Chin Shi Huang Turned Into a Tyrannical Megalomaniac
Chin Shi Huang pulled off the impressive task of ending the chaotic and ever warring feudalism that had prevailed in China for over five centuries. In its place was now a unified, peaceful, and efficiently governed centralized state. Unification, pacification, and efficiency, came at a high price, however: tyranny and crushing oppression. As a result, even though Chin Shi Huang was the most influential figure in Chinese history, he was also the figure most abhorred by the Chinese throughout most of their history.
The First Emperor’s most trusted and influential official was his minister of justice, Li Ssu. In addition to being a bureaucrat, Li Ssu was also a philosopher who followed a school of thought known as “Legalism”, which advocated strict laws and draconian punishments for even petty crimes. As Li Ssu put it: “If light offenses carry heavy punishments, one can imagine what will be done against a serious offense. Thus the people will not dare to break the laws“.
Criticizing the law became a capital offense, and cowed citizens were expected to inform on their neighbors. Then, with unchecked power and the resources of an entire empire to draw upon, the First Emperor grew megalomaniacal, and launched huge projects with massive amounts of forced labor. One such project used 700,000 laborers working on his tomb for 30 years. The famous Terracotta Warriors site, discovered in the 1970s and now open to tourism with its thousands of life size statues, is but a fraction of his gigantic tomb complex. The bulk of the tomb is yet to be unearthed. Millions more labored to dig canals, level hills, make roads, and build over 700 palaces. The biggest project of all was the Great Wall of China, which did double duty: keeping the northern barbarians out, and keeping the Chinese seeking to flee the emperor’s onerous taxation and oppressive rule, in.
The previous Warring States period had been a period of chaos, but it had also been a golden age of Chinese philosophy and free thinking. The centuries preceding China’s unification in 221 BC came to be known as the “Hundred Schools of Thought”. It was an era during which a broad range of philosophies, including Confucianism and Taoism, emerged and were freely debated.
The First Emperor brought that to an end by banning all schools of thoughts, except Legalism. He saw his new state as a radical break from the past, and to emphasize that break, as well as to keep his subjects from pining for bygone days, he ordered the burning of all history books throughout his realm. He also ordered the burning of books on philosophy, and every other subject except for agriculture, science, and magic. When scholars protested, he ordered 460 of them buried alive.