Page 74 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

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The Ch'in and Han Dynasties

By 221 B.C. the inexorable steamroller of the Ch'in armies had
crushed the remnants of the ancient feudal order. Now all China
was united under the iron rule of King Cheng, who set up his cap-
ital in Hsien-yang and proclaimed himself Ch'in Shih-huang-ti
first emperor of the Ch'in Dynasty. Aided by his Legalist minister
Li Ssu, he proceeded to consolidate the new state. He strengthened
the northern frontiers against the Huns and, at the cost of a million
lives, linked the sections of wall built by the previous kings of
Chao and Yen into a continuous rampart 1,400 miles long. The
boundaries of the empire were greatly extended, bringing South
China and Tonkin for the first time under Chinese rule. The feudal
aristocracy were dispossessed and forcibly moved in tens of thou-
sands to Shcnsi; rigid standardisation of the written language, of
weights and measures, and of wagon axles (important in the soft
loess roads of North China) was enforced, and over it all Shih-
huang-ti set a centralised bureaucracy controlled by the watchful
eye of censors. All that recalled the ancient glory of Chou was to
be obliterated from men's minds; copies of the classical texts were
burned, and the death penalty was imposed on anyone found
reading or even discussing the Book of Songs or the Classic of His-
tory. Many scholars were martyred for attempting to protest. But
while these brutal measures imposed an intolerable burden on the
educated minority, they unified the scattered tribes and principal-
ities, and now for the first time we can speak of China as a political
and cultural entity. This unity survived and was consolidated on
more humane lines in the Han Dynasty, so that the Chinese of to-
day still look back on this epoch with pride and call themselves
"men of Han."
The megalomania of the first emperor drove him to build at
Hsien-yang vast palaces the like of which had never been seen be-
fore. One series, ranged along the riverside, copied the apart-
ments of each of the kings whom he had defeated. The climax was
the O-p'ang, or O-fang, Kung; he never lived to complete it, and
it was destroyed in the holocaust which, as so often in Chinese his-
tory, marked the fall of his dynasty. The emperor lived in constant
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