The 24 Year Old Who Burned Every Book in China

He was 13 when he became king, 38 when he conquered every other kingdom in China, and by 49 he was drinking mercury to live forever. Between those numbers he burned every book he didn't write. He buried 460 scholars alive. He built a wall that took a million lives. He named the dynasty that named China. He built it to last 10,000 generations. It collapsed 4 years after he died. His name was Ying Zheng. He was born in 259 BCE in Handan, the capital of Zhao, an enemy state. His father was a Qin prince held there as a political hostage. His mother was a dancer. He was born into captivity. When his father escaped back to Qin, the boy was left behind. Soldiers were sent to kill him. He survived in hiding until age 9. At 9 he reached Qin. At 13 his father died and he was crowned king, the most powerful kingdom in China handed to a child. A merchant named Liu Buwei ran the country in his name. Liu was rumored to be the boy's real father. The court whispered. The boy listened. Liu grew careless. He installed his lover, a fake eunuch named Lao Ai, in the queen's chambers. She bore Lao Ai two sons in secret. When Ying Zheng turned 22, Lao Ai launched a coup. The young king crushed it within days. He had Lao Ai pulled apart by horses. He killed Lao Ai's two sons, his own half-brothers, by smashing them against the floor. He locked his mother away. Liu Buwei was forced to drink poison. At 22, Ying Zheng held absolute power and he was already planning to take the rest of China. China at this time was not one country. It was seven warring kingdoms. The warring states period had been killing people for 250 years. Qin had two advantages. The first was legalism, a brutal philosophy that said one law applied to everyone, even the king. The second was a chancellor named Li Si. He was the smartest man in the room and he had a plan to end the war forever. The plan was simple, bribe the corrupt officials of every other kingdom, assassinate the loyal ones, and invade the weakened states one by one. It took 10 years. Han fell first in 230 BCE, the smallest of the rivals swallowed in a single campaign. Zhao fell in 228 BCE. Ying Zheng went there personally to bury the people who had hunted him as a child. Old debts paid in blood. Yan tried to assassinate him, a famous knife in a rolled-up map. The blade slipped. Ying Zheng survived. Yan fell next. Wei fell in 225 BCE. The Qin army diverted a river and drowned the capital city in three months. Chu was the largest, 600,000 soldiers the heart of the south. It took 600,000 Qin troops two years to break it. Qi was the last. It surrendered without a fight in 221 BCE. Ying Zheng was 38. China had a single ruler for the first time. He decided no existing title was big enough for what he had done. So he invented one. Huangdi, emperor. The word combined Huang, the legendary sovereigns of myth, with Dai, the supreme god. He called himself Shi Huangdi, the first emperor. His successors would be called the second emperor, third emperor, and so on. For 10,000 generations, that was the plan. Then he started erasing the old world. The feudal lords were stripped of their lands. The aristocracy was forced to live in his capital where he could watch them. China was divided into 36 commanderies. Each was run by a governor he appointed. He could fire them. They could not inherit. The hereditary state was finished. He standardized everything. Currency, weights, axle widths so wagons could roll on the same roads. The written script so a clerk in Yan could read an order from Chu. He built 4,250 miles of roads radiating from the capital. They were exactly 50 paces wide. Pine trees were planted every 30 feet. And then he turned north. The frontier was raided constantly by the Qingnu, nomads on horseback, faster than any infantry could chase. The northern kingdoms had each built their own walls to keep them out. He ordered the walls connected. The Great Wall of China was born. Around 800,000 laborers were conscripted. Hundreds of thousands died building it. The wall was an open grave with battlements on top. By 213 BCE, he had been emperor for eight years. The empire was unified, walled, paved, standardized, and he was 46 years old. Then Li Si gave him a memo that would echo for 2,000 years. The scholars are using the past to criticize the present, it said. They quote Confucius. They cite the Book of Songs. They say things were better under the old kings. They are turning the people against you. Li Si's solution was simple. Burn the books, all of them except for medicine, agriculture, divination, and the official Qin records. Anyone caught hiding a banned book was sent to forced labor. Anyone discussing them was executed. Anyone using history to criticize the present died with their entire family. Shi Huangdi approved the order in 213 BCE. The fires burned across China. Centuries of philosophy, poetry, and history turned to ash in private courtyards and public squares. A year later, two of his court alchemists ran away. They had been promising him an elixir of immortality. They had nothing to deliver. He was furious. He ordered every scholar in the capital interrogated. They denounced each other Sima Qian's history records 460 buried alive in a single pit. Modern historians suspect the victims were the failed alchemists, not Confucian scholars. The legend stuck. But by then he was already drowning, not in descent, in fear of his own death. He had survived three assassination attempts, Yan's knife in the rolled map, a blind musician's lead-weighted lute, a 120-pound iron ball flung at his road convoy. He stopped sleeping in the same room twice. He built tunnels so no one knew where he was. He banned the words for death and eye from his court. And he sent expedition after expedition into the Eastern Sea. There were islands out there, the alchemists said. Immortals lived on them. The largest fleet was led by Su Fu. Sixty ships, thousands of children to give as offerings. They sailed east in 219 BCE and never came back. When the seas failed, the alchemists prescribed something closer to home. Mercury, liquid silver, the metal that flowed like water and shone like the moon. He drank it daily, for years. The mercury was supposed to make him eternal. It made him insane. Records describe a man pacing at night, seeing enemies in the walls with blackened teeth and shaking hands. Mercury poisoning. We have a name for it now. While the elixir killed him, his other obsession was being built. A mausoleum so vast it would be a city of the dead. 700,000 conscripts worked on it for almost 40 years. Underground rivers of mercury flowed across a model of his empire. The ceiling held jewels arranged as stars. Crossbows were rigged at the entrances to fire on tomb robbers. The workers who built the inner chambers were sealed inside when the doors were closed. And around the tomb an army was buried. 8,000 soldiers, 600 horses, chariots, archers, generals, all life-size, all made of clay. Each face was different. Each weapon was real. They faced east toward the kingdoms he had conquered, to fight his enemies in the next life. In 210 BCE, he set out on a tour of the empire. He was 49. The mercury had been working on him for years. He died in a roadside palace far from the capital. The official cause is unknown. Mercury poisoning is the modern guess. His chief eunuch Zhao Gao was with him. So was his prime minister Li Si. So was his second son, Huai. His chosen heir, his eldest son Fusu, was hundreds of miles away on the northern frontier. The three men kept the death secret for two months. They paraded the rotting body home in a sealed carriage. They covered the smell with a wagon of fish. They forged a letter ordering Fusu to commit suicide. Fusu obeyed. Huai was crowned the second emperor at 21. He was a puppet of Zhao Gao within months. Within a year, peasant rebellions had broken out across the empire. Within three years, Liu Bang, a village constable, was marching on the capital. In 207 BCE, the second emperor was forced to commit suicide. His teenage successor surrendered to the rebels 46 days later. The Qin dynasty, built to last 10,000 generations, had lasted 15 years. It died four years after the man who built it. Liu Bang founded the Han dynasty in its place. He was an illiterate peasant. He would rule China for the next four centuries through his successors. And the man who burned the books, his name became the answer to a riddle. Why is China called China? Qin in Old Mandarin was pronounced Chin. The Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, they all heard the name of the dynasty before they ever met the people. His dynasty died in 15 years. The country it created is still called by his name 2,000 years later. His tomb was lost to history. Until 1974, when farmers digging a well in Shaanxi struck a clay arm. Archaeologists found the Terracotta Army, 8,000 soldiers in trenches the size of football fields. The man's petarmi turned into the most visited archaeological site on earth. The actual tomb mound, a mile away, has never been opened. Sensors have detected mercury concentrations a hundred times the natural level. The legend was true. He wanted to live 10,000 years. He poisoned himself trying. And the country he forged still bears his name long after the empire was buried with him. If you want to understand modern China's instinct for strong central rule and standardized everything, look at the man who invented the template. Next week we open the dynasty that replaced him, the Han, 400 years that defined what Chinese would mean. Subscribe so you don't miss it.