A Thousand Pieces of Gold (10 page)

The First Emperor built thousands of miles of straight, tree-lined imperial highways radiating from Xianyang toward the outposts of his empire. He inaugurated regular tours of inspection, traveling over his new roads and impressing the people by giving them a glimpse of the pomp and majesty of his entourage.

He came under the influence of Xu Fu, a Taoist scholar-magician from Qi, who was a skillful navigator. The seaman convinced the emperor to finance an excursion to the three islands of Penglai. On these isles in the Eastern Sea, according to Xu Fu, dwelled celestial beings in possession of a magic elixir that rendered them immortal. Equipped with many ships containing food, water, tools, and weapons, and amid high expectations, Xu Fu set out on an expedition with thousands of virgin maidens and youths of good family. They never returned. Historians believe that Xu Fu and his entourage set sail for Japan and settled there.

After waiting in vain for Xu Fu, the First Emperor reluctantly began his journey home. As he reached the Yangtze River, the weather suddenly changed. Gale-force winds churned the river water into giant waves and delayed his passage. Blaming the inclement weather on the river goddess whose temple stood on a hill nearby, the infuriated monarch ordered 3000 convicts to cut down all the trees on the hillside bordering the riverbank in retaliation. As further punishment, he demanded that the mountain be painted red, since red was the color worn by condemned criminals.

A year later, in 218
B.C.E.
, the First Emperor narrowly escaped another assassination attempt while on his second tour of inspection.

Zhang Liang was descended from an aristocratic family from Haan. His father and grandfather had both been prime ministers of Haan at one time. In 230
B.C.E.
Qin had defeated Haan and the King of Haan had been captured. Qin soldiers had killed many Haan nobles and deliberately left their bodies lying on the ground unburied. Seeking revenge, Zhang Liang had sold all the valuables he could lay his hands on and carefully made his plans.

He engaged a powerful weight lifter renowned for his strength and built for him a heavy metal cone weighing 120
jin
(132 pounds). The two young men hid among the mountain bushes along the First Emperor’s route and watched the impressive procession as it went by beneath them. At a signal from Zhang Liang, the muscular assassin hurled the cone at the First Emperor’s carriage, shattering it to smithereens.

The First Emperor, however, had planned for just such an event. He was traveling in the second of two identical royal carriages, and the assassins had ambushed the wrong coach. Once again he escaped unscathed.

Despite an extensive search, the assassins were never captured, but the First Emperor did discover that Zhang Liang was the instigator. He placed a price on the young man’s head, but his close brush with death troubled him. He realized that the feudal nobility of the six conquered states had not disappeared. They were lying in wait, like a many-headed hydra, to do him harm. Anger and fear deepened his paranoia and spurred him on in his search for immortality. He became increasingly reclusive, trusting no one except those who filled his mind with tales of the supernatural.

Three years later the First Emperor embarked on his third tour. Still yearning for the elixir of immortality, he dispatched a number of seafarers to search for the elusive mariner, Xu Fu. One of the search party returned and presented the monarch with a five-character message purportedly written by the immortals. The note predicted, “Qin’s demise will be brought about by
hu.
”

The word
hu
was another name for
Hun.
Both were collective terms for the barbarian tribes that lived beyond China’s northwest frontier. Unlike the Chinese, who considered themselves civilized and lived by cultivating the land, the Huns were nomads and lived by hunting, fishing, and raiding. Before returning to his capital, the First Emperor inspected this border and saw for himself the devastation, disease, mutilation, and death inflicted on his people by the savagery of his northern neighbors.

On reaching Xianyang, the First Emperor dispatched one of his ablest generals, Meng Tian, with a force of 300,000 men to clear the Huns from the Ordos Desert. When this had been accomplished, he further ordered Meng Tian to transform his army into a labor force and build a great wall to keep out the nomads for good. He called this
wan li chang cheng
(Great Wall of Ten Thousand
Li
), “the most warlike fortification in the world.”

Extending thousands of miles and visible to astronauts circling the earth from outer space, the Great Wall stretches across three main regions. The first area lies close to Beijing, climbs across convoluted mountains, and ends at the Gulf of Liaodong near Korea. The second runs across the Ordos Steppes and traverses miles of quicksand within the loop of the Yellow River. The third strides across the western edge of China separating the Tibetan frontier from the Gobi Desert. Portions of the Great Wall are twenty-five feet tall and stand at an elevation of six thousand feet.

Never in the history of humankind before or since has labor been mobilized on such a grand scale. Working conditions were deplorable. Much of the northwestern frontier was desolate and wild, with endless sand dunes, deadly quicksand, plunging chasms, and precipitous mountains. During the building of the wall, it is estimated that 400,000 people died from disease, pestilence, malnutrition, and poor working conditions. Although they were not buried within the wall but only close to the wall, the Great Wall became known as the “longest cemetery in the world.”

When workers died, the labor crews were replenished by conscripts and convicts. After unification, the First Emperor posted new codified laws throughout his empire and handed out harsh retribution for those who disobeyed. Even those who deviated merely from his laws of weights and measures were sent off to work on one of his endless building projects: the Great Wall, imperial road system, canals and bridges, palaces in Xianyang, and his mausoleum.

To pay for and staff his projects, the First Emperor levied heavy taxes and instituted compulsory service. He divided families in every village into left and right halves and decreed that every man living on the left side of the village gate was to report to the frontier for work under General Meng Tian. As more and more workers perished, the remaining peasants were unable to cultivate the land as required. Villages suffered from lack of laborers, shortage of food, and general discontent.

Shiji
tells us that in the year 213
B.C.E.
the First Emperor held a banquet at his palace in Xianyang to celebrate that year’s bountiful harvest and Meng Tian’s victory over the Huns. Led by the senior minister, all the officials rose to drink a toast to the emperor and were full of praise for His Majesty’s accomplishments. Among the din of congratulations, however, was a single voice of dissent. One of the guests, a Confucian scholar named Chun from the former state of Qi, rashly and openly criticized the emperor. He started by saying that unlike the male relatives of the ancient kings, the sons and brothers of the First Emperor remained commoners without fiefs. He then sounded a warning that “no empire can endure for long unless it is modeled on antiquity.”

Perceiving this to be an attack on himself, Li Si was outraged. By then, he was prime minister and enjoyed the full confidence of the emperor. He rose to rebut Chun and said accusingly, “There are some who study the past only in order to discredit the present. If this type of behavior is allowed to continue, the imperial power will decline. We must stop this at once.”

Playing on the emperor’s paranoia and megalomania, Li Si submitted a throne memorial. Wishing to preserve forever his sovereign’s power and, by extension, his own power, he recommended the erection of a permanent barrier between past and present by destroying the past. To all future generations, the world was to begin with the First Emperor, who now issued a decree that all books in the bureau of history, save for the records of Qin, were to be burned. “These Confucian scholars,” said Li Si, “use their learning to refute our laws and confuse the people. By destroying their books and all historical records except for those of Qin, dangerous thoughts would no longer exist and nobody could use the past to discredit the present anymore.”

At that time paper had not yet been invented. Books were written on bamboo slips about nine inches long, tied together with silk threads, and rolled into bundles with leather thongs like the shutters of a window. Words were written with a brush or engraved vertically onto the bamboo with a knife. General Meng Tian, who built the Great Wall, supposedly first invented the writing brush by binding rabbit or camel hair to a wooden shaft with string and glue and using pine soot as ink. As more and more people chose brush and ink over the knife for writing, the script itself lost its angularity and adopted more flowing lines.

Calligraphy is considered the mother of art in China. Accomplished calligraphers are revered, and beautiful script is cherished as great paintings are in the West. Words are written with a brush, and a writer’s emotions are captured and transmitted through the direction, speed, and power of the brush strokes. My grandfather used to adorn his room with proverbs written in large black characters on rectangular sheets of paper, hung vertically. Once he told me that there is an intimate connection between Chinese words and paintings, that literature and art are inextricably linked. When I was a little girl in Shanghai 2200 years after the time of the First Emperor, my first task when I got home from school was to put water in the receptacle portion of my inkstone and make fresh ink by grinding an ink stick against the stone’s moistened flat surface, probably in the same way as was done since the time of Meng Tian. Then I would start my homework by writing ten different characters into a special exercise book with brush and ink, copying each word five times in an attempt to improve my handwriting.

Since printing was also unknown during the time of the First Emperor, books were laboriously engraved (or “brushed”) separately by hand. The educated treated them with reverence and treasured them above all else. Now they were suddenly told to burn the books within thirty days of the emperor’s order being issued. The only exceptions were books on medicine, divination, and agriculture. “As for those who wish to learn,” added Li Si, in an attempt to impose imperial control on thought as well as education, “let them learn from the state officials.”

Some scholars simply could not bear to burn their books. To those who loved to read, books enshrined the wisdom and knowledge of great writers who came before them. They were not lifeless stacks of bamboo slips but fascinating minds beckoning with their magic wands. A few did hide their precious rolls of bamboo underground or between walls, but those who were discovered were killed outright or branded on the face as convicts and sent to work on the Great Wall.

According to
Shiji,

Over 2000 years later Mao instituted his version of
fen shu keng ru,
“burning the books and burying the scholars.” A seemingly minor incident took place in 1965, one year before the beginning of the Cultural Revolution. The vice mayor of Beijing was a writer-historian by the name of Wu Han. Wu had written a play that portrayed the unjust dismissal of an honest bureaucrat by a Ming dynasty emperor. Mao, who had just purged a straight-talking general named Peng Dehuai, took exception. He claimed that Wu’s play was a veiled criticism of Mao’s dismissal of Peng. He accused Wu of employing literature as a disguise for anti-Party activities, and he relieved him of his office. Later Wu was further condemned as an “enemy of the people” for “using the past to attack the present.” He was imprisoned and died there. During the Cultural Revolution, which ensued, schooling was abolished, teachers were attacked, and millions of teenage Red Guards went on a rampage of torture, murder, and destruction throughout China.

As time went on, the First Emperor became increasingly anxious about the possibility of dying. Although he was the most powerful man in the world, he was riddled with fear, and happiness eluded him. He consulted the Taoist magicians, who advised him to conduct his affairs in secret so as to avoid evil spirits. He was told that by withdrawing himself from other men, he could gain union with the true Tao and be transformed into a Divine Being or a True Man. As such, he would be immortal.

In 212
B.C.E.
his Taoist advisers could no longer invent any more plausible excuses for not obtaining the elixir of immortality. Fearing for their lives, they fled the capital without notice.

The emperor was enraged.
Shiji
relates:

In his frustration and anger, he turned against the literati in his court and ordered 460 scholars to be buried alive. His own eldest son, Prince Fu Su, protested this sentence as unnecessarily harsh, predicting that it would cause general discontent. For daring to speak out, the prince was banished
from the capital and sent to the Great Wall to oversee the work of General Meng Tian.

Meanwhile, Li Si, the prime minister, had become the second most powerful man in the country, subordinate only to the emperor. He was now in his sixties, and his children were either married or affianced to the children of the emperor. On his eldest son’s return to the capital from the commandery of Sanchuan, where he was chief administrator, Li Si gave a celebratory banquet.
Shiji
reports: