Technically, the Warring States period is the last 200 years of Zhou dynasty, but it was during this time that seven generations of Kings of the Qin family brilliantly outmaneuvered, conquered, and united all the provinces.
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.
>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.
The food of kings, slathered in curry and sold on streets. How far they have fallen.
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.
So, there's two different batches of people who came up with a romanisation for Chinese. One was two British dudes, neither of whom actually spoke Chinese. That's where you see romanisations like Sun Tzu or Chiang Kai Shek or Peking. Everyone collectively agreed that it doesn't resemble how the word is supposed to be pronounced even remotely. Then later on, an actual team of Chinese people came up with pinyin, which at least tries to sound like what it's trying to represent.
I use pinyin for everything, both for consistency, and also because I don't actually know what the other way of writing things is. Everything I'm referencing as a source is in Chinese. I can look at the Chinese word and tell what the pinyin transliteration is. But to look up the other form of romanisation, I've have to go through and google everything and see if Wikipedia can tell me the answer, which is just super annoying to work with.
Any English translations for Song Yu? Would love to read something called "Poem of the Degenerate Pervert," but alas, Google doesn't know about it yet.
>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.
More accurately (and I do love nitpicking), Chinese writing is *no longer* phonetic. You can still see traces of its past phoneticity in certain words: 技、妓、歧, but some others diverge, like 支 (The contrast is more prominent in other Chinese languages: Cantonese has gei⁶, gei⁶, kei⁴, and zi¹.) But when you look at languages that have diverged earlier, like Hokkien, they all sound similar again: kī, kī, kî, and ki, which suggests that words with similar phonetic components would've had similar phonetics at the time of their coining, which has apparently been a while already, even by their first Oracle Bone attestations. The characters and writing were kept fossilized even though the languages diverged.
Good point! Another fun fact that has nothing to do with Qin Shihuang, but about Qin Dynasty. CCTV did a program a couple of years ago where they did readings of Qin Dynasty texts in their original pronunciation, and obviously, it sounds nothing like modern day Chinese. I have no idea what they're saying at all, even if I'm trying to follow along to the subtitles.
But some people from rural villages in Sha'anxi, who speak impenetrable local dialects, apparently can close their eyes and listen super close, and still pick out key words and kinda, sorta capture like 20% of meaning. Which is goddamn mindblowing considering it's been 2200 years.
This reminds me of something I've been wondering about for a while. I feel like when I hear people discussing Mandarin, they talk as if the written form of the language is the real one and the spoken form is just a way of encoding that, whereas with English we usually view it the other way around. Is that an accurate perception?
I'm not sure? I do know that dialects are still very much a thing in China that hasn't been wiped out by the standardisation of TV yet. I think, perhaps, this is because dialects are allowed to exist on TV (the Chinese sitcom I recommended, for example, has a lead character who speaks in a Sha'anxi dialect), and you're just expected to read the subtitles. And eeeeverything is subtitled on Chinese TV, including the commercials, exactly for those people who never learned how to speak Mandarin.
Which is a lot of people. Although it's mandatory to teach in Mandarin in school, nonetheless, if you're from a small rural village like me, the local school just can't find any teachers who speak proper Mandarin. So a lot of kids grow up never hearing any Mandarin except on the evening news.
I've got a relative who married a wife from a village 30 minutes away by car, and we have a completely uncrossable language barrier between us. She can't understand a word my family says. We can't understand a word she speaks. We'd have little translation issues all the time during family gatherings where I'd be like, "What does this word mean?" And she's like, "Um. I don't know how to say it in mandarin. It's like...it's like..." and then she'd use a English word to explain. And I'd turn to my family and be like, "Oh, it's this in our dialect."
I would guess that most of us could if we tried really hard, already knew approximately what it was about, and are really good at Classical Chinese XD
It also depends on which reconstruction they're using. There are definitely some that you could tell are Chinese, and then there's Baxter and Sagart's. (If they used Zhengzhang's, which is likely, it leans closer to Baxter-Sagart than "typical Chinese".)
That was a really fun read. For me, my impression of Qin Shihuang is not from his early life, but from the end of his life. A man who had built the greatest Empire on earth (as far as he knew) who had no one to leave it to, who was deeply aware that it teetered on the edge of collapse, and in his desperation, he relied on magic and sought immortality. It's really tragic. There's a reason there's quite a bit of historical fanfiction where Qin Shihuang gets his immortality wish granted.
Sorry, it's only taboo for *contemporary historians*. Because it's disrespectful to refer to Emperors by their first name. Obviously, for subsequent dynasties (and modern-day historians) it doesn't matter. Though, for modern historians, the rule of thumb is to refer to Emperors by their posthumous title, and you just have to remember that Emperor Hui of Han and Emperor Hui of Tang and Emperor Hui of Song and so on and so forth are all different people. But I figured that would be too confusing for a western audience, so I'm just using their names. I'm not sure why this custom is industry-standard.
A lot of Chinese people don't even know the given names of very famous Emperors, because all textbooks ever use is the posthumous title.
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.
>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.
The food of kings, slathered in curry and sold on streets. How far they have fallen.
Except his version definitely tasted worse, because Qin Dynasty has no good salt :P
I think you mean seven days a week, not seven hours.
I feex
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.
So, there's two different batches of people who came up with a romanisation for Chinese. One was two British dudes, neither of whom actually spoke Chinese. That's where you see romanisations like Sun Tzu or Chiang Kai Shek or Peking. Everyone collectively agreed that it doesn't resemble how the word is supposed to be pronounced even remotely. Then later on, an actual team of Chinese people came up with pinyin, which at least tries to sound like what it's trying to represent.
I use pinyin for everything, both for consistency, and also because I don't actually know what the other way of writing things is. Everything I'm referencing as a source is in Chinese. I can look at the Chinese word and tell what the pinyin transliteration is. But to look up the other form of romanisation, I've have to go through and google everything and see if Wikipedia can tell me the answer, which is just super annoying to work with.
Any English translations for Song Yu? Would love to read something called "Poem of the Degenerate Pervert," but alas, Google doesn't know about it yet.
I don't think so? I have no idea. Chinese poems are beyond my ability to translate.
>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.
More accurately (and I do love nitpicking), Chinese writing is *no longer* phonetic. You can still see traces of its past phoneticity in certain words: 技、妓、歧, but some others diverge, like 支 (The contrast is more prominent in other Chinese languages: Cantonese has gei⁶, gei⁶, kei⁴, and zi¹.) But when you look at languages that have diverged earlier, like Hokkien, they all sound similar again: kī, kī, kî, and ki, which suggests that words with similar phonetic components would've had similar phonetics at the time of their coining, which has apparently been a while already, even by their first Oracle Bone attestations. The characters and writing were kept fossilized even though the languages diverged.
Good point! Another fun fact that has nothing to do with Qin Shihuang, but about Qin Dynasty. CCTV did a program a couple of years ago where they did readings of Qin Dynasty texts in their original pronunciation, and obviously, it sounds nothing like modern day Chinese. I have no idea what they're saying at all, even if I'm trying to follow along to the subtitles.
But some people from rural villages in Sha'anxi, who speak impenetrable local dialects, apparently can close their eyes and listen super close, and still pick out key words and kinda, sorta capture like 20% of meaning. Which is goddamn mindblowing considering it's been 2200 years.
This reminds me of something I've been wondering about for a while. I feel like when I hear people discussing Mandarin, they talk as if the written form of the language is the real one and the spoken form is just a way of encoding that, whereas with English we usually view it the other way around. Is that an accurate perception?
I'm not sure? I do know that dialects are still very much a thing in China that hasn't been wiped out by the standardisation of TV yet. I think, perhaps, this is because dialects are allowed to exist on TV (the Chinese sitcom I recommended, for example, has a lead character who speaks in a Sha'anxi dialect), and you're just expected to read the subtitles. And eeeeverything is subtitled on Chinese TV, including the commercials, exactly for those people who never learned how to speak Mandarin.
Which is a lot of people. Although it's mandatory to teach in Mandarin in school, nonetheless, if you're from a small rural village like me, the local school just can't find any teachers who speak proper Mandarin. So a lot of kids grow up never hearing any Mandarin except on the evening news.
I've got a relative who married a wife from a village 30 minutes away by car, and we have a completely uncrossable language barrier between us. She can't understand a word my family says. We can't understand a word she speaks. We'd have little translation issues all the time during family gatherings where I'd be like, "What does this word mean?" And she's like, "Um. I don't know how to say it in mandarin. It's like...it's like..." and then she'd use a English word to explain. And I'd turn to my family and be like, "Oh, it's this in our dialect."
I would guess that most of us could if we tried really hard, already knew approximately what it was about, and are really good at Classical Chinese XD
It also depends on which reconstruction they're using. There are definitely some that you could tell are Chinese, and then there's Baxter and Sagart's. (If they used Zhengzhang's, which is likely, it leans closer to Baxter-Sagart than "typical Chinese".)
My friend just wrote about QSH as the trickster archetype; I think you might find it a fun read. https://xianyangcb.substack.com/p/the-80-20-rule-and-the-trickster
That was a really fun read. For me, my impression of Qin Shihuang is not from his early life, but from the end of his life. A man who had built the greatest Empire on earth (as far as he knew) who had no one to leave it to, who was deeply aware that it teetered on the edge of collapse, and in his desperation, he relied on magic and sought immortality. It's really tragic. There's a reason there's quite a bit of historical fanfiction where Qin Shihuang gets his immortality wish granted.
Truly a historical case study in paranoia and megalomania
Why is it taboo to refer to emperors by their given names?
Sorry, it's only taboo for *contemporary historians*. Because it's disrespectful to refer to Emperors by their first name. Obviously, for subsequent dynasties (and modern-day historians) it doesn't matter. Though, for modern historians, the rule of thumb is to refer to Emperors by their posthumous title, and you just have to remember that Emperor Hui of Han and Emperor Hui of Tang and Emperor Hui of Song and so on and so forth are all different people. But I figured that would be too confusing for a western audience, so I'm just using their names. I'm not sure why this custom is industry-standard.
A lot of Chinese people don't even know the given names of very famous Emperors, because all textbooks ever use is the posthumous title.