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I. Introduction to the First Sovereign Emperor of China



Most Westerners have at least heard of China's first sovereign emperor, the Son of Heaven who unified China's feuding feudal states. He was from the state of Ch'in (modern Shaanxi). His given name was Chao Cheng. Cheng's mother Zhao Ji (Jiu Gei) was an an excellent dancer and extremely beautiful courtesan  - courtesans were the best-educated women in Chinese society - from a wealthy family in the state of Chao.  She had become the concubine of his father, Lu Pu Wei, a great merchant. When she was pregnant with Cheng, Lu Pu Wei gave her away to Tzu-ch'-u, a prince from the state of Ch'in; he was a lesser son of the royal family of Ch'in, and, according to custom, had been sent to Chao as a hostage. Lu Pu Wei used his resources to attach himself to the court and establish Tzu-ch'-u as Crown Prince of Ch'in, who thereafter succeeded to the throne. When Tzu-ch'-u eventually died, Cheng took the throne at age thirteen. Lu Pu Wei was honored by young King Cheng: he appointed him Councillor of State and also gave him the honorary title "Second Father." But Lu Pu Wei was actually Cheng's natural father - his mother had concealed her early pregnancy from Tzu-ch'-u. At least that is the low-class origin (merchant and courtesan) story handed down for better or worse - depending on our prejudices. The scandalous tale continues with the alleged sexual relations of the Councillor of State with the Queen Dowager - his former concubine - and a cover-up involving her and Lao Ai, a man with a huge...but never mind.



Ch'in was already the most powerful state when Chao Cheng became King Cheng, hence his personal role in the unification is discounted by some historians. The small state of Ch'in - "Ch'in" is the word from which the Western name "China" is derived - occupied the Wei river valley, strategically situated on the mountainous, extreme northwestern periphery of the country: it was difficult for invaders to gain access to the valley except through well-guarded  mountain passes. Ch'in was the least Sinicized state as well as the most martial one: it had a reputation for being "superior in agriculture and war." The central states considered the inhabitants of Ch'in as barbaric and called it "a ferocious beast" and "the state of tigers and wolves." Ch'in was in fact surrounded by barbarians and its struggles with them and the warring states with which alliances were eventually made no doubt made it the great power it came to be, the power upon which the central areas became increasingly dependent. By the 3rd century B.C., the tough little Ch'in state had proceeded with a centralization program said to prove Mencius' famous statement wrong, that "those who do not delight in killing will unify the country". Again, given these precedents, the unification of China under Cheng is considered by some historians as having been probable under any king of Ch'in: the Grand Man simply appeared at the right time and place as the inevitable result of the historical forces in play.



Nevertheless, we should not underestimate Cheng's role nor forget that his biography was written by his bitter enemies, the Literati he tried to put out of business. Their reports are behind the popular view that Cheng was an evil man as well as a passive, do-nothing Taoist. But Marcel Granet amongst others disagrees with the merely negative assessment: "In order to blacken the man with quite easy consciences, the historians concealed the greatness of his achievements." (Chinese Civilization).  Be that as it may, we know Cheng (deeply influenced by Taoism) with his right-hand man Li Ssu (a staunch Legalist) beside him, went along with the Tao as they saw it, and by virtue of force of arms, bribery, espionage and Legalist ideology, created the Ch'in empire in 221 B.C.



We should add that Taoism, with its individualistic doctrine arising from a belief in man's innate goodness, and Legalism, with its reward and punishment doctrine arising from the belief in man's innate evil, seem poles apart on the continuum, except where they conjoin in recognizing the importance of doing nothing. Yet they disagree as to who should do nothing. The Legalist compromise, that the emperor should have to do nothing himself under the rule of law except to have the right officers appointed and rewarded and the wrong ones removed and punished, and that his subordinates, to the contrary, should do everything else, would seem apropos of the hypothetical philosophical relation between Shih Huang Ti and Li Ssu. However,the first sovereign emperor, who was king for twenty-five years and ruled as emperor for eleven, was reportedly an active man who busied himself with one hundred and twenty pounds of bamboo reports every day, who liked to make his own decisions after consulting with his seventy "scholars of wide learning", who took five awesome tours of his empire in ten years, and who sometimes prowled about disguised in order to conduct personal inspections. Indeed, exhaustion from overwork may have contributed to his death.



Now then, every Chinese person who reads English knows by now which Dragon-man I am speaking of, yet many of us probably need more clues. I refer to Cheng as a dragon because the dragon is a totemic conglomeration of features, the epitome or highest example of the integration of apparently disparate spiritual forces and material elements. Our Western metaphysicians might prefer the abstract "concrete universal" or "unity of particulars" over the mythological dragon; political philosophers might go so far as to call the state Leviathan - in response to which a Chinese king or emperor would probably agree with Louis XIV's dictum: "I am the state."  But to bring our conversation back to Earth and to further jog the reader's memory with a mundane clue, I speak of the True Man who, when he ascended to Heaven the final time on his tripod or on the back of the ultimate Dragon, left a grandiose, twenty-square mile mausoleum complex behind: representing the best of his empire including palaces, pavilions, offices, fine furnishings, the ocean, the sky above and the earth below, replete with an army of eight thousand full-sized replicas of soldiers and horses to guard it. Work on this monumental project probably began even before he became emperor of all China.



Excavations of the True Man's mausoleum proceeded in 1974. Visitors are astonished by the breathtaking spectacle. I use the term "spectacle" loosely: perhaps the mysterious Tiger of Ch'in did not intend to put on a grand show for us; then again, knowing him, maybe he did. Hu-hai, his favorite and youngest son, buried him and had the doors of the tomb was sealed on the Emperor's wives and concubines, leaving them to starve to death. The workmen were killed by an "infernal machine", and the grave was covered up and disguised as an ordinary hill. No doubt Hu-hai had twinges of conscience for his part in the conspiracy, led by the prototypical evil eunuch Chao Kao, to establish him as his father's successor instead of his eldest brother Fu Su. Fu Su had been working on the Great Wall to which he had been sent as punishment for criticising his father's policies, when he received a sword along with a forged letter supposedly from his father commanding him to commit suicide: he dutifully obeyed. The original letter had simply instructed him to attend to his father's burial; meaning he was the legitimate successor. Furthermore, Hu-hai's selection of whom was to be buried alive was discriminatory, obviously to protect him from challenges. Ironically, the tomb was broken open and robbed of iron weapons by the rebels who overthrew him.  



Now we might wonder whether the Emperor believed the mausoleum would help maintain the proper relation between Heaven and Earth after his departure, or whether he really believed he could take the best of his empire with him. His desperate search for the Elixir of Immortality in his later years seems to belie faith in an after life.



The enormous grave dug out of the side of the mountain is dwarfed by the legendary palatial complex the first emperor of China reportedly built over a distance of one-hundred miles, comprising two hundred and seventy royal residences filled with gorgeous furnishings and people including a harem of 13,160 beautiful women. It would have taken the Emperor thirty-six years to "feel at home" in all the palaces. The ancient Chinese historians say many of the palaces were replicas of those in the states he had conquered. Historical rumor has it that the emperor roamed about his palatial estate in secrecy according to a regular cosmic order, never sleeping in one place two nights in a row, not only to avoid the mounting number of would-be assassins but to occlude himself according to occult Taoist doctrine. Neither love nor fear abhors a secret, and he who seems to do nothing gets everything done. Curiously, despite the astronomical regularity of the True Man's movements "following the Sun", few knew of his whereabouts, and anyone who revealed his location was as a matter of course executed.



Yes, indeed, I mean that emperor. But the name King Cheng does not sound familiar to most of us because, after conference with his ministers, who carefully considered historical precedent and made the unacceptable recommendation of "Great Sovereign" - which was the illustrious title of the legendary sovereign who succeeded the "Celestial Sovereign" and the "Terrestrial Sovereign" - King Cheng chose instead a new name more befitting to his imperial highness; namely, Shih Huang Ti, or "First Sovereign Emperor." The term "ti" once signified sacrifices, then the divine beings sacrificed to of which there was a highest ti (shang ti), or God, and gradually took on a political meaning king, or emperor. Huang means "majestic", and shih in this case means "first". Shih Huang Ti provided that his line be continued with the titles "Second Sovereign Emperor", "Third Sovereign Emperor", and on down.



According to the Chinese doctrine of the Rectification of Names, a man must live up to his name. Undoubtedly the actuality signified by the grandest of all titles yet for the Son of Heaven appertains to the creator of universal order, or Peace, a task necessarily taken up in those days by means of incessant war. Now that we have properly named our emperor, at least according to one method of transliterating Chinese into English, let us identify his Grand Councillor, then examine our Emperor's Great Plan along with a few of his accomplishments not already mentioned.