YEAR ZERO: Jonathan Clements on the First Emperor of China

Jonathan Clements returns to talk about his book on the First Emperor of China and the man who was sent to kill him: facts and fictions in Zhang Yimou’s movie Hero (2002), the evil mirror-universe version of Confucianism, an impossibly well-endowed “eunuch”, the construction of the Terracotta Army, the politics of archaeology, and how to spent a slave labour dividend. And what to do when you had the Mandate of Heaven a minute ago but can't remember where you put it.

Transcript

Setting The Stage: Why Qin Matters

Russell 0:03

Hello and welcome to Subject Change with me, Russell Hogg. My guest today is historian and cultural critic Jonathan Clements. Jonathan has been on the podcast several times now. He has talked about the history of Taiwan, about the unhappy story of the early Christians of Japan, and most recently we did a series of podcasts talking about Japan after the Meiji Revolution, and in particular its wars with its neighbors and with the wider world. Well, today we're moving away from Taiwan, and we're moving away from Japan, and we're going to talk about China. And more particularly, we're going to talk about the first emperor of China. So welcome back, Jonathan, to the podcast. Thank you for having me. So a film I like very much is Hero by Zhang Yi Mo, and that film is all about an attempt to assassinate the first Emperor of China. That assassination attempt is also the way you open your book. So I thought I might start by asking you to tell the story of the assassination, and and I mean the real story and and not the one in Hero. Although I'd I'd hope we can maybe come back and talk about the movie a bit later on.

The Real Assassination Plot Unpacked

Sources, Sima Qian, And Truth Claims

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Yeah, I'm very happy to talk about the movie, because this is like the sixth time I've been on this podcast, and it's supposed to be about films as well, and you've never asked me about any films. And Hero is a really interesting case for me, for reasons which I hope we can talk about later on. Not the least that it was one of three different films about the first Emperor that came out in a very short period of time, because there was also The Emperor and the Assassin, directed by Chen Kai-Gur, and there was The Emperor's Shadow, um, directed by uh Joel Shaoen. And so, you know, when Jiang Yi Mo turns up with Hero, that was the last and most populist version. When I say populist, it was the one that was designed for foreigners, it was the one designed to entertain audiences abroad in a colour-coded, simplified way. Uh, and I don't mean that in any disparaging sense at all. It's what he does so well and what he does best. So it told the story in a really stripped-down and very theatrical way, and it's because he made that film that we were treated many years later to the joy that was the Great Wall, um, which is the best ever Irish Matt Damon fighting alien space lizards in China film you will ever see, um, and which incorporates many of Jang Yi Mo's trademark uses of colour and uses of kind of stylized imagery. But anyway, in terms of what really happened, we are talking about the end of Bronze Age China, about a time when there are seven different kingdoms uh fighting for control of uh what would become China. And one of those kingdoms is doing very well. It's far out in the west at the edge at the edge of the desert, at the edge of the steppes, and this is the state of Qin, and uh like many of the other states, it's its dukes proclaim themselves to be kings, and there's a young king of the state of Qin who is one by one devouring all of these other kingdoms, and the kingdom right up in the northwest, around what is now Beijing, they develop a project to do away with him. They say there's no way we we've got to stop this guy, and the only way we're gonna stop him is we're gonna kill him. And the only way we can kill him is to find some way to get into the throne room with an assassin. They were all fans of The Art of War by Suen Zhu, an entire chapter of which is devoted to espionage and to the value of embedded assets, and to the fact that if you can send a a a guy on a suicide mission to do the job, it'll save thousands of lives and loads of money, and it's really worth it. So a man called Dan, uh the Red Prince, um, as as I as I call him in my book, uh, for reasons we can talk about later as well, um, he hatches on this scheme and uh uh and it's it's it's a one-way mission. So he finds this swordsman called Jin Ker and he says, You're gonna die, so what we'll do is we'll give you your reward in this life. So you get to have you know a couple of years living like a king in a palace with all your concubines, whatever food you want and anything you want at all. And at the end of it all, we are gonna send you into Chen to kill the king. And Jin Kerr says, Yep, okay, well, I'm I'm pretty good with a blade, but you've got to get me in the throne room. And this is something they do really well in the hero film, is they actually show Jet Li being stripped before they even let him in. I mean, he's really being very heavily searched. And so they come up with this fantastic scheme that he's gonna come in as a as an emissary offering Chin the ultimate prize. And so he says, What we're gonna do is we're gonna give you a map that you unroll and it's gonna show you all of the kingdom that all the borderlands we're just gonna hand to Chin rather than fight a war. But we're gonna hide a poison dagger inside the map. So as this very famous Chinese phrase goes, as the map is unrolled, the dagger is revealed. And then they spend years working on this, perfecting the poison, for example, which requires the sacrifice of multiple slaves to see how quickly it'll work. Um and they still need a means of getting him in because just showing up with a map isn't gonna be enough. So they find a general, a refugee general who's fled Chin, um, with a price on his head, and they get him to agree to die. They say, What we're gonna do is we're gonna kill you, we're gonna cut off your head, we're gonna take your head into the throne room, and we're gonna say, Look, this you know, this is a m refugee that we were looking after, but I know there's a price on his head, so here he is, and incidentally, here's this map. So that's what they do. At the end of this huge project, which is you know much uh lauded and celebrated in Chinese fiction to the extent you have to really pick through carefully to find the true story. Jing Ker shows up in the throne room and says, I've brought the head of this general and I've brought this map, and they let him right up close to the dais where the the Qin Emperor is. Sorry, the Qin, the king of Qin is, and he opens the the the box and the guy goes, Oh, yep, head, thank you very much. I put that with the others. Um and then he goes, Here's a map of all the things, and they roll out the map, and then there's the dagger. He grabs the dagger and he goes for him, and there's this scuffle on the dais. And rather fantastically, although there are other people in the throne room, they're not allowed on the dais on pain of death. So even though there are bodyguards, even though there are there are people in the room, they have to stand there and watch, thinking, should I intervene or not? No, no, no, no, last person who went up those steps got killed. While the king kind of runs around trying to dodge Jin Kerr. And uh the doctor, the the kind of the court doctor, throws his medicine bag at Jin Kerr, hits him and distracts him momentarily, while other people are shouting at the king, put your sword behind your back, then you can draw it, because he's got this giant thing called the tyre blade, which is impossible to take out of its scabbard unless it's kind of behind it. And he wrenches it out with scabbard and he whacks Jin Kerr several times repeatedly, kills him, and the trouble is over. And this you know is the beginning of a huge purge of people, uh you know, a lot of heads literally roll after this, and in fact, quite ironically, it is used as the excuse to attack the state that has arranged this uh this one-way mission. So, in fact, within a few years the armies of Qin roll over the Beijing region and take it over, and and Dan, the Red Prince, is is well they I think they have to hand him over and he commits suicide rather than agree to be handed over. And and the king of Qin gets to say, Well, I've conquered all the other kingdoms now. So I'm the king of everything, and we need a name for that. We need to come up with a name, and I and I'm gonna get this old word for the son of heaven and this word for the god of heaven, I'm gonna put them together to make Huang Di, which is the Mandarin for emperor, and that's what I am. And also, we are going to wipe out the past. This is gonna be year zero, there's not gonna be any precedents, there's not gonna be any stupid poetic names. My name is Qin Shu Huang Di, the first emperor of Qin, and my son will be the second emperor of Qin, and that's how things are going to be for the next 10,000 years. In the end, his dynasty lasted for 14, but I guess we'll get to that.

Russell 8:34

So there's a couple of things that come out uh of that. Uh I mean, one is you say we have to pick out very carefully to find out the truths. What confidence do we have that at this time we're getting anything like the truth? I mean, how good are our sources?

Names, Language, And Reading China

SPEAKER_01 8:48

I mean, it's a very good question, and you know, people have devoted their entire careers to the historiography of such things. Um, and the issue with the Qin dynasty is that it was this tiny transformational moment in Chinese history between the Zhou and the Han, both of which lasted for centuries on either side. And so there's a lot of stuff spoken about it, and the Han Dynasty that came after it, which is roughly coterminous with the Roman Empire, if you want to put that in context, and the Han Dynasty was desperate to disassociate itself from Qin. Um so they made up all kinds of horrible stories about the Qin Empire, which may or may not have been true. When it comes to the precise historiography of these moments, we have the records of the historian, the Shu Ji, uh, written by um Gr Summa Chen, uh also known as the Grand Scribes Records. And these this is what amounted to in his day a history of the world, and it was probably written about uh a century, century and a half after the events described, which doesn't sound great, obviously, um, but there are many elements of the Grand Scribes Records which have proved to be remarkably accurate. For example, he wrote about the Shang dynasty, the legendary uh uh first dynasty of China, and no one took it seriously until the 1930s, when a bunch of oracle bones were unearthed in Anyang that matched the king lists that Summa Chen provided exactly. And so this dynasty went from being legendary to being historical uh within the space of a human lifetime. You know, there are people alive today who were born in a world where no one took the Shang dynasty seriously. Um and uh in the case of the fight in the throne room, um the doctor who threw the medicine bag, I think um Summachen knew his grandson. Right. I mean we're we're we're that close in terms of the uh in terms of the uh the relationship that these people had. Um so we have personal reminiscences that probably have a have a degree of accuracy worth worth taking seriously. Of course, history being history, it's always hard to to to be sure. But you know, the Summa Chen is uh is a remarkably reliable source um in Chinese history.

Russell 11:08

And then the other question I have is I mean you kind of slightly adverted to it that uh the first emperor very kindly uh sorts out our naming problem. He says, right, forget all this, I'm just called first emperor.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

Yeah.

Russell 11:22

And that's great because I guess for a Western audience, trying to sort of get to grips with with Chinese names is incredibly difficult. I mean, uh you know, for a long time I didn't realise that Q uh is pronounced Ch. So in other words, you have the Qin dynasty. So how do you deal with that given just how hard it is for us Westerners to follow these names?

Zhou, Mandate Of Heaven, And Statecraft

China And Rome: Parallels And Limits

SPEAKER_01 11:44

Yeah, it is it is very hard, and and my my attitude towards it has has softened over the years. Certainly in the early days, when I wrote my book about the first emperor, when my wrote my book about Confucius and the Pirate King of Taiwan, I was having to deal with people who go in very, very confident that it's all going to make sense, and who would then blame me for everyone's name sounding the same to them. Um and uh it it's it's necessary to put it in as racist terms as that, because that is that is how that that's how this ends up. And and so you know, when you're reading in Chinese, the difference between you know one Tang and another Tang is very obvious, and often the meaning of those words is contained within the characters that you're looking at. And so you have names for emperors and poetic names for emperors and what their original name was, and uh Chinese people do uh historically would change their names repeatedly throughout their life for various you know superstitious reasons, and that makes life very difficult, and then historiographically you have to kind of look back and say, Well, I'm gonna assign this name retroactively. So we're gonna talk about the the first emperor of China. We're gonna say that his given name was Ying Zheng, except that Ying wasn't his surname when he was born, and Zheng wasn't his first name when he was born, and so uh and so it becomes very difficult. So you do have to simplify things, and uh you will normally get attacked for simplifying them. You know, I I was talking about Dan, you know, the the the the Red Prince. Dan means Cinnabar, so I called him the Red Prince just to kind of focus people's minds on this, because just calling him Dan makes him sound like desperate Dan in in English, uh and and we have to deal with those kind of illusions. So what I would tend to do, and I have sometimes been taken to task for this, is I try and establish kind of character quirks or naming quirks or actions that make someone well known, and then kind of refer to it in a kind of almost Heric way when I mention someone, you know, oh this is the guy who you know who punched that horse, and oh yeah, the horse punching guy, I I I remember him. Um and that makes it easier for the reader, if particularly if you can try and bury it, you know, somewhere in in the text in in an unobtrusive way. But it it is it is a recurring problem, and so what I would sometimes do is use pe is is translate people's epithets. So when it comes to the Pirate Kings of Taiwan, for example, Zhang Ji Long is the uh is the father of Coxinger, um, the the Pirate King, and he was an admiral in the fleet, and his name meant Zhang the Dragon. And all of the other sailors, all of the other captains in his fleet had animal names. So there's Zhang Ji Bao, who is the Panther, and there's uh Zhang Ji Hu, the tiger. Um and so I called them, you know, Zhang the Tiger, Jung the Panther, to give you that sense of what those names sounded like to a Chinese reader, because they don't sound like real names, they sound like kind of you know nom de guerre or or kind of you know code names almost, because that's what they were. None of these these people weren't all born with animal nicknames, those have come up. And one hopes that that allows someone to kind of visualize and and kind of keep these names in their heads for for longer. Um, but of course, the longer period you're covering in Chinese history, you know, the more often the same sounds are coming up, because although there are you know a a character can be written twenty different ways and pronounced in five different ways in Chinese, in English that's all stripped away, and you just see two letters or or three letters, and so that that kind of makes life hard, is is one of the issues one has to deal with. And I I've I've since become used with a weary sigh to reading a proportion of reviews every time one of my books come out in which someone blames me for this, um, and not say linguistics.

Russell 15:33

And then there's another point of confusion for me, was because you say that this is the first emperor, and yet you mentioned we've we've already had the art of war. So so clearly, you know, the Chinese have been going for many centuries, you know, thousands of years perhaps. And then you have something which you which I pronounce the kingdom of Zhou, but I think I'm pronouncing the Zed where I should be calling it the the Kingdom of Cho, is it? Zhou, Zhou. And so I'm wondering, well, well, who are they? Because they seem to have something called the Mandate of Heaven, whatever that is. And I'm never quite sure what the Mandate of Heaven is, whether it's a thing, is it something you can lose uh you know because you misplaced it? Uh so are they not are they not the first emperors or are they not the emperors of a pre-existing empire?

Why Qin Won: Legalism And Power

SPEAKER_01 16:22

The the rulers of the Zhou were called the sons of heaven, and it would be possible to call them emperors if you wanted to, but the word Huangdi, which we call emperor, was initiated by the Qin dynasty. What Zhou was was a Bronze Age kingdom on the Yellow River, which in its original form you could probably cross on horseback in a day or two. It's a very, very small central kingdom. Radiating out from Zhou are all of these marchlands which were taken over by various aristocrats. So the kingdom of Zhou remains this tiny little you know Bronze Age statelet, and the ruler is technically the ruler of everything, of everything under heaven, the ruler of the world, and then you have these massive areas outside, these these these na these dukedoms, as they eventually became, which are so much more big so much bigger. And so as the Iron Age approaches and you and you start to be able to kind of chop down more trees and and and plough more land, these dukedoms become immensely more powerful than the ruler to which they proclaim homage. And so what you get during the so-called warring states period in China is one by one these dukedoms say, Why are we listening to this guy? Why why are we putting up with this? You know, and and and eventually the dukes, the various dukes, proclaim themselves to be kings, and then they start fighting over who should really take over. And in fact, the kings of the kings of Qin, very famously, marched into the Zhou heartland, deposed the last ruler of the Zhou, and said, Well, we're the sons of heaven now. When it comes to the the mandate of heaven, this actually goes back to the the foundations of the Zhou, which were 800 years previously, when you had this previous kingdom, the Shang, and uh they were overthrown by the the the the Zhou um family, and when doing so, the Zhou said, Well, of course, we're not being disloyal. Yes. We're not being disloyal. The fact is, is that the various signs and portents that we've seen, the eclipse, the famine, the flood, and everything, everyone being unhappy, there not being any food, these are signs that heaven is displeased. You've lost the mandate of heaven. Heaven has appointed you the ruler, but you've done something wrong, you haven't done the right ceremonies, you've you've you've displeased the gods, so now we are taking over. We have the mandate of heaven. And as in a whole bunch of other societies, I mean, I'm uh the the the fall of the Roman Republic being the one that's that's paramount in my mind, the precedent this sets for regime change by revolution because of some nebulous idea that the gods aren't happy is is what sets in motion the cycles of Chinese history, which go all the way up to 1911, which is that a dynasty is founded, everything's rosy, things start to fall apart, let's blame the foreigners, let's blame women, things do fall apart, normally directly mapped to climate change. Uh you can you can map various different fluctuations in climate over Chinese history, and dynasties tend to fall when there's weather patterns that are difficult. And then everyone says, Well, that last dynasty were terrible, the things they did in the last couple of generations. Well, obviously they lost the mandate of heaven, but luckily we're here and we have the mandate of heaven now, and so that uh that is how it works. And and you say, Is it something you could lose? Which is a lovely idea because tech technically it's all theoretical, but back back then there were actually items, there were things called the nine tripods, which were these big bronze kind of artifacts, and whoever had the nine tripods was the ruler of the world. And so uh there was there was one famous story when the king of Chu, which was a southern state, um south of the um south of the Yangtze, and actually technically not part of China until until relatively recently, he sent a message to the to the ruler of the Zhou Kingdom and he said, How much do your tripods weigh out of interest? Just ask him for a friend. Um, which was his way of saying, I need to take them to my capital because I think you've lost the mandate of heaven. Um and so these tripods became this kind of religious focus for some of these wars. Very famously, I think one of them got dropped in the Yellow River and never recovered, but but technically we're down to eight tripods now. Um But uh yeah, so so there were physical artifacts that were kind of symbolic of power, but they were lost, you know, in during the warring states, I think. And and so um by the turn of the Christian era, you know, over the last 2,000 years, the concept of the mandate of heaven has been something that's been far more theoretical and and usually employed by whoever's starting the new dynasty.

Russell 21:02

You mentioned the Roman Republic uh uh and so on. Uh so we're we're roughly we're roughly co-terminous with with the Roman Empire. And so so how how how advanced is China compared to say the Romans or the Greeks at this time? Are they are they far ahead or are they are they roughly the same?

Unity And Fragmentation Across Dynasties

SPEAKER_01 21:24

Um I think they're they're in very similar positions. Um the the the time of the first emperor is actually around about the time of the of the Punic Wars. That's what you're looking at. You're looking at the fall of Carthage and the rise of the Roman Republic in in the Western Mediterranean. Um so Rome starts to devolve into you know a central state with these big provinces which eventually take over, which is you know exactly what happened in China. Um I shouldn't say exactly what happened in China uh as as a as a historian, but but basically that's what happened. Um yeah, I think technologically speaking, we're looking at very, very advanced society. The difference Between Greece and Rome and China is the Chinese tended not to build in stone. And statuary is something that was only drifting in by the hand in a sea. Stone statues may well be something that the Chinese started to do more in earnest after they'd encountered one or two Hellenistic Greeks at the very edge of China. So uh so statuary comes in much later on uh in any enduring form. And throughout Chinese history, particularly in prehistoric times, we have a uh we have something called the bamboo limit, which is that bamboo is so versatile as a building material and as a tool that the Chinese tended to lean on it very heavily. Um, but unlike pottery or metals, it rots and decays very quickly. So there are all kinds of invisibilities in Chinese history that are very difficult to replicate. So I would say that the the M the Qin Empire, particularly the wealthy of the Qin Empire, were living a fantastic life, not too different from the fantastic life of the wealthiest of Athens or the wealthiest of Rome. But what I will say in addition to that is we have another problem there, which is something I like to think about a lot historically, is what life was like for these people. And I think uh the best way to explain this is that you can have the life you live now. You can have food on the table and a roof over your head and the laundry done. You can have that in 222 BC in China, but you need 30 slaves that are performing these functions that are working in place of the oil and machinery that does it for us today. Um, and so that creates uh you know a massive structural difference in the society around you as to how that is controlled and how things work for you. So, for example, the first Emperor's Palace, it had doors that opened on their own. They didn't open on their own, there were slaves hidden inside who would open them for you. It had air conditioning, it had these indoor waterfalls that kind of dropped water into the middle of certain halls so that there was always kind of humidity and and coolness. You know, it was a you know a fantastically opulent and you know well-designed palace. But if you go to the Apeng Palace, which is a which is a place in Shi'an, I mean the the location is still there, it's just a muddy pill because the the buildings were gone a long time ago. And even if there was stone involved, you know, we've had two thousand years to take the stones away and build other buildings. Yeah. Um so there's there's very little left. And so you don't have the the the ruination of the Roman Empire, which was you know all around us in Europe for for two cent for two millennia.

Palace Intrigue: Lu Buwei To Zhao Gao

Russell 24:53

Aaron Ross Powell And that sort of plays into another question I had, or let me let me let me rephrase that. I mean, one of the things that uh struck me in hero is that when uh when nameless you know is advancing into the uh into the imperial court, or into the king's court, I guess, as as he then is, you know, these these buildings are huge, these vast courtyards and this vast palace. And is that in any way realistic or is that or is that looking forward to another era?

SPEAKER_01 25:23

No, it's realistic. Um I mean the way that the that buildings were constructed in the Qin dynasty tended to rely on nature to do some of the work for you. So you see Jet Li, as nameless, walk up this vast staircase that goes up to this huge building on the top of the the of of the hill, because that staircase is built into a hill. Right. So although you you see a a building that looks like it's ten stories high, actually it's a three-story building on top of a staircase that is is using the the the hill to to kind of add a sort of moment, uh add weight to the architecture. So that that was quite a common thing back then. Uh but yeah, yeah, the the Qin Dynasty's buildings were very big. They had the advantage of a slave labor dividend. They had the advantage of hundreds of thousands of captured soldiers and and their families from the various nations that they had devoured um during the rise of Qin. And that was a one-generation dividend that built the roads and built the wall and built the palaces and was then expended. So then you have the Han Dynasty showing up afterwards with all of this infrastructure that's been built on slaves and taking the credit for it. Um, whereas actually, you know, it it is, I won't say it's easy, but um, it is logistically possible, if you have 10,000 people working for you, to get stuff done very fast. And so you have that you know immense uh architectural and and uh infrastructural development in China during the Qin dynasty, and and it's largely the payoff from all the people that they've captured.

Russell 27:07

You talked about Rome and kind of Rome stands out as this incredibly aggressive state, this this you know tiny city-state in Italy which which gobbles up Italy, which gobbles up the Mediterranean. So why is why is Qin so aggressive compared to, you know, why is it able to be so successful against against the other states? Because as I understand it, it was a lot was it not one of the smaller states?

The Great Wall Then Versus Now

SPEAKER_01 27:30

It started off as one of the smaller states, and uh it had an operational philosophy that was ideally suited to the times, which was that while most of the other states were paying lip service, at least, to Confucianism, to the idea that we should all be nice to one another and everyone should know their place and everyone should uh obey a certain set of precepts and go through certain rituals. The Qin dynasty, as upstarts, they were they were a borderland nation that was set up as a horse ranch, basically. They were they were primarily very important for supplying horses to the Zhou dynasty. They had no civilized neighbours on their frontiers, and uh they had a whole bunch of schemes that would allow them to develop very fast. For example, they conquered Sichuan, they arranged these big irrigation schemes that had very, very uh reliable agricultural basis for making more people, and they had a state that was run on military lines. Very famously, Qin was the place where where Shang Yang, Lord Shang, implemented the principles of legalism at a at a national level. And legalism is the is the the evil mirror universe version of Confucianism. Legalism is saying, why are we being nice to people? Why don't we just scare them? Why don't we make it so terrifying a prospect to speak out against the king that no one dares do it? Why don't we tell people that they will be murdered and their families along with them unless they obey? The Qin policy legalism becomes this uh militarized, you know, it's a military state. It's it it's it's it's completely run on military lines. Every ten houses has a little committee that's in charge of you know watching to make sure people aren't committing crimes and you know and policing these things. Every single infraction is a serious crime and is met with serious punishment, and that in itself is monetized. To put it in as simple terms as possible, bribery and corruption are legal and acceptable in the Chin state. Let's say that you murder someone, you may well have done yesterday, uh, and you're caught, and you say, Well, I mean, technically we should kill you now, but if you give us a million pounds, um that's more use to the state than us murdering you uh in retaliation for the person you've murdered. And so the the this is huge money-making operation uh that strengthens the state. Uh the official term would be you need to buy us a hundred suits of armour, Russell, but now you've murdered someone. Um, and those hundred suits of armour are put to use on military expeditions. And on military expeditions, you are savagely penalized for mistakes and and highly rewarded for successes. And Lord Chang ends up saying, you know, if we can offer these rewards, and 50 people might die trying to take that town. But, you know, if only one of them makes it back alive, he gets the reward, and we still take in the town. We have this infinite, well, not infinite manpower, but we have this very, very high level of manpower we can keep throwing at these things, and we're prepared to do it. And so Qin got this reputation as being a very belligerent and nasty place to be. I mean, Confucius never visited there. I mean, this this was going on during the time of Confucius as well, which was a couple hundred years before the time of the first emperor, but he, you know, he he visited every state and said, Oh, this is lovely, and I'm nice to be here in the state of Wei, nice to be here in the state of Chu, not bothering with Qin. Um, don't think they're worth it because they're nutters. Um and then, but over time the the nutters won out, and and they um, particularly after they'd taken over Sichuan, which is this entire today in China it's an entire province, and it's in this bowl within mountains, and it is it's uh shielded off from the rest of China, and it's got this fantastic agricultural capacity, and and then they they can keep going, they can use Sichuan to get around Chu, they can take over Chu. They weren't the only state involved in in the warring states. There are several points in Chinese history where things could have gone another way. So a certain amount of luck is involved as well, and once Qin was successful, everybody said, Well, obviously it was the legalism that did it.

Russell 31:49

So legalism is one way to do it, but but but it wasn't the only way.

SPEAKER_01 31:55

The intrigues of the warring states, uh, which is which is actually uh Jangwodzi, it's actually a book, um, uh is a fascinating tale of all the various espionages and skullduggeries that went on between these different kingdoms. And uh yeah, there were moments when you know there'd be a so-called horizontal alliance when all the north and south kingdoms got together, and there was the uh sorry, all the east and west kingdoms, and there was a horizontal alliance when all the I've got it wrong way around.

Russell 32:21

So I guess no, no, I understand.

Death, Immortality, And Succession

SPEAKER_01 32:25

Yeah, so but you know, and and spies and assassins and you know um all all kinds of things. I mean, for example, the the the whole assassination mission against the king of Qin, that was the state of Yen. That was nothing to do with Jin, but they were prepared to do that kind of thing, and and that's very common in the intrigues of the warring states. So, you know, it's it's a really fascinating period of history, and I think it's worth pointing out as well. I mean, this may have been a question you were planning on asking anyway, but I mean I'm gonna throw it in now. When we think of China, we think of this massive red blotch on the map that occupies a subcontinent. We think of this huge area with 1.4 billion people living there, and we think of it as being this kind of monolithic state. The idea of China as a single state was founded by the Emperor of Qin. In uh in presumption as well, because there were parts of what we now call China that didn't belong to him, but but nevertheless, the idea of China as a monolithic state comes from Qin. In the 2200 years since he came to power, China has been either fragmented or ruled by foreigners for half that time. So the concept of China as a single entity is something that the Chinese themselves have wrestled with and dueled against and reinstated and re-reinstated throughout 2200 years. The Han Dynasty was the inheritor of everything that Qin was, but when the Han Dynasty fell, China was didn't have a single ruling power for 400 years. It's only when the Sui and Tang dynasty turns up, in what we would call the Dark Ages, that things become a single country again. And then, you know, China is invaded by the Khitans and it's invaded by the Mongols and it's invaded by the Manchus. And each of these states is in charge for a century or more, or China is divided up into sometimes 10, 16 um different kingdoms. And during the Han Dynasty, there was even an argument about this. During the Han Dynasty, there was a fantastic document called The Discourses of Salt and Iron, which is the minutes of a long, long conference held uh in a I think about 80 BC, between various ministers of the Han Dynasty saying, What have we got here and do we want it? You know, we have uh a subcontinent that we are in charge of, and we have an operational policy that's designed to run a little Bronze Age city-state. Now, can we incorporate these people? Can we have laws that recognize the diversity of the of the country we now have? Are we going to continue to operate on the early hand policy of having an emperor, but then these kind of satraps and kingdoms on the edges that are sort of beholden to him but aren't? Or should we start appointing ministers? And, you know, this is an argument that could have turned into a federal China, or it could have turned into breaking it back up into kingdoms again. But they go, no, no, okay, we're going to have an empire. That's what we're going to do. But the the idea of China as a single state is something that obviously the modern-day People's Republic is very keen to promote, and they want to stamp down any sense of sedition or dissent that might see something breaking away from that. And and that, to return to your opener of Hero, is is also what Hero is about. You know, Hero is a bunch of actors from Hong Kong newly incorporated into the Hong Kong special administrative region. Special uh sorry, the the the Hong Kong uh Special Autonomous Region, whatever it's called, the HKSIR, newly incorporated. And Jet Li, who is is from mainland China, but has been in Hong Kong movies ever since the 80s, and it's them facing this this this monolith that they are, the the this this this icon that they are uh ushered into the presence of and deciding to themselves, spoilers, that the world is better for it.

Russell 36:20

So let's move on to the first emperor himself, because um I'm quite interested to know I mean how does he come to be be the king of Qin? Because because I don't think the path, at least I don't think his father's path to the throne is very straightforward.

SPEAKER_01 36:37

No, because you have, as so often happens, uh an aristocratic family where you know one man will have twenty wives and concubines, and so as a result, there's a huge number of children, and they're all getting sent away and fostered in different places, and they're having children, and their children are having children. And um what you have in the case of the first emperor is he is the grandson of the man who becomes the the king of Qin, or the yeah, the the uh who proclaims himself to be the king of Qin. And he's in this far-off place, and uh his father is is is looking for a actually no, his grandfather is looking for a a way of getting through this succession crisis. There's a man who's got a wife with no sons and a concubine with a son. And a man called Lu Bu Wei, a businessman in uh in a different state, uh who gets to know these people, says, you know what would really help? If you could convince this childless wife to adopt the son of the concubine, then we'd all benefit. The childless wife is not going to get cast aside, the concubine gets to have her son become the next ruler, there's the the matter of the of the succession is settled, and we're and everything's looking good. How about we do that? Um and and Lubu Wei is saying this because he has worked out as a businessman that it's the the ultimate deal for him would be to become the kingmaker of a country. There's a lot of money in jewels and there's a lot of money in investment and trade and everything, but if he gets to be the kingmaker and gets to be proclaimed as the first minister, then he has an entire country that he can ram raid at his disposal, which is in fact what happens. So there's a sudden series of suspicious death is uh sudden Let's try that again. There's a sudden series of suspicious deaths, and suddenly this 13-year-old boy is the new king, because his dad died two years after coming to the throne, and his dad died just after and suddenly everyone's dead, and there's his 13-year-old kid, and he needs a regent, and what do you know, Lu Bu Wei's available, and so we're done. What kind of muddies the waters on this is that Lu Bu Wei's uh previous mistress is the mother of the new king. Um and there's a lot of scurrilous gossip about this, which um which Summa Chen himself in the Grands Cross Records goes, you know, the the the the dates don't match. For this to be a true story, she'd have had to be pregnant with him for eleven months, which clearly isn't possible. But there were all these rumors that Lu Bu Wei was really the father um of of the uh of the man who would become the first emperor.

Russell 39:24

But does he not then get accused later on of having an affair with with uh with the with the mother?

Politics Of Archaeology And Tourism

SPEAKER_01 39:31

Yes, he does. Um so what you have with with Lu Bu Wei is that um he had this concubine who um the Qin Emperor's the man who would become the Qin Emperor's father um said that he wanted her for himself. I mean, basically, Lubu Wei is trying to do this deal with a with a uh with uh with Iran, which is the name of um first emperor's father. He's trying to do that, he's saying, you know, let me be the guy that backs you, let's sort this out, let's get everything, let's get everything rolling. And Iran's like, yeah, I really like that girl though, can I can I have her? And Lubu Wei very reluctantly hands over, you know, as a gesture of his faith, he kind of hands over, you know, his girlfriend, who ends up becoming, you know, the the the the mother of the of the um of the king of Qin, and who is then eternally associated with Lu Lubu Wei as his ex-mistress as maybe a woman that he's still seeing on the side. And as you get these various court intrigues at the state of Qin, people are whispering that. Well, we think that you know Lu Bu Wei is still at it with the Lady Hua Yang, we think that they're they're still doing it. And it's it's a very difficult rumour to um to to scotch. Again, these rumours seem doubtful. Um I I've always had my suspicion that he may have been the father of one of her other children, but uh there's no way that that can be proved. But what you get within the the the the state of Qin is Lu Bu Wei gets to run Amok while he is effectively the regent for this young boy, for this this teenage boy. And when Ying Jung, the the the king of Qin gets to be twenty two years old, they can't hold him off anymore. They have to say, okay, you're the king now, you're in charge. And there are a suspicious number of sudden attempted palace coups as people attempt to put another young member of the family in charge. And Lu Bu Wei may or may not have been responsible for some of those. But at the end of it all, the young man becomes the king of Qin, and you know, Lu Bu Wei is, you know, dismissed in favour of uh Li Tzu, who is uh who is a legalist uh minister who's been responsible for the education of the young king.

Russell 41:45

And in fact, we Sorry, go on. But was there not some disgraceful behaviour where Lu Bu Wei tries to tries to sort of fend off the mother who is passionately in love with him according to the story? And so he tries to get rid of her by finding somebody with enormous sexual prowess who he's not prowess, it's a penis.

Qin’s Legacy: Confucian Façade, Legalist Core

SPEAKER_01 42:06

This is the fantastic thing. I don't know if we can the the this is in the grandscribes records, and Summa Chen is not a scurrilous guy. He you know, he's he's he's the Thucydides of China. He really is a very respectable historian. And so when you're reading the Grand Scribe's record, you get to this point where, in order to deal with her, Lu Bu Wei found a man with an enormous penis, and you think, wow, I'm I need to check this in my dictionary because I can't Google it. And that's what he actually says. There's a man called Lao Ai, who was very well endowed, apparently, and the King of Qin's mother, you know, the the the Queen Dowager is insatiable, of course, because all women in history are women in history, and uh well I mean and and you know maybe she was. That's the thing as well. I mean, uh uh one day we'll talk about Empress Wu and we can talk about the degree to which if a man is insatiable, that's fine, and if a woman's insatiable, then she's a she's a slut. But the fact is that all of these people are operating in ultra wealth, and they get to do whatever they want, and if that's what the lady wants, then that's what the lady's gonna get, and Lubu Wei to distract her, finds Lao Ai. And in order to get her attention, these stories arise that Lao Ai is parading with people say cartwheel, but I don't think it's a cartwheel, but some kind of wheel with with his erect penis as the axle to demonstrate uh you know how how big it is and how how strong he is. And this attracts the interest of of uh of the Queen Dowager, and she you know eventually ends up established in a love nest with with this with Lao I. And uh I will point out that the word I in in Chinese is uh is a man of ill repute, so you know that's not his name, that's just what he's called in the record. So what Lubu Wei arranges is he says, Okay, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna tell we're gonna tell everyone that you've been castrated. And that makes you a eunuch, and it's okay for you to go into the palace and serve uh the Queen Dowager. And I want you to serve her as often as possible, uh, in an as in as non-unicary manner manner as you can. And in fact, what ends up happening is that Lauai and the Queen Dowager have two kids. Um and this is possible because she has said, Oh, I'm going to take myself off to the old capital for a while, I'm just going to live there for a couple of years. You know, she's behind a screen, you know, no one sees her in public. Much like medieval Japan, you can hide a pregnancy for quite a while. People are involved in this deception. I mean, when it all comes to when it all comes out, 40,000 people end up being punished. So there's a lot of there's a lot of people who know this is happening, but they've kept it from the King of Qin, um, and it's kept her out of the way. And Liu Buwei is indeed credited with that in the Grand Scribes Records. And there are some doubtful elements to this story, uh, one of which is the whole cartwheel thing. Um, but the other thing is that Su Machen, the the the historian, was himself castrated for a crime, and so he will have known that if you pluck out someone's beard, but they were castrated after puberty, the beard will grow back. And he reports this story that they say Lao I've been castrated, then they just pull out all of his hair, and um and that's supposed to be good enough. My guess would be you pull out all the hair, you show him off, and then you pack him away, you know, a hundred miles away so no one has to check. That that that seems feasible to me. However, the way that the story is is related in the Grand Crimes Records doesn't say that, it just repeats exactly these things, which we know that Summachen himself would have had direct experience of and would have known not to be true. Um so it it it it may be that he was just assuming we'd all understand that they would do it once and then they wouldn't check again. Uh, but that's not stated outright, and that's one of the textual issues with with that passage in the Grand Crimes records.

Russell 46:01

So poor old Lu Buei, presumably is part of the fallout when everybody finds out, presumably that's that's the moment when he gets pushed out and and his successor can come in.

SPEAKER_01 46:13

He is not directly implicated in the beginning, and but then it doesn't take long for the uh for the young King of Qin to to turn on him and to say, Who are you to for me to call you uncle? Why am I doing that? Um and it all it all kind of falls apart very quickly after that.

Russell 46:29

So I guess the the two things that the first emperor is most famous for in his life is the Great Wall of China, and the other thing is the terracotta army. But just on the Great Wall of China, is that right? Does he arrange for it to be built? This is this is this actually happened? Because there were a bunch of walls, weren't there? And I'm I'm sort of get very confused with with the Great Wall.

Closing Thoughts And Thanks

SPEAKER_01 46:55

Yes, he he he does build the Great Wall, but not the wall that most people think of. The various states within China had a lot of rice paddies and a lot of um irrigation works, so they were very used to building little walls. And defensively, they built big ones. And when you get to the edge of China, to the western edge of China, you are dealing with uh an area, a zone of land that is possible to be agricultural and possible to be nomadic. And so once you get into that liminal zone, you are dealing with nomad peoples who are gonna cause you trouble. Because they're wandering around in their various circuits, and if there's a shortage of food, they'll come closer, they'll come into your land. And meanwhile, you as agricultural people are pushing outwards into their land, and there's going to be tension there. And so, in order to deal with the various um barbarian peoples, the Hu people and the Wrong people, um R-O-N-G, wrong, not wrong wrong, it's one of those things there are a number of walls on the edge of um on the edge of China, and what the what the King of Qin did, what the Qin Emperor did, is to join those walls up so that there was a massive defence work going from the west to the north, right the way across of China. About a fifth of the length was not walled at all. There were natural barriers that functioned just as well, and it was made of rammed earth, and it was a it was a sentence, it was a criminal sentence. One of the worst punishments you could receive was wall, which meant you weren't going to get murdered, you weren't going to get castrated, you weren't going to get branded, you were going to get sent for a life sentence of hard labour building this thing. And as I said, there are hundreds of thousands of people available to do this, so it becomes possible very quickly. Sometimes the wall doesn't have to be that big. There are areas of the Great Wall where it's only, you know, a human person's height. It doesn't have to be big, it just has to stop someone who carries their wealth in cattle crossing. Um and so if you've got horses and cattle and you're a nomad people and you see this wall, you're not going to lift every single cow over it, you're just going to turn away and go somewhere else. So this wall uh was a thing, and it linked up a bunch of previous walls, and it stretched for hundreds, thousands of miles. But it is not the wall that you see in photographs. The wall that we see in photographs is the Ming Wall, which was built in the 14th, 15th century AD to keep out the Mongols and the Manchus, and so that is much more iconic and robust and memorable, and it's newer as well. So um so people kind of see it and and and say, oh wow, that's amazing. It's not the same wall that the first emperor built. Some parts of the Ming Wall do kind of cross into areas where the the first emperor's wall would have been, but in terms of the optics, when someone on television says the first emperor built the Great Wall and it cuts to a picture of Bada Ling just outside Beijing, that is a false equivalence.

Russell 49:51

I mean, I don't know how successful the first emperor's walls were, but the Ming's walls to keep out the Manchus and the Mongols, they don't seem to have been an absolutely stunning success.

SPEAKER_01 50:02

Well, it's very difficult to prove a negative, isn't it? I mean, we know that the walls ultimately failed because the nomads made it across. And in the case of the Ming dynasty, the walls failed due to finance and betrayal. I mean the walls held, but it was the fact that they couldn't pay the troops on them to manage them anymore, and the fact that uh Wu Sang Wei, who was the the man at the Shanghai Pass, opened the gates and let the man choose in because of something that had happened to his girlfriend in Beijing, that's what brought the wall down. I think it's cynical to say they didn't work, they worked very well until they didn't. And and that kind of eminent decline is very difficult to exp you know to to pass in historical terms, because we're probably talking about ten, twenty, a hundred times when the walls worked. Right. But we only remember the time when they didn't. And you know, the when it comes to the nomads on the border, China has fought hundreds of border wars with nomad peoples. And as I noted on several occasions, the nomad peoples have won and they've taken China over. So those would be occasions when the war didn't work. But um I'm trying to remember the exact number. I think uh I think there were In the time between the Qin Empire and the Tang Empire, there were 300, 360 different border conflicts. And bearing in mind that the the nomads didn't quite make it in, that would suggest that in most cases the war was holding.

Russell 51:33

There's a debate quite often in ancient history about whether the Spartans were really all they're cracked up to be as a fighting force. And people always mention the number of battles that they lost. And I always think, well, no, you really need to look at the number of battles they didn't need to fight, because everybody was absolutely terrified of them.

SPEAKER_01 51:51

Absolutely, absolutely. That's that's uh and this is something that Sunza actually says in the Art of War. When he says the best battle, the best generals win without fighting, he he one of the things that he says is there is no victory in a hard-fought victory. The best victory is one where it was really easy because you did all you followed all the rules and you got stuff done, or maybe they were so scared of you they never came in the first place. That's what we want, is my paraphrasing of the Art of War, which is a remarkably pacifist book. In the case of the Spartans, uh, I mean, I think they they had a uh a very chin style society, and they also had obviously the Hellots, they had this massive slave class that they had to keep under control, which probably made them tougher anyway. And I know they also have the the story of Thermopylae, which of course is uh you know so iconic that the um the the Spartan uh Spartan phrase uh come and get them is the motto of the Greek army, I believe, even today.

Russell 52:50

So let's talk about let's talk about the death of the of the first emperor. And maybe before or as part of talking about his death, we should talk about his search for immortality. And I'm not quite sure to what extent the terracotta army is part of that. Uh I mean I think well is it? No, it's not.

SPEAKER_01 53:10

Um uh the the the terracotta army I I would say i is a sign of defeat uh in that. What you have is a man who has literally everything, who has, as far as he's concerned, conquered the world. He has achieved everything it's possible to achieve, and so he assumes, well, uh how how different can death be? Surely we can deal with this as well. He falls in with a bunch of charlatans who are prepared to tell him, Oh yes, if you use the right breathing exercises or drink the right potions or or live in this the right style, you can become immortal, and that they sort of um misinterpret a number of Taoist stories about how to be long-lived. Um in fact, his mausoleum starts construction when he's thirteen years old. When he becomes the king of Qin, they start building his grave. And the size of that grave gets bigger and bigger as he becomes bigger and bigger, because the size of your tomb is supposed to reflect your your worldly importance, and he's become the most important person in the world, so it's the greatest tomb in the world. But yes, he does get involved in a number of schemes uh to become immortal, and he's not the last Chinese emperor to do this either. There are several other cases in Chinese history of emperors saying, Okay, well, I'm the coolest person in the world, I'm the richest person in the world, I'm the most powerful. If some, you know, I'm the guy who can solve death. So, you know, bring me the brightest boffins, bring me the greatest potions, I'm gonna live forever. And it doesn't work. I think we can all think of vainglorious world leaders who think they can achieve everything and then turn out to be not as clever as they think they are. And and I think he ran into that kind of shock. And in fact, it may have been what killed him. Um, you know, he he was relatively young when he died. It could have been he could have been poisoned, or he could have poisoned himself by taking mercury pills which are supposed to make you immortal. And so uh during one of his many progressions around the country to you know show off and inspect his realm, he died on on the on the journey, and the various people around him immediately began a cover-up because if the news got out that he was dead, then stuff would happen elsewhere. So they actually uh kept it quiet for as many days as they could um while they tried to arrange what would happen next. And uh the man who became kind of paramount in this was a man called Zhao Gao, uh, who was a eunuch in the service of the court, who realized that he had access to one of the first emperor's sons. And so he arranged for the sudden demise of the eldest son, and then put this very young son who was still a child, uh, called Huhai, he said, Okay, you are the second emperor of Qin. Here we go, second emperor, um, and just ran the kingdom on on his behalf for several years.

Russell 56:06

But this this episode made no sense to me because what he does, doesn't he? He arranges for a letter to be sent to the eldest son saying your dad wants you to commit suicide, uh, and and signs it, you know, lots of love, dad. Lots of love, dad, yes. And but we've all had letters like that. Well, quite. But but so you get so so he's up there on the wall, he gets the letter, he's there with a general with a massive army who he's best friends with, and then he commits suicide. And I'm just Yes. What were you thinking?

SPEAKER_01 56:41

Yeah, it's a very it's a very difficult passage to to believe. I I agree. Fusu, who is the eldest son of the first emperor, who is remembered as being this kind of noble character, it'll be great when he's second emperor because he's super cool, um, gets this this letter that Zhao Gao has forged with the first emperor's seal saying, Okay, well, you you've been ordered to kill yourself, and then kills himself. My only guess would be that it wasn't quite as voluntary as that. Um but if a command arrives from the first emperor and you don't know he's dead, that there will be people around who will expedite that for you, is is my guess. It's very difficult for me to imagine Fuso going, Oh, well, I better do it what my dad says, gonna kill myself now, and then killing himself, as you say. It it seems it seems unlikely. Um there are several incidents that come up soon afterwards where other people are placed in very similar positions and go the other way. They go the way that you are implying he should have done. So, for example, there's there's the man who was a who was a um a work leader at the at the mausoleum, uh, who's taking a bunch of slave labourers along and he's gonna be late, and he realizes that if he's late, he's gonna be executed. So he thinks, well, sod it, I'm gonna revolt. And he he he turns them into an army and they and they go off and and try and fight to overthrow the second emperor. I think Fu Su is probably the last person in the history of the Qin dynasty to actually obey fully. After him, it starts to fall apart, and people start saying, Well, okay, well, it's uh let's fight back because we're gonna die anyway, we might as well go down fighting. But yeah, it's it's a very it is indeed a very odd part of the record. The thing is with with with classical Chinese is it's a very terse language. Right. Very sparing in what it says. It's like Latin times 10, you know, a subject is mentioned, and that subject's not mentioned again until the subject changes. And if you've lost the page where the subject changes, you think you're still talking about the same guy. And so when it says, you know, he received an order to kill himself and did, the did is something that Chinese scholars will argue about a lot. Like which kind of did is that? Was it did for him? Was it or you know, or or did he did it himself? Um, that level of textual analysis, um, particularly in the in the um the spring and autumn annals, you know, people have written entire books about, you know, uh there's a fantastic concordance of the spring and autumn annals, which go through character by character why that particular character was chosen. Not that it was a copying error, it was a deliberate choice by the guy who wrote this, and this is why.

Russell 59:19

So tell us a bit about the Terracotta Army, because one of the things that that sort of shocked me in in your book was that I have this image of them. In fact, I've seen a photograph of them. They're all standing there to attention, looking terrific, and I've seen them displayed in the British Museum, you know, when they've gone out on loan, some of them. But according to your books, that's not how they were found at all. They were f they were found in pieces. Is that can that be right? Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 59:52

So when he was buried in his mausoleum, there is no mention of the terracotta army in any of the sources. The Grand Scribes record just says it was a big mausoleum. It doesn't say there were 7,000 terracotta soldiers with all with different facial features standing to attention. So everything we know about the terracotta army we have learned since 1974. Um and I think that's the thing that really boggles my mind about them is that in 1973 we didn't know it existed. And so much of what we know about the Qin Dynasty is based on the Terracotta army because it's one of the only artifacts surviving that was made in the Qin dynasty, and it wasn't just something they got from the Zhou or something the Han appropriated later on or anything like that. And and to put this in context, the Museum of the Terracotta Warriors has been in existence for longer than the Qin dynasty. So, you know, when when you go there in Shi'an and you see the Terracotta Warriors, it's been there for longer. Um, so there's no mention of them. They were they were put in their various ranks with a very low ceiling above them, so no one was ever intended to see them. And uh the mausoleum itself was not completed. I mean, one of the pits, for example, is empty because it was never filled. What happened was during the collapse of the Second Emperor's realm, which fell apart very swiftly, because Zhao Gao was wrecking things from the inside and there were various rebels coming from the outside. One leader said, Listen, the only way we can save the capital is if we offer a pardon to the slave labourers at the mausoleum, and we say to them, Listen, join up, be an army, and hold off the state, and we'll let you go. And they go, Okay, that sounds good. Where do we get our swords from? The Terracotta army were armed with real weapons, but most of them are empty-handed today because the soldiers, the newly appointed soldiers, broke into their own tomb and grabbed the weapons out of the hands of the soldiers and pushed them over, and they, you know, they're all lying in bits, and then it was largely forgotten what was going on there. There was a huge kind of necropolis on top that was burned down in parts and then raided for materials and others. And then for hundreds of years afterwards, there were stories about the mausoleum of the first emperor. And you know, a shepherd found his way into a cave once, but his torch lit fire to the thing and it burned down and um but no one really uh took it all that seriously. Okay, but then you know there's a temple underground somewhere, okay. So what? No one really took it seriously. No one admitted to breaking into the tomb itself, the grave mound at the centre. And then in 1974, it's a very hot season, and a bunch of farmers from the Yang family go out to sink a well, and they dig this hole in the ground uh near some persimmon trees, and after a day or so of hacking away, one of them, a man called Yang Jerfar, hits something on the ground and he sees what he thinks is a pot. It's actually the collarbone of a of a terracotta warrior without a head, and they pull it out and go, Oh wow, it's a terracotta thing. Some kind of thing, I know, some some kind of old temple, and they don't give it much thought. They throw bits out of the way and they keep digging and they throw some more bits out of the way, and they're a bit annoyed they haven't found any water, and they're a bit annoyed they found what could be an old temple, so that could be cursed and that's going to cause trouble. And eventually the news gets out to the local museum where the guy who runs the museum, a man called Zhao Kang Min, says, Can I see this stuff? And they go, Oh, yeah, there's the kids are playing with a bit over there, and here's a head of something, and and he goes, This is Qin Dynasty stuff. I'll I'll pay you for as much of this stuff as you can give me. So they fill up a wheelbarrow with this stuff and they take it to him, and he gives them like a tenner. And he goes, This is Qin Dynasty stuff, this is really interesting. Um and the news gets out that this is what is found, and the government in Beijing shuts down everyone who's working there, moves them off the land, and institutes the archaeological dig that discovers the terracotta army, in the course of which they put all the soldiers back on their feet, they glue them back together. I mean, one of the reasons it's it's so easy for the terracotta army to go on a world tour is they've already been broken once. So if you drop one, it's not the end of the world. Just get a bit of super glue, put it back together. They're only pots. Um of course they don't they don't exist in quite the way that they were. They were all painted, they're all beautifully painted. Well, I say beautifully, they were garishly painted uh when they were first buried, and the paint um rots away in in oxygen the moment it sees uh fresh air. So we don't really have any any of that anymore. They were largely empty-handed, uh, they didn't have any sorts. There's only four swords, I think, found in the entire site, but they had a lot of crossbow quarrels, uh, the crossbow mechanisms themselves, howlbirds, spears, whatnot, the the horses and the chariots and so on. And as time has gone on in the excavation, we found other pits that have a menagerie of animals and uh weightlifters and dancing girls and so on. So that there's all kinds of things at the site, and it's still being excavated today, and for political reasons will be for many years to come. So, yes, they were all in bits when they were found, and they've and they've been you know reassembled and put back where they were. If you go to the site, there's there's ranks and ranks and ranks at the back that haven't been excavated yet of the of the of the of the main pit. They've stuck some of them together, but not all, and they've left some pits in other areas in the condition which they were originally found. I mean, I'm not answering some kind of conspiracy theory here. It's well known that they were they were broken because there's actually a pit at the site where they've left them in their original state, so you can see the kind of wreck they were in. Um and the and the effort of restoration is still ongoing. Um in the main pit, there is always uh a good twenty soldiers in various states of repair as they put them back together.

Russell 1:05:43

I didn't quite understand what you meant when you said that for for political reasons the excavation will carry on for I don't know another twenty years.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:52

This is a it's a big issue in archaeology. Archaeology is very boring um to watch. As a spectator sport, it's worse than golf. And so it takes forever to get stuff done. And often the the important issues are the things that you found are middens, you know, with fossilized poo in them. You know, that that tells you more about what the Vikings were eating than than you know uh a Viking cookbook. And so in in in the same case, the the the site of the Terracotta army is is miles wide, and it used to be an entire necropolis, and so there were temples there and there were burial pits and there were the children of the first emperor who were executed and they got their own little pits and their families and and the big prize is pres you know that the the Tutan Carmoon level prize is not the terracotta army, it's the the grave in the middle. Because according to uh Li Dau Yuan certainly and also a little bit of Suma Chen, there's he's supposed to be in a golden coffin set in a sea of Mercury that is like a map of the world with jewels in the sky to you know represent the stars you know stuck in the ceiling. Um and this is presumably the big prize, and you might think to yourself, well, why not just go straight in there, dig a hole, get it now? And the reason is is that if it turns out to be empty, that's it. Digs over, shut you down. And then this has happened in other places. I've I've seen it happening in other places, not just in China, but all around the world. You you know, if it's if the if the big thing is done, you you stop funding the the little digs at the side. So very deliberately, and I'm gonna know this is political with a small P, the archaeologists are going aspiring around the edge, dealing with all of the important stuff that's important to archaeologists as they head in towards the centre. And when they get to the centre, they will either open the tomb and find the most amazing thing ever, or they will open the tomb and find it's empty because we have a Valley of the King situation, and he's actually buried in a disused jade mine on Mount Li, and no one thought of looking there. Or somebody's been there before you and uh that's yes, I mean yes, the other thing is that grave robbing in China is a is a I'm not gonna say it's a national pastime. But you know, I'm I'm absolutely fascinated by grave robbing in China, and and when I've I've talked to a lot of archaeologists about it. I was in Xi'an at the various grain pits, they have these grain silos outside the city, and I was standing in one talking to uh um the man who who runs the dig there, and I said, What's that kind of hole there? And he went, Oh, that's where the grave robbers came in. And they they dug into this thing because they knew it was an archaeological site, they didn't know it was an archaeological site of a grain silo, so all you're gonna find is like corn. And because we're archaeologists, we could forensically date the time of the grave robbery because of the fag packets they left behind and the beer bottles and stuff. And they did this in 1986, you know. So, and I was in another grave site in Anyang talking to the uh the the archaeolog the lead archaeologist there, and he said, you know, so we we these are all fields, and so we pick a field and we strip away the topsoil and we dig down and we get the stuff and then we we we hui tien, we we return the field by putting everything back, and then the next year people are growing crops on it and we've moved one along. And he said, and he said, When I say we, I mean I'm the archaeologist and all the farmers who we've put out of work by taking their field a well away, they work for me as diggers. He said, although sometimes I think when we find a grave that's been robbed, I think the people who've just found the grave for me were the ones who robbed it yesterday. And he was he was joking, but he wasn't joking. If you are a farmer in the middle of nowhere in China and you, you know, you you're digging in your field and you hit something, maybe you take it out of the ground and maybe you tell people and maybe you don't. And also there are fantastic stories about very there was one there was one point in the Han Dynasty where they said, you know, there's so much gold and bronze underground, we should just dig it up. Let's let's raid the dead to to support the living. And so there was this kind of national policy for a number of years of okay, just dig everything up, take the bronze, melt it down, reuse it. And then we're like, no, no, no, we can't do that. The spirits will be offended. So they're okay, pull the bronze back, stop doing it. Um, so you know, you you get these kind of massive switches in in kind of attitudes towards it, uh, which itself has been the subject of some very interesting Chinese films um uh recently. So, so um, yes, I can't remember what the question was now. Oh yes, uh it was what why is it political? That's why it's political, because the narrative that museums tell about things, sometimes we can tell the story of the discovery, and that's kind of fun, and sometimes we tell the story of the artifacts, but you know, politics becomes a a huge issue with uh with the story of the terracotta army. So you have the Yang family, for example, they've they've they've dug this pit and they found this stuff, and then they're they're ushered away. They're they're told uh they're given land somewhere else because this is now an archaeological dig site, leave us alone. The Yang family then turn on each other about who the person was who discovered the terracotta army. Was it the work gang leader, or was it his nephew, or was it the guy Yang Jafar, who I've met with the pickaxe, which I've held, that actually hits that pot. Now, Yang Jafar, who's still alive, uh as we record today, he had a reputation as being the man who discovered it. He managed to hang on to that, the government kind of let him keep his pick and made it a uh a national, you know, treasure. And when the museum was built, which was 10, 15 years later, he started to sit in the museum and sign books. And that was how he made a lot of his money. And he makes a lot of his money talking to TV journalists and so on about what he did. But it's a very well-rehearsed story, and it's one he's told a million times. And with the best one in the world, he's a farmer. He doesn't necessarily know about anything else. So Zhao Kang Min, the man who said, send me the wheelbarrow, he then said, I discovered the terracotta army. They were a bunch of peasants who found some pots and let their kids play with them. I'm the guy who showed up and said, This is what it is, this is Qin Dynasty, and this is important, and we should do something with it. And I've always felt with Zhao Kang Min that while he may appear to protest too much, there is a there is another element buried beneath that, which I know is a question you wanted to ask me about anyway, which is that I think Zhao Kang Min, at various points in his earlier career, had stumbled across Qin artefacts in that area, but didn't talk about it because he was afraid uh of what would happen during the Cultural Revolution, for example, because you know you had this period in Chinese history that went on for several years when anything old was destroyed. And as a young man, Zhao Kang Min had found some terracotta statues near the site of the terracotta army. He put them in his museum in Lin Tong, and in the late 60s, a bunch of red guards turn up and smash them up because they were old and there was supporting feudalism and so on, and he was made to issue a self-criticism about it. So it may well be that Zhao Kang Min had known for some time or believed for some time there was some kind of large site there, but he'd he'd kept quiet about it because he was afraid of the political situation. When the news got out in 74, it was against his will. There was a journalist who visited and said, I've got to tell people about that. And he's like, Oh, for God's sake, please don't tell anyone, because we don't know what the government's gonna do about it. As it happened, the government was very keen on the first emperor because Chairman Mao was a huge fan of the first emperor as being this kind of unwelcome unifier who made China what it was and had to break a few eggs doing so, if I can be so glib about Chairman Mao. And so as as a result, the the terracotta army has become this iconic thing that it is today. But the the conflict between the Yangs and and Zhao Kangmin played out right up until Zhao Kangmin's death in about 2018. And and it goes to a semantic issue. Who discovered it? The guy with the pickaxe or the guy who identified the the pottery?

Russell 1:14:01

It is interesting what you say about the Chinese government, because it's something I don't completely understand. I mean, if I was the Communist Party of China, I'd be sweeping the archaeologists aside and saying, right, guys, let's start digging let's start digging the big mound and see and see what's there. I mean, I'm quite surprised that they uh that they're that they're leaving it uh as long as they are. And and maybe it speaks quite well for them, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:27

I don't know precisely what's going on behind the scenes there. I mean that there are stories about the first emperor's tomb and indeed about Empress Wu's tomb, which is similarly large, that the archaeologists have said after the there were certain events during the Cultural Revolution, for example, in the Ming tombs, where the Red Guards broke in and completely wrecked the tombs, dragged out the bodies of the uh former Ming Emperors and set fire to them and hung them from a tree and and then took away the silk and left it in a shed where it rotted and and all all kinds of issues where I think the archaeologists have got the moral high ground now to say, trust us when we say we shouldn't go in yet. And one of the rationales, for example, with the tomb of Empress Wu is we don't know what's in there. The moment we're in there and the oxygen comes with us, whatever it is is going to start to decay. Right. We need to go in with technology that may not have been invented yet in order to ensure that we do right by this tomb. So there's a little bit of that going on, and there's also a little bit of uh the the politics I mentioned. And I I would also say you're assuming, perhaps, that the the government of the People's Republic of China isn't wise to the same thing. The Terracotarmy is a fantastically lucrative tourist site, and for as long as it's ongoing and there's always a new discovery and there's always a new thing, that's that's bringing in huge amounts of income, particularly to Shian. Shi'an and Luoyang were both capitals of the Tang dynasty, they were both capitals of the Zhou dynasty. They fight all the time about who is the origin of the Silk Road, where does the Silk Road start? Because if you get to say, you know, if you get enough archaeological sites and places of interest in one town, that becomes a three-night tourist itinerary item rather than a day trip, and that generates huge amounts of tourist income. So I think Xi'an and uh Luoyang are both fighting over this, and Shi'an has a terracotta army, and for as long as it's an ongoing project that's still bringing people in. Incidentally, Xi'an also has the start of the Silk Road. Rather brilliantly, they built a massive statue the size of three buses, and they called it the start of the Silk Road. So whenever you Google it, this point comes down on the western edge of Xi'an, and you go, Oh, that's where it is. Okay.

Russell 1:16:45

And how is the Qin uh how is the Qin dynasty, how is the first emperor now looked back on in in history by by modern Chinese?

SPEAKER_01 1:16:57

Well, Chairman Mao was a big fan of him because he was a unifier, and I think the the modern day party is a big fan of him because they're very keen on tourism.

Russell 1:17:06

Um and it's I was thinking more about are they are they big fans of legalism?

SPEAKER_01 1:17:12

Well, okay, that's uh there is a a Chinese scholar. Hang on, I'm gonna look behind me at my my bookshelves. Hang on.

Russell 1:17:21

And ladies and gentlemen, there's a vast bookcase that I'm looking at behind Jonathan. Here we go.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:28

Yeah, sorry about that. Um there is a Chinese scholar called called Zhao Ding Xin, um who was published by, I'm looking at the book now, Oxford University Press. And he wrote a book called The Confucian Legalist State. So he basically says that Chinese history is a constant duel between Confucianism and legalism. The way that, you know, legalism was was regarded as a failure because the Qin failed. But that slave labour dividend, as I mentioned, helped the Han Dynasty establish itself so firmly that it was in power for 400 years. And so the Han Dynasty made a big deal about how Confucian they were. But so many of the skullduggeries of the Han Dynasty are very legalist in their tone, and they kept the Qin Dynasty punishments and they kept many of the Qin Dynasty legal statutes. So I would say that the modern day um argument of the of the People's Republic has for the last twenty years been one of a Hirsch her Hershey Shuh of a of a harmonious society. We we we use our institutes all around the world are called Confucius Institutes, and we are promoting Chinese culture, and Confucius says let's all be harmonious. But that has quite a sinister tone in modern China because the concept of a harmonious society is also one of don't rock the boat. It's not just um understand your obligations, it's know your place. And so the modern People's Republic has a very Confucian facade to it, but still enforces its desires with a certain legalist strength.

Russell 1:19:08

Okay. Well, look, that's uh that's probably as good a place to end this as any. So that was great, actually. Uh, as always, Jonathan, thank you very much indeed. Thank you for having me.