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:
The First Emperor said, “I assembled this group of scholars and alchemists in a quest for peace, having been promised wonderful herbs…. Instead they have wasted vast sums without procuring any elixir…. Meanwhile their cohorts are slandering me in my own city…. I have made inquiries, and they are defaming me viciously. My people are becoming confused.
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:
The chief ministers of the various departments all attended to offer their congratulations, and the carriages and horses at his door numbered in the thousands. Li Si sighed and said, “My teacher, Xun Zi, always used to warn me against excessive success. I am but an ordinary clerk from a little village in Chu. His Majesty did not realize that I am only an inferior workhorse and elevated me to this august post, where I have achieved the epitome of wealth and power and am second to no other minister. When a man has reached the top, he starts to come down. I do not yet know what my ultimate fate will be.”
Chinese thinking has changed remarkably little in the last 2200 years. Whenever I brought home a good report card to show my Ye Ye, he would quote the proverb le ji sheng bei, “excessive happiness will lead to sorrow” (le ji sheng bei was a phrase first coined by Sima Qian in Shiji).
Ye Ye believed in the dualist theory of yin and yang, which teaches that happiness and sorrow (like “day and night” or “summer and winter”) are complementary and interdependent and represent two faces of the same coin. Since the two are each other’s counterparts, one will eventually transform into the other.
“Don’t rejoice too much!” Ye Ye would say, “Be modest and content! What rises will fall and what falls will rise.”
Li Si was voicing the same sentiments 2200 years ago when he wondered about his ultimate destiny during the lavish banquet he gave at the height of his happiness to celebrate the homecoming of his successful son.
Historical figures in China are frequently reinterpreted according to the politics of a given time. This is nowhere more true than in the case of the First Emperor during the rule of Mao Tse-tung.
The two had many similarities. They were both intelligent, incisive, hardworking, charismatic, and natural leaders. However, both were also autocratic, cruel, megalomaniac, and paranoid. The First Emperor unified the empire, while Mao Tse-tung established the People’s Republic of China. Their achievements were such that they both regarded themselves as superhuman.
Like the First Emperor, Qin Shihuang, Mao also became a man of infinite power, having triumphed over all his enemies, imagined or otherwise. Nicknamed “Qin Shihuang the Second,” he could rewrite every law, imprison any citizen, bed the prettiest maidens, suspend the education of every Chinese youth, and uproot the entire nation by a wave of his hand.
For over 2000 years the First Emperor had been roundly condemned for being the bloodthirsty tyrant who fen shu keng ru, “burned the books and buried the scholars.” After Mao took power in 1949, however, the official view gradually changed. Articles began appearing in Communist journals such as Red Flag, Peking Review, and People’s Daily praising the First Emperor. During the Cultural Revolution, it became dangerously incorrect in China to castigate the First Emperor in any way whatsoever. His cruelty was now considered to have been essential in crushing the “counter-revolutionaries” within his court, and he was praised for his “enlightened policies.”
As Mao’s power and prestige grew in China, he identified more and more with the First Emperor. He often compared himself directly with the ancient monarch and would find him lacking. During the Communist Party’s Central Committee Meeting in May of 1958, Mao made a speech in which he personally praised the First Emperor for being an authority on “emphasizing the present while discounting the past.” Further on in the same speech, Mao said, “Who is Qin Shihuang anyway, and what did he do? So he buried 460 scholars alive. We have ‘buried’ at least 46,000! Haven’t we silenced that many counter-revolutionary intellectuals during our anti-rightist campaigns? In discussions with members of the minor democratic parties, I’ve said to them, ‘You accuse us of being Qin Shihuangs. You are incorrect. Actually, we have outshone him a hundred times. You accuse us of being dictators. We have never denied this. You should have gone further in your accusations because now we have to supplement them.’”
It was recorded in the minutes that Mao’s remarks were greeted with roaring laughter.
Following the failure of Mao’s economic policy known as the Great Leap Forward, he began purging senior ministers of his cabinet, such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who criticized him. Like the First Emperor two millennia earlier, Mao was also determined to eliminate those who dared to attack him. His method of feng shu keng ru, “burning books and burying scholars,” was to abolish education for all children and silence his opponents by condemning and persecuting them as counter-revolutionaries. All this was carried out during the Cultural Revolution.
After our tour of Vietnam, Bob and I visited the city of Qufu, in Shandong Province (ancient Qi), where Confucius (Kong Fuzi), or Master Kong, was born and buried. Inside the Confucian Temple, we saw a genealogical chart of Confucius’s family. Nothing I have ever seen before or since has impressed me more than this simple document to illustrate the continuity and span of Chinese history. Starting with Confucius, the names of all his direct firstborn male descendants have been recorded, together with their years of birth and death. Confucius’s descendants lived consecutively at the mansion for almost 2500 years, totaling seventy-seven generations. In 1940 C.E. the last male heir of the line fled to Taiwan to escape the Japanese and never returned. However, the surname Kong is so common in Qufu that more than one-third of the local telephone directory is dedicated to it.
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Twenty-one hundred years ago, the Grand Historian Sima Qian also visited Qufu. In Shiji he wrote,
Whenever I read the writings of Confucius, I try to picture him in my mind. Once I traveled to his birthplace in the state of Lu. There I visited the temple of Confucius and saw his carriage, clothes, and sacrificial vessels with my own eyes. Scholars from all over go there to study at his house. I wandered about from room to room mesmerized, unable to leave.
A solitary wall in a courtyard within the Confucian temple is known as the Lu Wall. During the book-burning phase of the First Emperor, a ninth-generation descendant of Confucius hid his forefather’s books within this very wall. Several decades later, during the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.), the books were rediscovered when part of the wall was demolished to build an extension.
In a separate courtyard closer to the entrance is the Thirteen-Stele Pavilion, which contains many stone tablets with engraved comments from different emperors commemorating their visits. They date from the Tang dynasty (618–907 C.E.) to the first half of the twentieth century, a span of thirteen hundred years. Many of the beautiful tablets show deep cracks and scratches across their surface where Red Guards wantonly tried to destroy them. An old tour guide at the temple told us sadly that he tried to hide and protect the slabs from the “young hooligans” but was beaten savagely for his pains. Like the First Emperor, Mao Tse-tung also wished to destroy the civilization of the past and start afresh. In many ways the Cultural Revolution was an eerie replay of fen shu keng ru, “burning books and burying scholars.” It was Mao’s bid to increase his personal power at the expense of his old comrades, who had dared to challenge him.
In his bloody purges, Mao was at first ably and wholeheartedly assisted by the war hero, General Lin Biao, who was named defense minister and Mao’s designated successor. After four years Lin became increasingly powerful as he went about replacing the old veterans with his own men in key military positions. Feeling threatened, Mao tried to curtail Lin’s influence in the crucial Central and Military Affairs Committees. A struggle ensued between the two, which eventually led to the notorious affair known as Project 571.
In 1971 Lin Biao entered into a conspiracy with his son to murder Mao. The younger Lin drafted a plan called Project 571 in which he accused Mao of being the worst feudal tyrant in history and named him the “contemporary First Emperor (Qin Shihuang).” Lin’s coup called for the rapid seizure of military power in Shanghai, Beijing, and Canton. Mao was to be assassinated by missiles launched against his train while he was on an inspection tour.
The plot was revealed to Premier Zhou Enlai in the nick of time by Lin Biao’s daughter Dou Dou, who had always felt neglected by her parents and been jealous of her brother. The premier immediately informed Mao, who aborted the scheme. While fleeing, Lin Biao, his wife, his son, and five aides were all killed in a plane crash in Mongolia. There were rumors that the plane was shot down by surface-to-air missiles.
Since Lin’s Project 571 was anti-Mao and anti–Qin Shihuang, it became expedient, even mandatory, to view the First Emperor favorably from then on. There is a proverb that says, “The enemy of one’s enemy is one’s friend.” Eminent historians throughout China began publishing articles revising their opinions of the First Emperor and conforming to the eulogistic Maoist view that has persisted up to the present.
To the Chinese, there is no rigorous distinction between ancient history and current events. Continually, analogies are drawn and identification made between historical characters and contemporary figures. History is regarded as a mirror of the human condition, a timeless parable from the past, to aid in governing lives not only here and now but for countless generations to come. It is interesting to note, however, that like his namesake, Mao too was unable to find happiness as he neared the end of his life.
CHAPTER 8
Words That Would Cause a Nation to Perish
Wang Guo Zhi Yan
After visiting Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius, Bob and I flew west to Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi Province. In ancient times, Shaanxi was called Qin because it encompassed approximately the same territory as the state of Qin. The First Emperor’s ancient capital of Xianyang is located about thirty-five miles northwest of Xi’an, on the northern bank of the Wei River. It was from Xianyang that the First Emperor launched the expeditions that eliminated the six rival states, swallowing them, according to Shiji, like a silkworm devouring mulberry leaves.
Even today, we can see traces of ruins of the First Emperor’s legendary palaces on the outskirts of this still-existing ancient city. They endure as earth mounds with outlines of the zigzagging corridors that linked one building to another. Relics of hollow bricks, tiles, baths, water tanks, drainage pipes, and stairways have been excavated as well as slabs of walls decorated with images of stallions, chariots, hunting scenes, birds, and animals in various colors. These are probably the earliest palace murals to have been discovered in China. The floor tiles of the main hall of one palace were painted red. It thrilled me to imagine that the legendary assassin Master Jing might have stood on these very tiles and gazed at the same frescos we were seeing as he waited to present General Fan’s head to the emperor.
The First Emperor’s tomb is situated about twenty miles northeast of Xi’an. We were amazed both by its magnitude and by the fact that the tomb protruded upward like a small, grassy mountain. We had expected it to be hidden underground but were told that originally it was even higher but had weathered down after 2200 years to a height of a twenty-five-story building. So far, Chinese archeologists have not dared open the grave for fear of damage and pollution.
Shiji records that the First Emperor started constructing his mausoleum soon after ascending the throne at the age of thirteen. He chose a site for his tomb at the foot of Mount Li and immediately began digging. When he unified China twenty-six years later, he transported 700,000 men, many of them convicts, from all over the empire to work on the project. They dug through three underground springs and oriented the massive necropolis according to the four points of the compass. The underground chambers were lined with brick, but the outer coffin was lined with bronze. The tomb contained a huge relief map of China made of bronze representing the features of the earth. The Yangtze and Yellow Rivers and many others were reproduced as channels twelve feet deep and filled with mercury. Machines were installed to keep the mercury in motion. Myriad treasures were placed within the sepulchre: replicas of magnificent palaces and grand pavilions containing flocks of silver and gold animals; priceless dishes, plates, lamps, and furniture made of jade and bronze; lacquer boxes, musical instruments, weapons, money, and “books” written on bamboo or silk. Above was a huge copper dome representing the night sky with the moon and starry constellations in pearls. Lamps were fueled by whale oil, set to burn for a long time. The tomb was protected by crossbows and arrows set as booby traps to slay would-be grave robbers.
What Shiji did not record and perhaps the historian Sima Qian did not know is that there are over 500 satellite tombs and subterranean chambers in the immediate vicinity of the main tomb. In 1974 peasants digging for well water a short distance from the First Emperor’s tomb accidentally stumbled upon a vast clay army contained in one of these underground chambers, undisturbed for 2000 years. Thousands of life-sized, individually crafted, terra-cotta soldiers were found in three separate vaults together with hundreds of archers and horses and chariots.
We entered the largest chamber, known as Vault One. It is rectangular in shape and is built of earth, with brick floors and timber supports. Bob and I stood on the elevated walkway erected over the site and could hardly believe what we were seeing. Called the eighth wonder of the world, it is truly a magnificent sight. Row upon row of life-sized warriors are lined up neatly in battle formation, poised to fight on behalf of their emperor. When first discovered, they were carrying real metal weapons such as swords, halberds, dagger axes, spears, and spikes, which were made of a special alloy that had not
rusted after two millennia. The cavalrymen wore caps with chin straps while the officers and charioteers had on more ornately designed headgear. Their long hair was either plaited or pulled up on top of the head and tied. Their tunics were double layered and belted at the waist, with a thick roll of fabric around the neck to protect against chafing from their leather armor. Below the knee, they wore leggings and square-toed shoes. Each soldier has his own distinctive facial features; no two look alike. Their average height is five feet, ten inches, the same as Bob’s.
Vault Two is L-shaped and smaller. It appears to contain an elite unit of special troops and consists of a few hundred kneeling archers, cavalrymen, horses, and charioteers as well as some infantry.
Vault Three is smaller still and resembles an army’s command headquarters. Besides a chariot there are sixty-eight figures, mostly lined up as guards of honor and holding ceremonial weapons. This was the base where the general in chief would consult with his advisers in devising strategies of attack or defense. The remains of animal bones have been found in this vault, which suggests that ritual sacrifices were performed here, as was the custom before going into battle.
Adjacent to Vault Number Two is a separate chamber with two imperial bronze chariots, each drawn by four horses and driven by a charioteer.
In October of 211 B.C.E., the First Emperor set off on what was to be the fifth and last tour of his empire. His entourage included the elderly prime minister Li Si, then about seventy years old, Meng Yi, the younger brother of General Meng Tian, and Zhao Gao, a palace eunuch and minor official of low rank. Just before departure, the emperor’s youngest son, Prince Hu Hai, who was then twenty years old and much loved by his father, begged to tag along and was allowed to go.