25. A Departure from Chinese Reverence for Scholars
The Warring States period had been a period of chaos. However, it had also been a golden age of Chinese philosophy and free-thinking. The centuries before China’s unification in 221 BC came to be known as the “Hundred Schools of Thought”. It was an era in which various philosophies, such as 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. To emphasize that break, as well as to keep his subjects from pining for bygone days, he ordered that all history books in China be burned.
Chin Shi Huang also ordered the burning of books on philosophy, and every other subject except for agriculture, science, and magic. When scholars protested, they discovered just how brutal he could get. Until then, intellectuals and scholars had been revered figures, highly respected by China’s rulers. Chin Shi Huang was cut from a different cloth: he ordered 460 scholars buried alive. What the First Emperor was most interested in was immortality through a “Life Elixir“, but his quest for immortality backfired. It was not only that all his efforts to find a Life Elixir failed, as they were bound to do. It was that those insane attempts at living forever did the opposite, and shortened the life of China’s First Emperor.