Did the Qin Dynasty Fall Because of Tyranny?

Those who won the hearts of the people won the realm; the realm belonged to those who amassed great virtue.

Because they lived in different eras, people thought differently.

Some deeply agreed with those two statements, while others dismissed them.

Liu Bang wholeheartedly agreed. "Back in the day, I was just a commoner. I was able to establish Great Han because I had the people's support."

"As the saying goes, a just cause enjoys abundant support, while an unjust one finds little. Only one who possesses every virtue can truly win the realm." The man who said this was Mencius, who held that the ruler mattered less than the people.

The people living in those troubled times had grown numb. Their lives were worth less than grass, and they had never seen an emperor who held them in his heart.

Emperor Taizu of Ming's plane.

Zhu Yuanzhang said with feeling, "I rose from the grassroots and knew the people's suffering well. That was why I could rule with benevolence and virtue and win the hearts of all under heaven."

The officials beside Zhu Yuanzhang twitched at the corners of their eyes.

Those who win the hearts of the people win the realm? Old Zhu, is your family really fit to say that?

Why don't you talk about how your sons abused and killed the people in their fiefs?

Emperor Chengzu of Ming's plane.

"Great Ming fell because it was beset by troubles at home and abroad. The foreign enemies were the Jurchens, but what was the trouble at home?" Great Emperor Yongle Zhu Di mused. "External threats were always there; it came down to whose troubles at home erupted first. Those people of later generations were right!"

[Did the Qin Dynasty really fall because of tyranny? #QinDynasty #YingZheng]

"For two thousand years, who didn't know that the First Emperor of Qin was a tyrant?"

"I want to see just how people in later generations judged Ying Zheng."

"Tyrannical Qin fell in its second generation. That was retribution for destroying my state!"

"Though Chu had but three households left, Chu would surely be the one to destroy Qin!"

"Just wait! Once we outlive Ying Zheng, we'll carve up the Qin State and restore our old states. Liu Bang and his Great Han had better stay out of history!"

First Emperor of Qin's plane.

Ying Zheng asked curiously, "Great Qin fell in its second generation. How will the histories of later generations record me? How will people more than two thousand years from now judge me?"

By now, Ying Zheng already had a feeling that the histories would have nothing good to say about him.

["Ying Zheng. What comes to mind when you hear that name? The peerless emperor who swept away the Six States and unified Huaxia? Or the totalitarian tyrant who burned books, buried Confucian scholars, and imposed harsh laws and cruel punishments?"]

["Whenever the fall of the Qin Dynasty came up, the prevailing view had always been that it was caused by tyranny."]

["Then, in 1975, more than 1,100 Qin bamboo slips unearthed at Shuihudi in Hubei Province overturned what people thought they knew. Their 200,000 characters clearly recorded the Qin Dynasty's humane laws: when called up for labor service, anyone under 1.3 meters tall did not have to join the army; being three to five days late warranted only a verbal reprimand; and if heavy rain delayed troops, they could even be exempted from punishment. This ran directly counter to Chen Sheng and Wu Guang's claim that delaying troops would cost them their heads. So who was lying?"]

"Chen Sheng and Wu Guang lied?"

"That's not what Sima Qian wrote in the Records of the Grand Historian!"

"Sima Qian was a Han Dynasty court historian. It's only natural that his Records of the Grand Historian would smear the Qin Dynasty! Besides, he never saw the First Emperor of Qin with his own eyes or lived in the Qin Dynasty. What did he know about Qin law?"

"A rebellion needs a reason. If the reigning emperor isn't a tyrant, what reason is there to rebel?"

"The Han Dynasty replaced the Qin Dynasty. No matter how the Han family won the realm, Han emperors would never have cleared the First Emperor of Qin's name. It would have been good enough if they hadn't gone even further in smearing him!"

"Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, was it? I'll remember those names!"

Chen Sheng and Wu Guang's faces darkened. This was how their names became known throughout the realm.

["Besides military law, there were even laws protecting the mountains and forests. For example, every second month, people were forbidden to cut down trees in the mountains or hunt certain birds, and so on."]

["From then on, more people began to consider the issue from the historical perspective of the time, and the view that the King of Qin ruled through tyranny grew increasingly weak and unconvincing. So was he unjustly condemned for all time over the burning of books and burial of Confucian scholars?"]

The First Emperor of Qin looked at the sky screen and frowned slightly.

Some of those laws had not been introduced by him; the credit belonged to the Qin kings of the previous generation. It was certainly a good thing that people of later generations attributed them all to him, as it could raise Great Qin's prestige and unite the people behind it. But it could also be seen as taking credit due to the former kings.

["In fact, that infamy did not stem from his burying alive hundreds of fraudulent alchemists, most of whom could hardly even be called Confucian scholars. It stemmed from his banning private schools and burning the histories of every state except Qin, causing a great decline in culture and severely stifling the advancement of social thought."]

["In most people's eyes, burning the books was more serious than burying the Confucian scholars."]

["That was why the phrase 'burning books and burying Confucian scholars' made its way into today's history textbooks."]

"Lies! All lies!"

"The burning of books and burial of Confucian scholars was a lie? The people buried were fraudulent alchemists, not Confucian scholars? Just what did Sima Qian write in his Records of the Grand Historian?"

"His Records of the Grand Historian has no basis whatsoever! He made the whole thing up!"

First Emperor of Qin's plane.

"The people I had buried were indeed alchemists, not Confucian scholars. The alchemist Xu Fu cheated me out of money, failed to find the elixir of immortality, and spread rumors everywhere. How could I spare him? As for burning books, I only ordered the burning of privately held copies of the Classic of Poetry, the Book of Documents, and the writings of the hundred schools, while preserving the official collections. The histories of later generations..." Ying Zheng looked at the sky screen and could not bring himself to go on.

The people who wrote history in later generations had relied entirely on unofficial accounts.

Li Si said, "Your Majesty burned the books to complete the unification of writing and thought as quickly as possible. The subjects of the former Six States did not understand, and people of later generations understand even less."

["Drawing upon the accumulated might of six generations, Ying Zheng destroyed the Six States, subdued the Baiyue, built the Great Wall, and struck the Xiongnu. After the six kings were gone and all within the four seas had been united, he abolished the system of enfeoffment and established commanderies and counties, achieving an unprecedented and never-to-be-repeated great unification, with a common script and a common axle width for carts. He was one man, yet he accomplished things beyond mortal reach. It would not be an exaggeration to call him a 'god.'"]

"Good! Good!" Ying Zheng burst out laughing.

Being called a "god" swept away all of Ying Zheng's earlier displeasure.

Great Qin's civil and military officials congratulated their emperor.

That praise was so lofty!

Ying Zheng was pleased, but plenty of others were not.

The nobles of the former Six States, and the emperors who came after the Qin Dynasty.

We were all emperors, so why were you alone called a "god"?

"Isn't calling Ying Zheng a god going too far?"

"What benefit did people of later generations get from that tyrant, to speak up for him like this?"

["It was precisely because he raised the empire to a new height that it existed by virtue of him alone. That also meant that once Ying Zheng died, the realm was bound to descend into chaos. That was why he pursued the elusive dream of eternal life."]

["Ying Zheng was the true founder of our country's territorial boundaries. No matter how talented and visionary the emperors of later generations were, including the kings and princes with fiefs in the various regional commands during the great fragmentation of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, they did no more than move within the boundaries drawn by the First Emperor of Qin. His great contributions to Huaxia civilization deserve to be remembered forever by us, his descendants in later generations."]

[History is written by the victors.]

[With more than 200 countries on one Earth, isn't that a betrayal of Mr. Ying?]