King Hui of Qin had nevertheless established cordial relations with his distant neighbours. He exchanged presents with the king of Shu, encouraged small-scale trade with his kingdom and nursed big-scale designs upon it. Access remained a challenge, but according to a later and scandalously slanted account, he sought to resolve this problem by adopting a ruse of which gift-bearing Greeks would not have been ashamed. Five life-size stone cows – rather than a wooden horse – were commissioned and, when sculpted to naturalistic perfection, were mischievously embellished by spattering their tails and hindquarters with gobs of purest gold. The herd was then put to grass where emissaries from Shu might observe it and reflect.
Shu people being, even by Qin’s doubtful standards, unenlightened in the ways of civilisation and so somewhat credulous, the emissaries reported this remarkable phenomenon to their king; and he of course, excited by the idea of an unlimited supply of gold cowpats, indented for ‘the stone cattle’ as a gift. King Hui of Qin assented. But because of the impossibility of hauling such a herd up the scree-trails and panda-paths of two major mountain ranges, he graciously offered first to construct a suitable drove road. The king of Shu applauded and the work began.
Whatever its origins, this ‘Stone Cattle Road’, of which archaeologists have since uncovered some convincing traces, was a major undertaking and the first of Qin’s great civil-engineering feats. It was also a revolutionary departure in ‘warring states’ strategy and the earliest mountain highway in China. Like the trans-Himalayan jeep-track that linked Xinjiang with Pakistan (until Chinese engineers obligingly replaced it with the 1970s Karakoram Highway), much of the new road was of carpentry. Where modern engineers would cut or tunnel, the makers of ‘Stone Cattle Road’ traversed. (Not even in China had the blast of gunpowder yet been heard.) It teetered along galleries cantilevered out of the sheer hillsides. Holes were bored horizontally into rock faces and plugged with sturdy poles that projected far enough to accommodate the planking of the carriageway. Elsewhere rivers were bridged and forest felled. King Hui’s solicitude for the cattle’s safe passage could not be faulted; and in time his counterpart in Shu welcomed the stone herd to Sichuan’s lushest pastures – and then returned it. There was no ill feeling; it was just that the ruminants failed to perform as expected.
Not so easy to repel, though, were the heavily armed and armoured Qin storm-troopers with their chariots and supply wagons who followed along ‘Stone Cattle Road’. Clattering over the planked galleries, Qin’s forces invaded Shu in 316 BC. On the flimsiest of dynastic pretexts, King Hui of Qin had abandoned his bluff and now put his road to the purpose for which it had all along been intended. Comprehensively outwitted in the hills, Shu was easily outfought on the plains. After consecutive defeats, its king fled, while the ruler of neighbouring Ba was taken captive. Save for slivers of territory in the south and the east (where Chu retained an interest) all of cultivable Sichuan was at the mercy of the king of Qin. It was the largest territorial acquisition in China since the Western Zhou had overrun the Shang domain following the c. 1045 BC battle of Muye.
Only elsewhere in Asia had a comparable feat of arms been recorded. Just ten years earlier Macedonian infantry had erupted into India in similar fashion. Without the benefit of a mountain highway Alexander the Great had led his men on a circuitous route through the Hindu Kush before descending to no less promising victories in the basin of the upper Indus. Panj-ab, meaning the ‘five-rivers’ tributary to the Indus, lay at Alexander’s mercy much as Si-chuan, meaning the ‘four-rivers’ tributary to the Yangzi, did at King Hui’s mercy. Yet in the case of the would-be world-conquering Alexander, there the odyssey had ended. His Indian escapade proved to be no more than a historical hiccup. Within a year he was gone, and within three he was dead. His arrangements for India’s richest province collapsed as soon as he withdrew; so did much of his army as thirst took its toll on the desert march back to Babylonia; and within the subcontinent his incursion left so little impression that no surviving Indian source contains so much as a mention of it.
The Chinese outcome was very different. It brought Sichuan within the ambit of Xia culture and so, imminently, of Chinese empire – where it would remain. For Qin, if not for Alexander, victory marked a point of no return. The conquest had doubled Qin’s territory and elevated its status from that of ‘warring state’ to warring superstate. There could be no question of relinquishing a land as rich in minerals as it was in cereals, as well served by rivers as it was by climate, and as advantageous strategically as it was economically. Rebellions were ruthlessly suppressed, and after a brief experiment in feudal dyarchy, directly administered ‘counties’ and ‘commanderies’ were carved out across the country. Qin methods of registration and recruitment were imposed, the ‘legalist’ tariff of rewards and punishments was introduced, and weights, measures and calendar were standardised. At Chengdu the massive walls, said to have been 23 metres (75 feet) high by 6.4 kilometres (4 miles) long, of a new provincial stronghold soon proclaimed Qin’s permanent intent. Compounded as usual of layered earth that had been tamped between wooden shuttering into the concrete-like hangtu, the fortifications left deep excavations, or borrow-pits, scattered about the Chengdu plain which were large enough, when flooded and stocked, to feed the city on fish. However demanding and intrusive, Qin rule was not indifferent to the welfare of the ‘black-haired commoners’; on the docility of the masses depended their mass mobilisation.
Meanwhile, across ‘Stone Cattle Road’ and other hastily constructed roadways poured pioneers from Qin’s harsher climes in the Wei and Yellow rivers – land-hungry colonists, corvée-serving conscripts, labour-sentenced convicts, mineral-seeking prospectors and career-in-crisis exiles. ‘Of all the regions [that would be] unified by Qin, Shu underwent the longest and most sustained transformation,’ writes a persuasive champion of the process.2 Comparatively undisturbed for eighty years, Qin here had a chance to field-test the policies and experiment with the projects that would characterise its all-China dominion.
The ‘land of silk and money’ lay ripe for development. In addition to linens and other fabrics, Sichuan’s vast silk output, especially of brocades, would provide both a tradeable commodity and, when packed in bales of standard weight, a convertible currency. More recognisable coinage came from the great mineral deposits to be found throughout the province and that of neighbouring Yunnan. Here ‘making money’ meant just that. Mined, minted and managed locally, copper coins, now of a more familiar and pocket-friendly shape, filled the coffers of Qin, and to judge by their ubiquity at contemporary grave sites found ready acceptance among the ancestors. Salt and iron-ore deposits were also extensively worked, both of them under state direction but with ample scope for private initiative. The salt brought in wealth; the iron was wrought into tools and weaponry.
Cereal production, the mainstay of every settled economy and the measure of its success in that it governed the availability and mobilisation of manpower, received the highest priority. Cadastral surveys were conducted, a grid of plots interspersed by paths and dykes was imposed, and much land was re-allocated. If one may judge from the scant documentation, the state even attempted to dictate what crops were planted and when. This may have applied especially to newly irrigated land; for in c. 270 BC Li Bing, as the Qin governor of Shu, conceived a means of partially diverting the Min River (one of Si-chuan’s ‘four rivers’) into the Chengdu plain.
Li Bing’s Dujiangyan system of weirs and races was extremely ambitious. The labour requirement can only be guessed at, but both deep-cutting and hill-contouring were involved, plus some bridge-building and an elaborate distribution network. ‘The largest, most carefully planned public works project yet seen anywhere on the eastern half of the Eurasian continent’, it reduced the danger of floods, provided a commercial waterway, and in time converted central Sichuan into the great rice-bowl of inland China.3 It also made Li Bing himself into a legend, and though now enveloped in the steel and concrete of later improvements, the scheme survives to this day. In fact