At about the same time as Xunzi’s visit to Xianyang, Qin abandoned the traditional policy of alliances and adopted one of unilateral expansion through naked aggression. ‘Attack not only their territory but also their people,’ advised Qin’s then chief minister, for as Xunzi had put it, ‘the ruler is just the boat but the people are the water’. Enemy forces must be not only defeated but annihilated so that their state lost the capacity to fight back. ‘Here’, intones the Cambridge History of Ancient China, ‘we find enunciated as policy the mass slaughters of the third century BC.’
The slaughters were made more feasible by important advances in weaponry and military organisation. In the ‘Spring and Autumn’ period, military capacity had been assessed in terms of horse-drawn chariots. Besides usually three passengers – commander, archer/bodyguard and charioteer – each of the two-wheeled chariots was accompanied by a complement of about seventy infantrymen armed with lances, who ran alongside and did most of the fighting. The chariot was a speedy prestige conveyance for ‘feudal’ lords and provided a vantage and rallying point for the troops, but it often got stuck in the mud and was liable to overturn on rough terrain.
As centralisation increasingly relieved subordinate lineages of their fiefs and autonomy, most states supplemented these ‘feudal’ levies of chariots and runners by recruiting bodies of professional infantrymen that rapidly grew into standing armies. Disciplined and drilled, clad in armour and helmets of leather, and equipped with swords and halberds, the new model armies were more than a match for the chariot-chasing levies even before the introduction of forged iron and the deadly crossbow.
These important innovations seem to have orginated early in the fourth century BC and in the south, where Wu was famed for its blades and where Chu graves have yielded some of the earliest examples of the metal triggers used for firing crossbows. Never far behind any technological innovation, scholarly treatises provide evidence of warfare being elevated into an art. A shi called Sun Bin, also from the south, is credited with the first text in which the crossbow is described as ‘the decisive element in combat’.29 Sun Bin also mentions cavalry, a novelty in that the art of fighting from horseback was as yet little understood. A famous discussion on the merits of trousers over skirts that took place in the state of Zhao in 307 BC seems to mark the adoption of the nomadic practice of sitting astride horses rather than being drawn along behind them in chariots. But cavalry were used largely for reconnaisance and their numbers were small. Mozi, that stickler for non-aggression, manages under the rubric of self-defence to reveal the development of a much more sophisticated level of siege warfare, including the use of wheeled ladders for wall-scaling and smoke-bellows to counter tunnellers. Cities had long been fortified, but it was in the ‘Warring States’ period that chains of garrisoned forts linked by ‘long walls’ first receive mention. Partly to define territory, partly to defend it, ‘long walls’, bits of which would later be incorporated into Qin’s supposed ‘Great Wall’, were perhaps the most obvious manifestation of state formation.
Universal conscription naturally meant that armies were much bigger. At the great battle of Chengpu in 632 BC each side had supposedly mobilised up to 20,000 men. By the beginning of the ‘Warring States’ period, armies are thought to have numbered around 100,000, and by the third century BC several hundred thousand. Battle-deaths running to 240,000 are mentioned but are presumed to be exaggerations. The slaughter was nevertheless on an unprecedented scale; the battles sometimes lasted for weeks, and prisoners-of-war could expect no mercy; their numbers, like their heads, were simply added to the body-count.
In a series of decisive campaigns accompanied by just such slaughter, Qin decimated the forces of Han and Zhao between 262 and 256 BC. The ageing Zhou king, who had unwisely thrown in his lot on the side of Zhao, was also forced to submit. According to an almost throwaway paragraph in the Shiji, in 256 BC this last of the thirty-nine Zhou kings of such illustrious memory ‘bowed his head in recognition of guilt and offered his entire territory…to Qin’. ‘The Qin ruler accepted the gift and sent the Zhou ruler back to his capital. [Next year] the Zhou people fled to the east and their sacred vessels, including the nine cauldrons, passed into the hands of Qin. Thus the Zhou dynasty came to an end.’30
Ten years later, in 246 BC, there succeeded to the Qin throne a thirteen-year-old boy ‘with arched nose and long eyes, the puffed out chest of a hawk, the voice of a jackal…and the heart of a tiger or a wolf’. At this stage he was known as King Zheng of Qin. A quarter of a century’s ruthless campaigning would see the remaining ‘warring states’ eliminated and the same King Zheng arrogate to himself the Zhou’s Heavenly Mandate and assume the title of Shi Huangdi, ‘First Emperor’.
Contrived in bloodshed, China’s tradition of empire would endure, often broken but never abjured, from this ‘First Emperor’ in the third century BC until the film-famous ‘Last Emperor’ of the twentieth century AD. A milder young man wearing thick spectacles, dark suit and silk tie, the last of China’s emperors, like the last of its Zhou kings, would ‘flee to the east’. Having first abdicated and then been deposed, he would slip away from Beijing’s Forbidden City in 1924 to place his person at the disposal of the Japanese invader.
C. 250–210 BC
STONE CATTLE ROAD
ALTHOUGH QIN SHI HUANGDI (the Qin ‘First Emperor’) is invariably described as the architect of China’s earliest integration, his achievement was not quite as remarkable as might be supposed. The Qin edifice would last barely a generation, after which the empire would have to be laboriously reconstructed; it covered little more than ‘core’ China, and that not entirely; and although the First Emperor certainly outdid all his predecessors in aggressive universalism, his success was largely down to others. Shang Yang and his ‘legalist’ associates had devised the interventionist framework of what amounted to a totalitarian state; various rationalists and ministers continued to fine-tune this machinery: and it was the kings of Qin prior to the First Emperor who had instigated the policy of expansion and had substantially realised it while assembling the resources for its completion.
In c. 330 BC – so a century before King Zheng of Qin assumed the title of ‘First Emperor’ – his great-great-great-grandfather King Hui of Qin had allowed his attention to wander away from the east, from the lower Yellow River and its ever ‘warring states’, to focus on an inviting but remote and apparently unattainable prospect in the far south-west. There, over the switchback mountains of the Qinling range (now a last redoubt of the Giant Panda), across the valley of the upper Han River, and beyond the misty Daba Hills, lay what one scholar calls the ‘land of silk and money’.1 This was Sichuan, the great upper basin of the Yangzi that is today the country’s most populous province. Two administrations then controlled it – as indeed they do now following a 1997 bisection of the province: Ba in the south-east roughly corresponded to the modern Chongqing region and Shu in the centre to the modern Chengdu region.
Neither Shu nor Ba figure much in the ‘Spring and Autumn’ or the ‘Warring States’ Annals. Distance, gradients and climate conspired to isolate Sichuan from the Yellow River states, while the Sichuanese peoples were deemed too alien and uncultured to participate in the cynical manoeuvrings and bloodlettings of the high-minded Xia. Outside this charmed circle, the great bell-casting southern state of Chu had on occasion pushed up the Han and Yangzi