In recent years, there has been a wave of popular historiography in Taiwan Province of China, with websites run by historians or graduate students such as STORY, Taiwan Province of China Bar, and History Shop being set up. Although not many ancient Chinese subjects are available, Qin Shi Huang, an ancient Chinese celebrity, has found a stage in the publishing industry. Since 2010, historians such as Lee Kai-yuan and Lu have written a trilogy of books with Qin Shihuang as the main clue, which has received attention from historians and the public. This year, the Commercial Press in Taiwan Province reprinted Mr. Chang Fen-tien's biography of Qin Shihuang, which undoubtedly provides an important text for discussing Qin Shihuang once again and is recommended.
Although it is only one volume, it is nearly 700 pages long and incomplete. The author depicts the life of Qin Shi Huang in chapters on family history, obedience, pro-regime, unification, claiming the title of emperor, extravagance, and the end. The first chapter begins with Qin Shi Huang's family history, outlining the history of Qin's rise to power and explaining the historical context of Qin Shi Huang's actions. Although Lu writes the biography of Qin Shi Huang first and then the biography of Qin Shi Huang in reverse order, his sense of the problem is exactly the same. Chapter 4, "Reunification," recounts Qin Shi Huang's sweeping of the six kingdoms and outlines the historical background of each of the six eastern states. So Qin Shi Huang is not just a biography, but a history of the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period, with the Qin people as the main focus. You shouldn't, can't, and won't read this book with only Qin Shi Huang in mind.
The eye is really not limited to Qin Shi Huang. The author attempts to explore the relationship between the important historical background of the Qin dynasty, such as the Legalists, bureaucracy and law, hierarchical society, and the fields, and Qin Shi Huang, in chapters on ideology, institutions, society, economy, legal system, engineering, and life.
Tyranny is the first impression of Qin Shi Huang, and the author does not disagree. However, the author divides Qin Shi Huang's tyrannical and immoral behavior into social tyrannical behavior, contemporary tyrannical behavior, institutional tyrannical behavior and personal tyrannical behavior, pointing out that the political system at that time was a monarchy and the social structure was an aristocratic society. The relationship between people was very different from today's democratic system and plebeian society. If the political system and social structure of that time are ignored, the tyrannical and immoral behavior of Qin Shi Huang will be criticized. The combination of subjective moral evaluation and objective historical analysis here greatly deepens our understanding of Qin Shi Huang's tyranny and brutality, and shows us how different the conclusions can be when judging whether or not a character has historical depth.
The harshness of the Qin law is also the usual impression of the general public, but before the Qin law was unearthed, this impression was actually based on the Han people's historical memories and writing about the Qin dynasty. It was not based on first-hand historical materials and could not accurately explain the relationship between the Qin people and the law. According to the legal briefs unearthed from the Sleeping Tiger Land Qin Tomb in Yunmeng, Hubei Province, it is pointed out that the Qin law has provisions that are in line with the spirit of modern legislation, such as distinguishing between intentional or negligent crimes, leniency for self-reporting, falsely accusing a person, and the exemption of minors from criminal responsibility. However, many of the crimes and punishments that seem harsh and cruel to modern people actually existed in the laws of the Han, Wei, Jin, and Tang dynasties, and it is not appropriate for the Qin Law to be solely responsible for them. The true character of the relationship between the Qin and the law is that the official is the teacher and the criminal is the base. The sacred laws promulgated by the emperor were the guiding principles of people's lives
Both of the above examples reflect the author's different views on the politics of the Qin Dynasty. In fact, the author, Mr. Zhang Fentian, is a professor in the Department of History at Nankai University and has studied traditional Chinese political thought. The book Rise of Empires also has a lot of space to analyze important concepts in traditional Chinese political thought, such as "Mandate of Heaven" and "Emperor", which is quite helpful for readers to understand Qin Shi Huang, who leveled the kingdoms of Zhou and the Warring States period, and bragged that he surpassed Huang San and the five emperors, so he created the concept of the Qin Dynasty. Qin Shi Huang, who had pacified the Zhou and Warring States kingdoms, boasted that he had surpassed Huang San and the Five Emperors, so he coined the title "Emperor" to show his unrivaled ego. Emperor, a familiar concept, was extremely new and special in the Qin Dynasty. Qin Shi Huang's creations were faced with changes and did all kinds of things that no one had ever done before, and his mentality of production has been known ever since. The merits and demerits of what he did are worthy of posterity. Qin Shi Huang is a timeless topic, and remains so in the 21st century.
The biography of Qin Shi Huang is a crystallization of 20th century history, and history must be based on evidence. The author not only carefully analyzes the contents of the biographies of Qin Shi Huang and other heirloom documents, but also makes full use of the 20th century unearthed artifacts, such as the Sleeping Tiger Land Qin Simplified Documents, Shang Yang Fang Sheng, Yang Ling Hufu, and the archaeological site of A Fang Palace. Biography of Qin Shi Huang is an excellent step for readers to understand Qin Shi Huang at the beginning of the 21st century.
What will the year of Qin Shi Huang's biography look like at the end of the 21st century? I can't predict archaeological discoveries in mainland China for the next 80 years, but I can point out that the 2002 excavation of the ancient city of Lijie in Longshan, Hunan Province, will surely figure prominently in the future history of Qin Shi Huang's current biographical year. With what? 36,000 Qin slips were found in the ancient city of Liye.
On November 1, 2012, I set out from Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, changed trains four or five times, and bumped along the mountain roads for twelve hours before arriving at today's Lier Town, Longshan County, Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, Hunan Province, the former site of the Qin Dynasty's Dongting County Qianling County. Only two public ****cars leave Lier Town every day. If you take the afternoon bus, you can't leave the mountainous area of western Hunan on the same day, and you can only spend the night in Jishou or Fenghuang Ancient Town. From the point of view of transportation, Lier undoubtedly belongs to the paradise, or foreign land. This is a corner of the Qin Empire border in the ancient city of Liye. Therefore, these 36,000 Qin Jian are not top-secret archives held in the treasury of the capital city of Xianyang, and the biography of Qin Shihuang in the Han Jian of Peking University does not contain an account of another version of Qin Shihuang's death. But because the ancient city of Lille is just a county covering about 40,000 square meters, less than one-tenth of Tiananmen Square, and Qianling County is just an inconspicuous corner of the great Qin Empire, the Lille bamboo slips are the best test papers for Qin Shi Huang's edicts and the systems of the Qin Empire.
In Riyano. 8-461 Qin renamed the party, visible "Shu" two words, Qin Shi Huang biography, in the translation of the specific policy is how much weight. Previously, we only knew that the six foreign nations were the goal of Qin Shi Huang's unification. Now we know that the different characters, dialects, and even inconsistent titles were the goal of Qin Shi Huang's unification. Who would have wanted Emperor Qin Shi Huang to care whether the first half of the character "帝" was "白" or "己"? Who wanted Qin Shi Huang to forbid the Chu people from continuing to call the animals they kept in their toilets "pigs"? From then on, they had to call the Qin people the customary "Bi" instead? What Qin Shi Huang wanted to unify was not only writing, but also language. The 36,000-mile-long Qin Jian does reflect a high degree of uniformity in the language of official documents, and Qin's policy of identical books and language was indeed carried out across the vast expanse of China, even in Qianling, a small county in the southern wilderness.
According to the biography of Qin Shihuang in the Qin Jian of Yuelu Academy, Qin Shihuang's visit to the emperor's temple at Pulitai, one of the 36 counties, seems to have been a precursor to the county temples of the Han Dynasty, reflecting the fact that Liu Bang's Pulitai temple outside the capital Chang'an had its own origins and was not whimsical. Liye Qin Jian 8-1388-1748-5228-523 records the activities of officials in Qianling County, and this "temple" is likely to be the Yuelu Qin Jian in the Taishang Temple, proving that the Qin law is not false, even the southern deserted mountains of the small county to set up a Taishang Temple regular sacrifices. The Qin name-change party of Liye also recorded that the emperor's rituals were inherited from the emperor of heaven, meaning that the emperor was equal to the emperor of heaven, and that Qin Shi Huang was completely deified, as were the Thai emperors. Based on the evidence of the Yuelu and Liye Qin slips, we can surmise that the sacrificial rituals used at the Taishang Temple in the Qianling Mausoleum were the same as those used at the original Tiandi Temple. We can even speculate that Emperor Qin Shi Huang not only established the Imperial Taishang Temple in Qianling County, but also established his own Temple of the First Emperor. When Qin Shi Huang was alive, he set up Shi Huangdi temples in counties and required local officials to make offerings to Shi Huangdi himself in the emperor's sacrificial ritual. There was no reason for this - year Qin Shi Huang was a god, and the Qin Empire was a state ruled by a theocracy. The emperor's divine right was like the edge of the sky, and this seems to be the true meaning of the shrine in Puli County during the Qin Dynasty. If the latest opinion based on the above latest material can be established, we can re-understand the Qin Shi Huang's mentality and purpose of creating the title of "emperor" from this perspective, the end of the 21st century, Qin Shi Huang's biography will become a biography of a mortal who became a god.
If Qin Shi Huang's religious ideology was so extreme and his self-confidence so inflated, it is easy to understand his powerful, almost tyrannical control over the mortal world. As repeatedly emphasized above, the ancient city of Liye is extremely inaccessible, and Qianling is only a small county in the southern part of the old Chu lands. However, in such a wild mountain where birds do not live, Emperor Qin Shi Huang preferred to send a large number of foreign garrison soldiers to garrison it, a large number of foreign officials to rule it, and a large number of foreign immigrants to live in it, and to drive all the local natives out of Qianling County, in order to ensure the stability of his rule, instead of adopting a low-cost, but effective, policy of confinement. If the mountainous regions of western Hunan were occupied by the Wuling people after the Eastern Han Dynasty, then the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties were all local Tusi territories. Until the 20th century, the central dynasties hardly ruled the western Hunan mountains effectively, and the strong rule of Dongting County in the western Hunan mountains during the Qin Dynasty was even more amazing. Since this was the case in the southern mountains, how could the Qin dynasty not strictly control the vast plains of the six eastern countries? Qin Shi Huang's control and suppression of the masses of people may have been unimaginable to scholars in the past.
The ancient city of Liye, though small, gives us the possibility of knowing something. A better biography of Qin Shihuang than the Zhaozheng book must take full account of the findings of the Lijie Qin simples. Qin Shi Huang is an eternal topic that makes us look forward to the 21st century.