INTRODUCTION
The Chinese, with their veneration of ancestors and reverence for the rites and practices of the past, have from early times been indefatigable keepers of historical records. It is not surprising, therefore, that works of history should occupy a place of particular importance in their literature. The text from which the chapters translated here are drawn, the Shi ji, Records of the Grand Historian — or Historical Records, as the title is sometimes translated — is in fact one of the most widely read and influential of all works of early Chinese literature, and its author, Sima Qian (145?–89? BC), commands among readers of Chinese a respect and admiration comparable to that accorded Herodotus or Thucydides in the Western tradition.
The Shi Ji was planned, and perhaps written in part, by Sima Qian’s father, Sima Tan (d. 110 BC), an official who held the title of Taishi, or Grand Historian, at the court of Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty but whose actual duties pertained more to astronomy and the regulation of the calendar. Sima Qian succeeded to his father’s post and title and, obedient to his father’s dying request, set about bringing the proposed work of history to completion. After some seven years of labor, however, his efforts were unexpectedly interrupted by a tragic turn of events.
China at this time was frequently troubled by raids from the Xiongnu, a nomadic people living in the desert north of China. Emperor Wu, determined to put an end to the incursions, repeatedly dispatched large military forces to the desert region in an attempt to capture the Xiongnu ruler, known by the title of Shanyu, or at least force him to acknowledge fealty to the Han. During one such expedition in 99 BC, a young military commander named Li Ling led a force of several thousand men in a daring raid deep into enemy territory, but after desperate fighting he was finally forced to surrender. Emperor Wu, who expected his military leaders to die in battle, was enraged when he learned of the surrender, and the other court officials united in condemnation of Li’s action. Only Sima Qian, who had known and admired Li Ling in the past, spoke out in his defense. For such temerity he was charged with attempting to deceive the ruler and handed over to the law officials for investigation, a process that involved imprisonment and torture. Eventually he was sentenced to undergo the penalty of castration. Customarily, a man of honor would commit suicide before submitting to such disgrace. But, as Qian explains in a letter to a friend translated in appendix 2 of this volume, he chose to suffer the shame of mutilation in order that he might finish the writing of his history. This price of completion, ghastly as it was, has assured him a place of honor among the world’s great historians.
The Shi ji is monumental in scope and aim, running to 130 chapters and covering the entire known history of the Chinese people from its beginnings down to the time of the historian, a period of well over two thousand years. In addition, it includes chapters describing the lands and peoples of the areas of central Asia, Korea, and Vietnam that border China. It is thus in effect a history of the entire world as known to the Chinese of this early period.
To impose order on this vast array of material, Sima Qian devised an entirely new historiographical form. He divided his history into five large sections, arranging his material by subject and suggesting by the section in which he placed it something of its importance and relative reliability. His work opens with twelve chapters entitled benji, or “Basic Annals,” which deal with the early dynasties of Chinese history or, in the case of the Han dynasty, with the reigns of individual rulers. Next come ten “Chronological Tables” that list in graph form the important events of the past with their dates. These are followed by eight “Treatises” on such subjects as rites, music, astronomy, religious affairs, water control, and economics. Thirty chapters entitled “Hereditary Houses” come next, dealing for the most part with the histories of the various feudal states of ancient China. The work concludes with seventy chapters entitled liezhuan, “Biographies” or “Accounts” devoted to the lives of famous personages or to the foreign lands with which China had contact.
These five large divisions of the history support and supplement one another in various ways, the different chapters pertaining to a single event or personage often varying subtly in treatment and angle of approach. Thus, although there is a certain degree of cross-referencing, one must take care to read all pertinent sections of the work in order to gain a full picture of any given subject. This type of formal arrangement, known as the “annal and biography form,” was adopted in later dynastic histories compiled under official auspices, and it exercised a great influence on the development of Korean and Japanese historiography.
In two earlier volumes of translations from the Shi ji published in 1961 and reissued in slightly revised form in 1993, I presented material dealing with the founding and early years of the Han, the dynasty under which the historian lived and worked. In the present volume I have moved backward in time somewhat to focus on the chapters of Sima Qian’s work that relate to the preceding Qin, or Ch’in, dynasty, founded in 221 BC when the king of the state of Qin brought all of China under his rule and assumed the title of First Emperor of the Qin. The First Emperor, long regarded as one of the most influential and noteworthy of all Chinese rulers, has in recent years become the center of particular interest because of the spectacular life-size terracotta figures of Qin period warriors that were discovered in excavations near his mausoleum in 1974.
Sima Qian began his history with a chapter entitled “Basic Annals of the Five Emperors,” which describes five legendary sages who were said to have ruled the nation in the dawn of Chinese history. He followed this with three chapters dealing respectively with the Xia, Shang (or Yin), and Zhou dynasties, the Three Dynasties of antiquity that ruled China in succession in the early historical period. Sima Qian’s account of the Xia and Shang dynasties need not concern us here, but it should be noted that much of what he tells us about the early centuries of the Zhou dynasty has been confirmed or supplemented in recent years through the results of archaeological research. Thus from the late years of the Shang, and certainly from the Zhou on, we are on firm historical ground, though dates in this early period are uncertain.
The Zhou, which was probably founded around 1045 BC, appears to have exercised fairly effective control over a wide area of northern China during the early years of its rule. But later, particularly after its capital was moved east to Luoyang in 770 BC, its power rapidly waned, and China was thereafter ruled by a number of feudal states that acknowledged nominal fealty to the Zhou king but in fact behaved as virtually independent political units.
The Zhou royal house, despite its political weakness, continued in existence until its overthrow by the state of Qin in 256 BC. Sima Qian might therefore have begun his account of the Qin dynasty at that point and still preserved chronological continuity in his narrative. But, as he makes clear in his remarks on Qin history, he was intensely interested in origins, in the history of a state or ruling family not only in its period of greatest glory but in the long centuries that preceded that era of flowering, for in the actions of those earlier years, he believed, lay the key to an understanding of its later successes or failures. He therefore began his account of the Qin dynasty with a “Basic Annals of Qin” chapter that in chronological terms runs parallel to his account of the Zhou dynasty and traces the beginnings of the Qin ruling family back to the age of the mythic Five Emperors. The chapter then describes the history of the state of Qin from its start as a tiny feudal domain on the far northwestern border of the Chinese cultural sphere, down through its subsequent stages of growth until the moment when, having gradually amassed power over the centuries, it was able to swallow up its rivals and unite China under a single rule.
Sima Qian then added a second chapter in annals form in order to present a greatly expanded account of the momentous reign of the First Emperor, and that of his successor, the Second Emperor, when the dynasty was swiftly toppled by the rebellion that brought the Han dynasty to power. The events in the close of this chapter, therefore, dovetail with those described in the opening pages of my earlier volumes on the Han.
Sima Qian’s dramatic portrait of the First Emperor in this chapter is one of the highlights of his history, skillfully juxtaposing examples of the grandiose rhetoric employed by the monarch to celebrate his achievements with grim accounts of the cruelty, folly, and oppression of the populace for which he has been remembered in later ages. But Sima Qian’s preceding chapter, in part because of the scanty sources available to him, is less colorful and at times consists of little more than a dry recital of military actions and steps in the slow process of territorial expansion.
To better understand the events briefly referred to in the annals section of the Shi ji, one must always turn to the relevant chapters of the liezhuan section of Sima Qian’s history, which contains biographies of the prominent statesmen, military leaders, and thinkers of the period. I have accordingly followed my translations of the two annals pertaining to the Qin with ten chapters or excerpts from chapters dealing with the lives of men who played an important role in Qin history.
In all these chapters on Qin history, and in particular in the often seemingly disconnected welter of entries in “The Basic Annals of Qin” chapter, there are three overall processes that the reader will want to keep close watch on. First, of course, is Qin’s slow but virtually unceasing territorial expansion, a process often described in traditional Chinese histories as canshi , or “eating away in silkworm fashion.” Qin, beginning as a tiny feudal domain situated on the Wei River in present day Gansu Province, bit by bit expanded to the east and south, gradually moving its capital eastward until it had established it at Xianyang near the modern city of Xi’an in Shaanxi. This is the heart of the so-called “land within the passes,” a rich agricultural area protected on the north and south by mountain barriers and on the east by the Yellow River, where it flows south from the Ordos region and then turns abruptly east toward the sea.
At first Qin’s ambition seemed to be merely to expand eastward as far as the Yellow River, thus fulfilling an ancient prophecy that the descendants of its ruling family would one day “water their horses at the Yellow River.” In time, however, Qin crossed the Yellow River to attack the states to the east, continuing its seemingly inevitable expansion in that direction, as well as southwest into the area of present-day Sichuan and southward into the Yangtze valley.
A second and closely related process is that by which Qin incorporated newly acquired territory into its administrative system in the form of xian, or districts, and later in larger administrative units known as jun, provinces or commanderies. The junxian, or province and district system, as it came to be known, apparently did not originate in Qin and was employed in other feudal states of the period as well. But Qin was noteworthy for the rapidity and thoroughness with which it adopted the system.
The founders of the Zhou dynasty, when they had overthrown the preceding Shang, parceled out fiefs to the members of their family and to the distinguished men of other families who had assisted them to power. The rulers of the individual feudal states in turn bestowed grants of land within their domains on members of their own families or meritorious officials, until China became a veritable patchwork of tiny political entities. Over the centuries, however, the better governed of these small feudal domains absorbed their weaker neighbors, until at times they came to pose a serious threat to the ruling family of the state in which they were situated, or to the Zhou kings themselves. This happened notably in the states of Jin and Qi, where ministerial families in time actually deposed and replaced the ruling family of the state.
Qin, which had a later start than the states of eastern China — the traditional date for its founding is 897 BC — at first followed the practice of the other states, handing out fiefs to its prominent statesmen and military leaders and honoring them with the title of marquis. But, perhaps because it could observe what was happening in the older states, Qin seems to have been highly wary of the dangers involved in such granting of territorial domains, and it seized on every excuse to take back the land that had already been handed out. Clearly it preferred to exercise direct jurisdictional control over its territory through the province and district system described above. Often, as will be seen, when it acquired new territories, particularly if they were in outlying regions, it forcibly transported large numbers of its population to the area in order to insure more effective control and quicker assimilation of the local populace.
In view of this background, it is not surprising that in 221 BC, when the Qin ruler united all of China under a single authority, he firmly rejected any suggestion that he dole out land in fiefs to his brothers or sons, as had the founders of previous dynasties. Instead he extended the provincial system to embrace the entire empire, creating an administration that consisted of thirty-six provinces and an unknown number of districts. While undergoing innumerable modifications over the centuries, this is essentially the administrative system that has remained in effect in China down to the present time.
A third process characteristic of the Qin, which began at the urging of the Legalist statesman Wei Yang, or Lord Shang, and is described in his biography below, was the promulgation of a code of laws to replace the largely unwritten complex of customs and rites that had governed the people in the past and continued to do so in the other feudal states. Qin’s laws are noted for their harsh penalties and detailed regulations, and for the equality with which they were applied to high and low alike, regardless of social rank. Qin’s legal system, and the philosophy of government underlying it, was one of the aspects of Qin government most vocally criticized by the founders of the succeeding Han dynasty, who had been commoners under Qin rule and had experienced in person its more oppressive aspects. They therefore made a show of simplifying the legal system in order to win popular support, though in practice they took over and carried on many features of the Qin code.
1In selecting chapters from the liezhuan, or biography, section of the Shi ji for translation, I have tried to include all those that describe figures of major importance in Qin history, though since so many of the bureaucrats and political advisors of the period moved about from one feudal state to another, and since the histories of the various feudal states are so closely interwoven with one another, it is difficult to present all the material that relates to the Qin. These chapters, beginning with the biography of Lord Shang and covering such famous statesmen as Shuli Zi, Gan Mou, Wei Ran, Fan Ju, and Cai Ze, along with the military leaders Bai Qi and Wang Jian, draw heavily for their material from an early text known as the Zhanguo ce, or lntrigues of the Warring States. This work, though cast in the form of historical narratives, contains a large element of fiction, its principal aim being to demonstrate how to present one’s ideas cogently and effectively and to persuade a ruler or superior to adopt a particular course of action. These persuasions, as the episodes have been called, are of considerable literary interest, though at times the arguments are so tortuous the reader may well lose his way in their complexities.
One may ask why Sima Qian should have incorporated material of such questionable nature into his history. It is well to keep in mind, however, that the First Emperor of the Qin, in his infamous Burning of the Books, deliberately destroyed the historical records of all the feudal states other than Qin, and Sima Qian hence had very few sources to draw on for the period. Had he not borrowed from the Intrigues, he would have had virtually no account of the men and events of the time at all. Since his purpose in writing his history was above all didactic: to preserve for posterity the moral and political lessons of the past even when he could not always be certain of the facts, he understandably elected to utilize the Intrigues despite its inconsistencies and dubious elements. As a result, he was able to fashion biographies that, while closer to historical fiction than true history, are highly effective as literature and among the most memorable in his entire 130-chapter work.
My selection concludes with biographies of persons associated with the First Emperor, which also draw at times upon the Intrigues. These include accounts of Lü Buwei, the rich merchant who may have been the real father of the First Emperor; the hero Jing Ke, whose desperate attempt to assassinate the First Emperor, had it succeeded, might have changed the whole course of Chinese history; Li Si, chancellor under the First and Second emperors; and General Meng Tian, builder of the Great Wall.
Conspicuously absent from this roster of famous figures of the period of the First and Second emperors is the eunuch official Zhao Gao, who played a crucial role in the closing years of the Qin. Eunuchs, because they waited on the ruler in his inner apartments, where none of the regular officials were permitted access, could exercise enormous influence over him, particularly if he was a minor, at times completely controlling his avenues of information and isolating him from his ministers and kin. There is no question that eunuchs exerted a sinister and inimical influence in some periods of Chinese political history. But because they were the natural enemies of the court bureaucrats, and because in most cases it was the latter who compiled the official histories, any accounts of the eunuchs therein are likely to be strongly colored by prejudice and animosity.
At this late date we have no way to determine whether this is true of Sima Qian’s portrait of Zhao Gao. I would simply note here that, leaving aside a few stereotyped villains of high antiquity such as the “bad last” rulers of the Xia and Shang dynasties, Zhao Gao is without doubt the most unmitigatedly evil figure to appear in the pages of the Shi ji. And his evilness is all the more chilling because it finds expression not in acts of passion or violence but in the deliberate and cunningly planned corruption of men such as Huhai and Li Si who otherwise, one feels, might have acquitted themselves in a passable manner.
One should also note that, important a figure as he was, there is no chapter devoted to Zhao Gao. Sima Qian is obliged to record Zhao Gao’s words and actions in great detail in the chapters devoted to the men whose downfall he engineered, but the historian refused to dignify him with a biography of his own. In terms of the formal structure of the Shi ji, Zhao Gao has been condemned to oblivion.
At the very end of my selection I have added two appendixes. The first contains a translation of “The Hereditary House of Chen She,” Sima Qian’s account of the rebellion that led in time to the downfall of the Qin. Chen She, the principal leader of the revolt in its initial stages, a farm laborer and self-styled king who was murdered by his own carriage driver after only six months of rule, was hardly a commanding personality, and one would expect to find his story related in the biography section of the Shi ji rather than in the more prestigious section labeled “Hereditary Houses.” But perhaps because his daring act of defiance showed how widespread was the hatred of Qin rule and how vulnerable it was to attack, thus opening the way for the founding of the Han, Sima Qian has chosen to honor his memory in this fashion.
The second appendix contains a translation of Sima Qian’s letter to his friend Ren An, already mentioned above, in which he describes the circumstances that led to his castration. A gem of the prose literature of the period, its outpourings afford us a rare insight into the character and motivations of the historian. Following his punishment, it may be noted, Qian was promoted to the post of Palace Secretary and continued in the service of Emperor Wu. After his death, the date of which is uncertain, a grandson by his only child, a daughter, worked to circulate the text of the Shi ji and insure its wide recognition.
Except for a brief moment of levity in the excerpt from “The Biographies of Wits and Humorists,” the material from the Shi ji on the state of Qin and the Qin dynasty that I have presented here is almost unrelievedly dolorous in tone. Sterner laws, harsher penalties! is the cry that rings throughout it, and many of the biographies, after describing some brilliant career in statecraft or military activity, end with the forced suicide of the protagonists or the thump of the executioner’s axe. Readers may be tempted to ask: were things under the Qin really that bad?
There is no question that they could have been that bad: the history of our present century, with its mass murders, concentration camps, and other unspeakable horrors, is proof enough of that. But one may still wonder if Sima Qian’s picture of Qin history is not perhaps rather grimmer and more dismal than the facts would justify. Let us consider here, therefore, what can be known about his attitude toward the Qin and what reasons he might have had for distortion in his portrayal of it.
First of all, one should keep always in mind that Sima Qian was a man of the Han, and it was the Han that overthrew and replaced the Qin. The rebel leader known as the governor of Pei who marches onto the scene in the very closing pages of my narrative on the Qin is none other than Liu Ji [Liu Bang], or Han Gaozu, the founder and first emperor of the Han dynasty. And as I have mentioned earlier, it was in his interests and the interests of his supporters to stress as much as possible the cruel and tyrannous nature of Qin rule in order to contrast it with their own lighter yoke and more enlightened methods of government. This attitude no doubt quickly became established as the official Han view of Qin history. We see it reflected, for example, in the famous essay entitled “The Faults of Qin” by the early Han poet and statesman Jia Yi (201-169 BC), which is praised by Sima Qian and quoted at length at two points in the Shi ji.
Sima Qian’s own comments at the end of his chapters on Qin history, and in the introduction to “The Chronological Table of the Six States,” evince a like attitude. Again and again, when we might expect him to express sympathy, or at least pity, for his subject, we find him sharply condemning the statesmen or military leaders who shaped Qin history for bowing too readily to the will of the ruler, for accommodating themselves too willingly to the trend of the times instead of endeavoring to reform it.
One should keep in mind too that Sima Qian spent most of his life as a court official in the service of a ruler, Emperor Wu of the Han (r. 140-87 BC), who in many ways disturbingly resembled the First Emperor of the Qin. True, Emperor Wu officially sanctioned Confucianism as the state creed, whereas the First Emperor had embraced the tenets of Legalism. But like the First Emperor, Emperor Wu worked to expand the territorial limits of the nation and to strengthen the power of the central government, and he attempted to gain tighter control over the population through strict and detailed laws in a way that hardly differed from the methods of the Qin — see, for example, Sima Qian’s chapter on the law officials of Emperor Wu’s time, “The Biographies of the Harsh Officials,” in Han Dynasty, volume II. Like the First Emperor, Emperor Wu launched military campaigns and vast construction projects that put a heavy strain on the population and the nation’s finances. He even imitated the First Emperor in his dogged efforts to establish contact with the spirit world and to attain immortal life — so much so that later ages would habitually link their names as fellow believers in superstitious folly. Because of these points of resemblance between the two sovereigns, it is clear that when Sima Qian condemns the failings and abuses of the Qin, he is at the same time indirectly attacking what he viewed as similar trends in his own age.
Finally, one should recall that, because Sima Qian spoke out in defence of an army leader who had surrendered to the enemy, he roused the ire of Emperor Wu and was handed over to the law officials for criminal investigation. Thus when he describes the harsh legal procedures of the Qin, when he tells of men being beaten so mercilessly that in desperation they confess to crimes they never committed, he may well be drawing on his own experiences in the palace prison. He was in time condemned to death and, lacking the money to buy commutation of the sentence, underwent castration rather than take his own life so that he could complete the writing of his history. The trauma of this event no doubt influenced his whole outlook and inspired in him a loathing for the type of legal processes used by the Qin, and in many instances by the Han as well, and for the whole Legalist philosophy that attempted to justify them.
We know so little about the sources used by Sima Qian in putting together his portraits of the First and Second emperors, Li Si, and Zhao Gao that it is impossible to say just how and to what extent his own prejudices may have affected his view of the Qin. But, as I have pointed out, there is every reason to expect that he would have judged the Qin with severity. Attempts have been made to argue that Sima Qian’s original description of the Qin may not have been so unfavourable, and that some of the more damning passages in his narrative are in fact later interpolations in the
Shi ji text, but I find such arguments unconvincing.
2 No one, it seems to me, would have had greater reason than Sima Qian himself to paint a grim picture of the reigns of the First and Second emperors, and almost no one in succeeding centuries to my knowledge ever accused Sima Qian of being unfair in his treatment of the Qin or attempted to correct the record.
3Until archaeological excavations in some way produce data that appreciably alter that record, therefore, we must continue to view the Qin through the eyes of Sima Qian. If he portrayed it in particularly sombre colors, it was doubtless because he wanted, with these “portions and parcels of the dreadful past,” to warn future ages away from its errors and atrocities. He knew that tendencies toward megalomania and tyranny, and the temptation to try to manipulate human beings like so many puppets through the twin levers of punishment and reward, are present in all governments and that one must be constantly on guard against them. That no doubt was the lesson he wished to convey in his depiction of the Qin.