Of all the issues involved in the power struggle – territorial, dynastic, philosophical and fiscal – perhaps the most surprising was social, in that dissent swelled from the lowest ranks of society. Resistance to Qin rule proved to be not just popular but populist. In his determination to mobilise the manpower of the empire, the First Emperor had established a direct relationship between the centralised government and the localised governed. Wrenched from mass oblivion, the black-haired commoners had been dragooned into participating in the historical process. Millions had been uprooted to fight, labour or colonise on the empire’s behalf. Millions more had been obliged to support this effort through heavy taxation and collective liability backed by ferocious penalties. Their woes were shared and their fears real. While nationalists would later applaud the First Emperor’s efforts at unification, and while Maoists would approve his autocratic efforts in mass mobilisation, orthodox Marxists would be more gratified by the anti-Qin response and its early evidence of peasant revolt and class consciousness.
The first challenge came from a ploughman of the erstwhile state of Chu, who was called Chen She. Ordered to the frontier with a gang of conscripts in 209 BC, Chen She calculated that the heavy rain was making it impossible for them to reach their destination on schedule and that since they would therefore be treated as deserters, they might as well as desert. A colleague agreed and, by dint of some supernatural trickery, convinced the other conscripts to join them. The cry of ‘Great Chu shall rise again’ was first heard coming from a spookily lit shrine at dead of night; it was followed by the refrain ‘Chen She shall be a king’, the very words that one of the conscripts had just found written in imperial cinnabar on a piece of silk miraculously preserved inside the belly of his fish supper. As portents went, these were both explicit and imperative. The conscript gang was transformed into a band of rebels, quickly snowballed into an avenging army, and then, as others followed Chen She’s example, became the vanguard of a great anti-Qin coalition. Chen She resurrected the ancient state of Chu and declared himself its king. Other pretenders followed suit north of the Yellow River in erstwhile Yan, Zhao and Wei.6
Sima Qian would dub Chen She ‘the Melancholy King’. Accustomed to history’s neglect of the common man, the Grand Historian was intrigued how someone ‘born in a humble hut with tiny windows and a wattle door, a day labourer in the fields and a garrison conscript, whose abilities could not match even the average’, could yet ‘step from the ranks of the common soldiery, rise from the paths of the fields and lead a band of a few hundred poor and weary soldiers in revolt against…a great kingdom that for a hundred years [i.e. since Qin’s acquisition of Sichuan] had made the ancient eight provinces pay homage at its court.’ The only explanation had to be that offered by Confucians: Qin had failed to rule with righteousnesss and humanity and had failed to realise that the qualities required of a ruler were not those of a conqueror. Thus Chen She had only to ride a wave of righteous protest. But when he too proved a neglectful ruler, he was himself engulfed by this wave, in fact murdered within the year by one of his own retainers. Melancholy indeed, mused the Grand Historian.7
A new breed of leader now emerged, the foremost example being Xiang Yu. Another native of Chu but an aristocrat rather than a commoner, descended from a long line of Chu generals, Xiang Yu towered above his contemporaries in both physique and accomplishment. He was foul of temper but fearless in battle, and his men worshipped him. Though historians nurtured in the literary and bureaucratic tradition found nothing remotely romantic in battlefield antics, Xiang Yu would prove an exception. Sima Qian called him arrogant, deceitful and ungrateful, yet could neither disguise his admiration nor resist the sort of detail calculated to enhance a heroic reputation. Xiang Yu strides from the pages of the Shiji like no other warrior; and it is testimony to the Shiji’s influence that he is still sometimes hailed as the most accomplished general in the whole of Chinese history.
Scenting a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, other leaders emerged from the masses more like Chen She. Liu Bang of Pei, a district in the north of what had been (and was again) Chu, had also fallen foul of the Qin authorities and taken to brigandage. But while the melancholic Chen She had had to contrive his own portents, and while the mighty Xiang Yu was well enough endowed to manage without them, Heaven of its own volition showered the young Liu Bang with auspicious signs and lucky encounters. Dragons – of all animals the most closely associated with power and celestial favour – featured in many of these manifestations. His mother had conceived him by a dragon, another hovered over him when he slept, and his well-whiskered features were sufficiently dragon-like to excite physiognomists (they foretold your future from your face), one of whom, a certain Lü, was so impressed that he gave him his daughter in marriage. Thus does the Grand Historian waste no time in flagging the future founder of the Han dynasty and his influential consort. Readers are not to be misled by Liu Bang’s limited education, his boorish behaviour and indifferent military record. Heaven’s favour would more than compensate.
Following the death of Chen She, it was the inspirational Xiang Yu who quickly made a name for himself as a commander. He then took over the reconstituted kingdom of Chu, first as the power behind the puppet throne, then as king and eventually as ba (‘hegemon’ or ‘protector’) over a cluster of satellite states. The dragon-blest Liu Bang of Pei, his gang having grown to an army, allied himself with Xiang Yu and his Chu forces. In 207 BC, the year in which the Second Emperor committed suicide and Zhao Gao was murdered, the armies of the now commander-in-chief Xiang Yu inflicted a succession of heavy defeats on the Qin forces, driving them back to the hill passes that guarded the Qin stronghold along the Wei River. ‘The war-cry of Chu shook the heavens, and the men of the other armies all trembled with fear,’ says Sima Qian.8
Meanwhile Liu Bang of Pei led his men west by way of the Han valley and then north towards Qin. Finding the passes from this direction less well defended, he opened contact with the Qin court at Xianyang, learned of the fall of the Second Emperor, and received some encouragement from the First Emperor’s grandson, who was now the would-be (or more precisely ‘would-rather-not-be’) ‘Third Emperor’. Without consulting his allies, Liu Bang then marched on the capital and took it.
As his superior commander, Xiang Yu was furious. He too thrust towards Xianyang and, threatening to exterminate both the enemy and his ally, encamped his 400,000 men within a day’s march of Liu Bang’s 100,000. It was not just a question of Liu Bang’s insubordination. Rumours of his having made a deal with Xianyang were rife, and they seemed to be borne out by the extraordinary clemency Liu Bang had shown towards Qin’s people and their would-rather-not-be emperor. Such restraint suggested that Liu Bang was both currying favour in Qin and cultivating a reputation for superior virtue, as sure a sign of imperial ambitions as the celestial dragons and tigers that were reported circling over his camp.
To fend off a clash of Qin’s joint conquerors, a reconciliation was attempted by go-betweens. Liu Bang reported to Xiang Yu in person; but even as the liquor flowed and loyalties were reaffirmed, weapons were being fingered by their jumpy retainers. Pretending a weak bladder, Liu Bang excused himself, left the audience tent and failed to return. On learning that he had in fact been smuggled back to his own army in safety, Xiang Yu fell into a towering rage. (Sima Qian has him fuming rather often.) Such wrath could be assuaged only by turning on Xianyang, massacring its inhabitants, torching its palaces and archives (so probably burning more books than Li Si), murdering the now would-definitely-not-be ‘Third Emperor’, and in one of the Shiji’s several versions of this grisly episode, ‘desecrating the grave of the First Emperor’ – which could account for the shattered state of ‘the terracotta army’.
This action of Xiang Yu’s was particularly reprehensible in that the city had already surrendered, albeit to his rival; and Xiang Yu now compounded his mistake with a string of others. Instead of establishing himself within the natural stronghold that was the state of Qin, he headed back east; trouble was brewing in Shandong, his men were homesick, and Chu’s new capital at Pengcheng awaited its hero. In his absence, the state of Qin was divided into four lesser kingdoms, with