yang: a philosopher of the “Legalist” school (founded by other notable philosophers I won't cover here), which advocated transparent rule of law over aristocratic arbitration- which also defined a lot of civil service positions to be filled on objective qualifications rather than nepotism. It also specified that laws applied equally to aristocrats as to peasants, privatized land ownership through military service, and other meticulous policy reforms. He wrote something that if you squint at it enough might even look like a Constitution for the Qin Kingdom, the most important part of which was allowing peasants to earn land, money, or even noble titles through enlisting for military service. For this he was drawn and quartered, and his entire family was executed.
Despite executing Shang Yan, King Huiwen of Qin kept the constitution enacted by his father. For this, he faced several assassination attempts, which allowed him to then execute rebel lords for treason and consolidate his rule. The meritocracy attracted talent from across the realm, and in this way Qin rose to supreme dominance over the other Kingdoms.
This is going to become a pattern in Chinese history. The person who brings about reforms that directly lead to a golden age most often dies horribly, as the reforms threaten the interest of entrenched powers. But the benefits of the reforms draws support from aspiring new powers, and if the reform survives a golden age ensues until new dysfunctions develop.
So why then is Yin Zheng possibly the most famous Emperor in Chinese history? The English word “China” bears Qin's namesake (the Chinese call their own country Zhong Guo, or “Middle Country” since it's the center of the world). Yet if you ask when China truly began as a nation, Qin Dynasty is often considered the start. Even now, his legacy is controversial—in Chinese history textbooks, he’s often accused of book burning3, executing Confucian scholars4, draconian laws, sky-high taxes5, and heavily drafting peasants for projects that only served his own ego6.
He standardized all measurements, road and axle lengths, and the characters used in writing7. Above all, Yin Zheng officially ended the feudal lord system that had existed in China since at least the Zhou Dynasty, instead taking on the Warring States philosopher’s ideas of a nation ran by peasant-born civil servant, employees of a central authority.
Social mobility was the pillar upon which Qin was built that allowed it to draw talent and motivate its people. But once the Warring States Period ended, and Qin had officially conquered the world, there were no more profitable wars to be had. The only lands left were barbarian lands of nomadic herders, unsuitable for farming and far away from the prosperous central regions of China. Shang Yang was aware of this when he wrote his laws, and his work was never intended to be the final form of the nation’s constitution, but the whole murdering him and everybody he knows thing might have disrupted the guy’s project.
Unrest grew, and Yin Zheng suppressed it with heavy labor drafts (corvee) on infrastructure projects. Zheng started the Great Wall (it became tradition that every Emperor after that added little bit more to it). He built dams and canals. He built highways (there's even a dirt road built in Qin dynasty that is still in use today, packed earth so tightly that grass hasn't reclaimed it in over two millennia). While these projects would return their investment for the dynasty that followed8, they were merely an unsustainable gulag for the Qin.
It needed solved, but Yin Zheng was running out of time. His own crown prince— Fusu—wanted a return to feudal nobility because he thought it was unfair the other talented Princes would retire to become normal citizens. The two openly fought about this many times, and Fusu was sent to the frontier to oversee the Great Wall- which he interpreted as exile9. Meanwhile Yin Zheng had become increasingly paranoid as a result of fallen nobility spending their fortunes on dozens of attempted assassinations.
And knowing that none of his sons were capable of holding this Empire together as soon as he died, with so many more reforms that he had never gotten around to, he began a desperate quest for immortality. Some Daoist got him to drink mercury- which admittedly is pretty cool and magical looking. This might have effected his temperament, and at any rate eventually put him in an early grave (with an army of terracotta soldiers10).
With the Crown Prince in the frontier, the youngest prince who was with Yin Zheng when he died—Huhai—stole the Imperial seal and wrote a letter in his father's name designating himself heir instead and demanding the Crown Prince's suicide—which Fusu figured was the natural conclusion of his exile and obeyed. Huhai then ordered the execution of all of his siblings—including the princesses who had no claim to the throne—a move which the historian consensus was because “he's just a remarkably evil little shit”.
The new teenage Emperor figured that now he could lay back and enjoy the luxuries of the world, but almost the second that Yin Zheng and his intimidation over the world disappeared, every single former Six Kingdoms nobility began organising and funding revolts. Huhai had left his Chancellor, Zhao Gao, in full control of the court and explicitly told Zhao Gao to never bother him with work, so he had no idea a civil war was even happening until the rebel soldiers were on his doorsteps.
And thus, an Empire that took seven generations to build was destroyed in a mere two and a half years.
A streak of seven competent monarchs who all have the exact same goal is unheard of anywhere else in Chinese history, and possible world history too?
It’s super taboo for contemporary historians to refer to Emperors by their given name; instead, they’re usually referred to by the Year Name that they use (for example, Tang Dynasty Emperor Li Shimin used “Zhen Guan” as his year name, and the first year of his rule would be Zhen Guan Prime, and the second year Zhen Guan 2, and so on and so forth), and this is all well and good, except many Emperors would use several year names throughout their rule, making things very confusing. Modern day historians use the title that Emperors are given posthumously, as a summarisation of their rule, except there are only so many good, praiseful words, so you end up with 16 different Emperors who are all named Wen. So for the sake of clarity, I’m just going to refer to all Emperors by name.
He did this in order to standardise writing—the books would be translated into Qin text and remain available. A copy of the original was always kept in his imperial library.
Only those who opposed his Magistrate System reforms, and those who lied to him about immortality.
Yes, fair.
Like the Great Wall.
Because Chinese is not phonetic, the standardisation of writing likely played an immense role in keeping the country united even as spoken languaged drifted into unintelligible dialects that persist to this day.
Though, I think the benefits of standardisation and unification were a bigger boon to merchants than even the roads and infrastructure, as entire provinces could specialise entirely in silk production, confident that grain would be provied from elsewhere in the Empire.
Yin Zheng left the Crown Prince with command over the Grand Marshal of the Qin military, so exile was likely not Yin Zheng’s intent. Most likely, he merely intended Fusu to take a look at the sort of thing that would never be accomplished with a feudal lord system.
This wasn’t just a vanity project. The custom of Zhou Emperors was to bury their servants, harem, royal guards, and sometimes even their court with them to bring into the afterlife. Yin Zheng’s intent is that since it would be arrogant and tacky for anyone to have a more lavish funeral than the first Emperor, if clay soldiers are good enough for him, then everyone else would have to settle for clay too. He’s also frequently attributed with killing the artisans who made his terracotta soldiers, but that was actually done by his son, Huhai.
Some pointless fun facts about Qin Shi Huang:
1. His favourite food was fish, but he hated having to pick out fish bones, so a dish was invented for him of fish meatballs, with a hollow centre filled with fish broth.
2. He grew up a hostage in the Kingdom of Zhao with his mother, who he really seemed to have loved very much. When his father passed away and left him the throne, he let his mother have as many young, handsome consorts as she wanted. He didn't mind that she had bastards with them. He only got upset when she tried to have him assassinated so her bastards could have the throne instead.
3. He never had a wife, only consorts. It's believed that the reason for this is "women would only slow down his work". He's known for inventing the 007 work day (midnight to midnight, seven days a week), and set himself a quota that he had to process 60kg of bamboo reports from his ministers per day. Sometimes, he would get shoulder injuries from lifting and reading through too many bamboo scrolls, and would continue working with his arm in a cast.
4. His child-rearing strategy is like many geniuses, "This is something that has to be taught?? Can't you just look at it and figure shit out? This is really not that hard, what are you, retarded or something?" Which is why all of his children (over 20 sons and 10 daughters) were all terrified of him. He let Confucian scholars raise his Crown Prince, Fusu, more or less explicitly because he didn't like children, didn't want to see them, and just assumed that once you grew up, you automatically unlocked the ability to run an Empire.
5. The Imperial colour of the Qin Dynasty was black, not gold like Han Dynasty afterwards. So Qin Shi Huang would've been dressed in all black most of the time.
6. He sounds like a cold, hard tyrant, but he's plenty capable of being soft and sweet with his ministers when he needed them. When one of his Generals wanted to retire, Qin Shi Huang wrote him letters like they're high school crushes, "I never thought you would abandon me too when I needed you the most. Why would you be so cold to me?"
7. Qin Shi Huang was obsessed with touring his Empire. Once he was done conquering the world, he spent most of his time travelling it. Han Dynasty scholars once again see this as a luxurious waste meant to soothe his ego, but I think he was merely trying to get a sense of things on the ground, especially for newly conquered territory, and ensuring that local magistrates were doing their jobs properly.
8. Qin Shi Huang pardoned a man that a judge had sentenced to death, because he identified him as a rare political talent. He felt guilty about this action to the day he died, because it went against his Legalist beliefs that the law should apply equally to everyone, whether Emperor or peasant, whether one was a genius or not. The man he saved was Zhao Gao, the chancellor who would eventually help Huhai steal the imperial seal and forge his claim to the throne.
First- I really appreciate these history lessons. As someone who only learned this stuff from video games, it's very helpful to get an overview of the actual history (even if it's just a quick and dirty guide for white people who don't speak Chinese).
Second- what's with the romanizations? I've always seen them written as "Sun Tzu" and "Tao Te Ching", not "Sunzi", "Sun Wu", or "Dao De Jing". I think it's better if you stick to the commonly used romanizations for these names, even if the actual pronunciation is a bit different.