The Story of China: The Epic History of a World Power from the Middle Kingdom to Mao and the China Dream

by Michael Wood

In December 2007, for example, more than 2,000 bamboo strips turned up in a Hong Kong antiques market. Belonging to one of the Qin prefectures in the Yangtze valley, the documents contained a series of exemplary criminal cases handled by local ‘justice secretaries’.

For all the reported ferocity of the Qin legal system, here we get an insight into legal procedures and even the conduct of local magistrates. These magistrates interviewed witnesses, listened carefully to evidence and had graded punishments, where discretion and mercy could, in theory, play a part.

In practice, though, application of the law was severe.

Convicted of being soft on crime, indeed of being effectively a closet Confucian, Tui’s sentence was to be ‘shaved as a criminal and made a gatherer of fuel’. (Higher up the list of Qin punishments were mutilation, cutting in half at the waist, beheading and ‘slicing’ – Death by a Thousand Cuts – a penalty only abolished in 1905.)

Of course the gap between theory and practice is as interesting as it is in early medieval Europe.

Yet in the images it gives us, of the poor village huts in the countryside, the shifting population of the small town with its guest house in the market, the pattern of rural smallholders, convicts and bonded servants, vividly evoke the local world of the Qin. Set against the wider background of war and disruption, in the period of the Qin conquests, we learn of the enslavement of captive populations, the movement of bonded labourers to different estates, and we hear for the first time the voices of the lower ranks of Chinese society.

During the Qin age, more than 90 per cent of China’s population were people like the poor farm labourers in Chu’s murder case, working in the fields to pay taxes and to feed themselves.

Inside the circuit of walls, several old wells were found 10 feet below present ground surface. One of them, 45 feet deep, had been used as a dump and contained an abandoned Qin government local archive on more than 37,000 bamboo strips.

On the slips, we meet the figures of authority in the county, the ministers of public works and defence, and local law officers.

What this treasure reveals is the crucial importance of information gathering to the Qin state. Now we actually meet the five-family groupings, the basic unit of Qin society as proposed by legalist philosophers like Lord Shang.

As a head of a five-household unit, Mr De probably had some level of literacy, the basic reading needed to confirm and sign off the data. Some things are not recorded, including age and occupation. Health status is assumed, because scribes elsewhere record chronic illness or disability if it affected ability to work, so evidently the De family were able-bodied.

A little later, under the Western Han, the government directly employed 130,285 officials who were fully literate, but there must have been far more people who were able to read, extending right down to local level, including the village teacher – long a mainstay of grassroots education in China.

to pass a written test that included recognising 5,000 characters to qualify for a post. This is the number that, in today’s China, pupils are expected to recognise by the time they are twelve years old.

In the third century BCE, the government was already developing standardised population data for use in taxation, crime and labour conscription and a system of village registration we see again in later periods, in the Yellow Registers of the Ming dynasty, or even the present Resident Identity Card system introduced by the PRC (People’s Republic of China) in 1984.

Along with the written word, the other great pillar of the Qin state was the army, and their image is now known across the world thanks to the astonishing find of the Terracotta Warriors.

Deployed several hundred kilometres from home, the brothers express themselves in a personal and straightforward way, with all the vivacity found in the Roman period tablets from Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall in Britain.

The second letter, from Jing to his young brother at home, repeats the request for money and clothes, suggesting that their situation had become a little desperate (the brothers perhaps were in debt), and asks that money be sent speedily.

These letters give us a glimpse into the real lives behind the Terracotta Army. They show ordinary Qin soldiers writing to their families, sharing their feelings and worries, and that the army allowed this kind of private communication.

Even in times of war, it seems that the postal service from the front line was sufficiently well organised to enable regular contact, and family members could visit the camp to deliver clothing, food and money.

Yet the letter says, ‘Heifu has entrusted me’ – Jing – ‘to beg you for help’, and it is clearly possible that people of his rank in the army were literate.

Later Han documents suggest writing skills were fairly widespread outside the civil service. One soldier, for example, is described as ‘capable of writing reports to higher authorities and managing official business and people. He is somewhat familiar with the texts of the statutes and ordinances.

These discoveries were only fully published in 2015 and underline the pace at which our knowledge of early China is changing.

Women also appear as heads of households in Qin and Han surveys, so we must assume they too had some writing skills if they were part of the government’s system of registration.

Women in the Qin empire could also be in business. The historian Sima Qian mentions the business acumen of a widow named Mrs Qing, from Ba county, who took over the family cinnabar-mining firm.

Like all great autocrats in history, the First Emperor created grandiose monuments to himself.

The emperor’s conquests, then, were mapped onto the landscape of the capital as a kind of vast memory room.

Most celebrated in later poetry and painting was the Epang Palace, south of the Wei River, which was said to be the most richly decorated of all. The throne room, as determined by archaeologists from surviving traces of the huge earth platforms, was 690 metres by 115 metres.

Covered walkways joined it to the administrative palace at Xianyang 6 miles away. They were connected by a bridge over the Wei River, which was itself imagined as an earthly twin of the Milky Way in a vast symbolic landscape mirroring the heavenly order, at the centre of which was the ‘palace of the celestial pole’.

One of the most controversial is the description by Sima Qian of twelve huge bronze figures which were cast for the emperor: ‘Weapons from all over the empire were confiscated, brought to Xianyang and melted down to be used in casting bells, bell stands and twelve men made of metal. These last weighed a thousand piculs each and were set up in the palace.’

a statue of a thousand piculs would weigh 60 tons. But did the statues exist? And, if so, what was the inspiration behind them?

The recent sensational finds at Sanxingdui of highly stylised, lifesized bronze figures are from much earlier and left no discernible artistic legacy.

The Terracotta Warriors themselves are stiff and anatomically inaccurate. However, the eleven figures of acrobats, weightlifters or dancers, discovered in a separate pit in 1999 (dozens more are still being restored), are a different matter. Only the Greeks at this time were capable of such anatomically well-observed renderings of the human body.

In the late fourth century BCE, in the very years when the Qin were beginning their expansion in China, Alexander the Great had conquered Iran and burst into India and Central Asia. Over the next two centuries his successors moved down the Ganges valley almost to the Bay of Bengal and colonised Bactria and Sogdiana. That they had contact with China across Central Asia seems certain, even though direct evidence is so far lacking.

Hellenistic finds in the far west of China include textiles, two small statues of soldiers in Xinjiang and a beaut...

the theorem of Pythagoras reached China within a couple of generations of Alexander’s death. The first known Chinese mission to the Hellenistic cities of Central Asia took place a century later, but there is no...

It is fascinating, then, that the story told by Sima Qian was that the Qin emperor had been inspired by the descriptions of ‘palaces far to the west’ when commissioning his twelve statues of ‘big men’ in foreign robes for his own residence at Xianyang.

Hollow and cast in pieces, other evidence suggests the statues were fashioned after non-Chinese prototypes – ‘foreign models’.

(The Western name for China is derived from the word Qin, and it was most likely transmitted via the Mauryans through Sanskrit and Persian into Greek.)

The twelve great Qin bronzes were lost in antiquity. Ten were melted down in 190 CE; two we know survived until the fourth century; but no trace of that astonishing Hellenistic–Qin hybrid survives today – except perhaps the Terracotta Army itself.

They were state artisans, employed by palace ceramic workshops, with separate groups responsible for the water pipes, roof tiles and figures. Artisans who normally worked for private workshops in the Xi’an area were also conscripted to work on the project, inscribing their names into the clay of the figures, sometimes prefixed by a county of residence and job description.

Some of the items are also inscribed with numerals, which appear to be job numbers.

Qin Shi Huangdi initiated the construction project for his own tomb when he took the Qin throne, aged only thirteen, but once he became emperor, in 221 BCE, gigantic resources were devoted to its planning and completion.

One slave worker on the imperial mausoleum was called Yu. His title was bugeng, denoting a low-ranking civil servant, and his place of origin was Bochang, a village more than 1,000 kilometres from Xi’an towards the northeastern edge of the empire. An educated man, an ex-civil servant, perhaps Yu had been an officer for the former Qi state. Sentenced to hard labour for an unknown crime, he had been part of a chain gang, led along the road routes up the Yellow River valley to the huge construction site under Mount Li. He never returned to his homeland.

The slave Yu was one of hundreds of thousands who worked on the insatiable construction projects of the Qin empire.

The site extends over 100 square kilometres and is still not entirely mapped, let alone wholly excavated. Pits bordering the tomb complex have so far yielded over 8,000 terracotta soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses, 150 cavalry horses, acrobats, officials, musicians and even a strongman.

The tomb itself, under its enormous mound, remains unopened. The archaeologists fear they may not have the resources or the expertise to deal with the sheer quantity of fragile material which may still lie inside, and that once exposed to the air may be lost.

We now know, for example, that the whole mound, flattened and eroded over so many centuries, originally measured 515 metres from north to south and 485 metres from east to west.

An immense pit was dug to a depth of at least 30 metres below the original ground level. This was then lined with a massive burned-brick perimeter wall, 460 metres by 390 metres and about 4 metres high. Inside this rectangle, a huge brick structure was built, with a hollow interior to surround the actual burial chamber.

In 2003, geophysical and geochemical analysis of the soil found unusually high levels of mercury concentrated in one area. Its distribution suggests a vestige of the model of China’s great rivers laid down on the floor of the tomb, confirming Sima’s account of its design and construction.

The buildings on the surface of the site were destroyed in the great revolt that overthrew the dynasty after the emperor’s death and the grave pit may have been plundered at that time.