The Emperor

Infamy. The word must have been hissed often by the first emperor of China, but we should not laugh. If so many assassins had not had it in for Qin Shi Huangdi, the paranoid megalomaniac would not have needed a terracotta army of life-size warriors to guard him in the afterlife. And the British Museum would not be looking forward to its most dazzling exhibition since Tutankhamun 40 years ago.

Among the unprecedented 120 treasures the Chinese have permitted to be exhibited in London from September 13 are a dozen warriors, a musician, an acrobat, a strongman, a chariot with horses and bronze birds to serenade the emperor in the netherworld. The show is already setting new records: almost 60,000 advance tickets have been sold.

Scholars debate whether Shi Huangdi was a unifier or a destroyer during his brief reign 2,200 years ago. To the western public, the main reason he has achieved something like the immortality he sought is the buzz surrounding his buried legacy of perfect, baked clay models dating from before the birth of Christ.

But in China he has been rehabilitated as a colossus equivalent to Alfred the Great and Napoleon rolled into one. His very title, Qin, pronounced “chin”, is the origin of China’s name. He pulled together a bunch of warring states and knit them into a centralised system. By ruthless force of will, he standardised China’s language and law, not to mention building the early Great Wall of China. The style of his coinage, round with a square hole in the middle, lasted until the 1950s. Few other rulers have so shaped the sinews of their country.

His most abiding legacy, according to Frances Wood in her recent book The First Emperor of China, was the survival for more than 2,000 years of China’s bureaucracy, “the largest in the world, staffed by educated men and reaching to the lowest peasant in the land”.

The first emperor still lies in his vast mausoleum outside the city of Xi’an, entombed with his concubines and the 700,000 workers who are said to have been killed to keep the location secret. The scale of the mausoleum, three miles across, became known after a group of peasants sinking a well in 1974 discovered some fragments of terracotta and chanced upon a subterranean chamber. It was the first of four pits yielding the clay figures, smashed by falling masonry and later painstakingly reconstructed. Less than 1% of the complex has been excavated.

The distant sound of pickaxes and the recovery of 1,900 clay guardians must disturb the emperor’s rest. Like Saddam Hussein, in life he seldom remained in one place for long, carried each night by servants to sleep in different buildings of his palace complex. He hired doubles to confuse those who sought his death.

Assassination did not square with his obsession with eternal life, to which end he dispatched thousands of young people in ships to obtain the fabled elixir of life from Penglai mountain, where the immortals lived. When none returned – failure meant execution – he sent another expedition consisting of three men, only to be offered the feeble excuse that they had been frightened off by a gigantic fish. He duly set off to shoot it with a repeating crossbow, but the elixir eluded him.

So he must have given thanks that he possessed another ace – immortality pills. These consisted of mercury, which his alchemists assured him would confer the same power that the substance displayed in absorbing gold. Their strength proved fatal. A dynasty he had promised would last 10,000 years only endured a decade (221BC to 210BC).

After his death the emperor’s character was assassinated by revisionist historians in the succeeding Han dynasty. There was much to besmirch – such as the story of him ordering more than 460 scholars to be buried alive and then beheaded. This persecution of intellectuals later endeared him to Mao Tse-tung, founder of the People’s Republic of China, who rejoiced: “He buried 460 scholars alive; we have buried 46,000 scholars alive.”

Besides outlawing Confucianism and burning classic texts that offended him, the first emperor became known for the ruthless elimination of defeated armies, estimated at hundreds of thousands. Countless more went to their deaths, conscripted into labouring on the Great Wall, a construction of tamped mud linking existing walls that was a precursor of the stone wall built in the Ming dynasty.

Like any tyrant worthy of the name, he decreed that black should become the paramount colour for “garments, flags and pennants” and six the paramount number. There was a certain Chinese logic to this: black and the numeral six were both associated with water, his favourite element. The result was that official hats were six “inches” long, carriages six “feet” wide, one pace was six “feet” and the imperial carriage had six horses.

None of this saved the emperor from cutting a ridiculous figure, according to his future commandant, who after their first meeting is said to have recorded: “The king of Qin has a waspish nose, eyes like slits, a chicken breast and a voice like a jackal.” As for his character: “He is merciless, with the heart of a tiger or wolf.”

He was known as a bastard in more ways than one. Born in 259BC and named Ying Zheng, he was the son of Zichu, a prince and future king from the state of Qin who was sent to a rival state as a hostage in a formal guarantee against attack. While there, Zichu befriended a merchant and fell in love with one of the latter’s concubines, whom he married. It was later claimed the concubine was already pregnant and that Zheng was not the prince’s heir but the merchant’s son.

At the time China was divided into six warring states, the others having been conquered or annexed. Despite being regarded as a “barbarian” state, Qin had for over a century been quite progressive.

The feudal rule of local aristocrats had been abolished and a system of laws and regulations installed. So when Zheng ascended the throne at the age of 13 under a regent, later assuming full power after staging a palace coup at 21, he had a working model on which to build.

By tenanciously attacking and defeating the feudal states with his cavalry, he finally took control of the whole of China in 221BC. Abolishing the feudal system, he divided the empire into 36 provinces, governed by civilian and military powers that were overseen by an inspector.

His most significant reforms were to standardise Chinese script, weights and measures and even the length of cart axles so that every cart could run smoothly in the ruts. An extensive new network of roads and canals improved trade and the movement of troops between provinces.

With an eye on possible rebellion, he ordered that “all the weapons were brought into the capital, where they were melted down to make bronze bells and two bronze statues of giants”. The emperor insisted that the nobility from other provinces move to his new capital at Xianyang, near present-day Xi’an.

The emperor’s reputation for cruelty and ever more extravagant projects stirred mutinous murmurs. In the capital, massive construction work began on palaces, an imperial temple and his extravagant tomb nearby. This vast mound was said to have been coated with molten copper and was protected by crossbows calibrated to shoot anyone who tried to break in.

According to Sima Qian, a Chinese historian writing less than a century after the emperor’s death, the tomb contained rare jewels, a map of the heavens with pearls depicting the stars and a panorama map of China with the seas and rivers represented by flowing mercury.

Intrigue swirled around the emperor’s death. Inconveniently, he died while touring a province in eastern China, about two months’ travel from the capital. Concerned that news of his death might trigger an uprising by a resentful population, Li Si, his prime minister, managed to keep the news quiet by pretending to confer with him every day in the emperor’s wagon. He also ordered that carts of fish travelled before and behind the imperial vehicle to explain the smell of decomposition.

By one account, the emperor managed to write a letter to his oldest son, naming him as his successor. But Li had other ideas, forcing the elder son to commit suicide and persuading the ruler’s 18th son, Huhai, to forge the emperor’s will.

As second emperor, Huhai proved to be the runt of the litter whose incompetence sparked revolt. By the time of his death four years later, many of his father’s achievements had been diluted and the Qin dynasty unravelled in civil strife.

Reviled for so long as a mass murderer and the burner of books, the first emperor has at least one solace. His travelling army of clay warriors are now ambassadors for an ascendant China, providing a thrilling fanfare for the Beijing Olympics. Even in the afterlife, he is proving he can reach out and make populations tremble in awe.