The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (4 page)

AGE OF WARRING STATES

Death toll:
1.5 million
¹

Rank:
40

Type:
failed state

Broad dividing line:
Qin vs. Chu

Time frame:
475–221 BCE

Location:
China

Who usually gets the most blame:
a string of increasingly vicious kings, culminating with Zheng of Qin

Prologue: Spring and Autumn Period (ca. 770–475 BCE)

To understand where China went, you should appreciate where it began. During the Zhou dynasty (ca. 1050 BCE–256 BCE) a nominal emperor ruled the whole of China, but he was more like a hereditary pope—a vestige of an ancient, almost forgotten era, a spiritual presence rather than a true monarch. Real power rested with feudatory states that incorporated pieces of the old empire. Below that level was the standard feudal arrangement of lesser lords and peasants.

The Chinese during the Spring and Autumn Period were a very well-mannered people, but their solution to every moral dilemma seemed to be ritual suicide. Let’s role-play a couple of actual scenarios found in the history books:
²

You are a noble of a minor rank who has been ordered by your lord, the prince of Jin, to assassinate his state minister for a serious transgression. When you discover that your target has been wrongly accused, you will

A.
Do your job and kill him anyway, as soldiers have been doing for centuries.

B.
Not kill him, and then hide because your lord will be quite angry.

C.
Not kill him, and then commit suicide for betraying your lord’s trust.

You are a noble of the state of Chu, and you firmly believe that your prince is embarking on a dangerous policy that will turn out badly for him. You will

A.
Keep your mouth shut and not risk angering him.

B.
Convince him to change his mind, and then bask in his gratitude.

C.
Convince him to change his mind, and then cut off your own feet for having disagreed with him.

If you answered (c) to these questions, you would have enjoyed the Spring and Autumn Period. Answer (c) was the chosen solution among the actual individuals in the history books.

During the Spring and Autumn Period, states fought for prestige rather than conquest. Usually, a defeated Chinese king was allowed to keep his title and lands as long as he acknowledged the magnificence of the man who beat him.

One episode probably says it all: After a decisive victory, a chariot of the Jin army was chasing a chariot of the defeated Chu army when the fugitive chariot got stuck in a ditch. The pursuing chariot pulled up alongside so the Jin charioteer could helpfully advise his enemy on how to free the chariot. When the chariot was up and running again, the chase resumed. The fleeing chariot easily reached the safety of the Chu army.
³

The Age of Warring States (ca. 475–221 BCE)

Chinese war-making turned cold-blooded after 473 BCE. For years, the two states of Wu and Yueh had been fighting each other whenever they had a spare moment. The king of Wu had won the previous round and followed the tradition of being a gracious winner, leaving the state of Yueh intact as long as its people acknowledged Wu’s magnificence. Then in 473 BCE, while Wu was off fighting elsewhere, the king of Yueh snuck in and took Wu’s capital. Fair enough—Yueh won that round. Wu admitted defeat and agreed that Yueh was now top dog; however, instead of leaving it at that, Yueh stripped his broken enemy of his lands and stashed him in a humiliating new kingdom consisting of a river island with three hundred inhabitants. The king of Wu refused to accept this shame and committed suicide.

The Spring and Summer Period had ended with the kingdom of Jin foremost among the others, but now a civil war ripped it apart. Three independent kingdoms (Han, Zhao, and Wei) emerged from the chaos in 403 BCE.

In time, “war became a business of wholesale slaughter, unmitigated by acts or gestures of chivalry which was considered as a folly hopelessly out-of-date by the people of the time. In the battlefield killing pure and simple was encouraged. A soldier was rewarded according to the number of human heads or, when these became too cumbersome, the number of human ears that he could produce after the battle. Ten thousand was considered a modest casualty list for a single campaign; twenty or thirty thousand was quite common. The wanton murder of prisoners of war, unthinkable in the former age, became a practice by no means unusual, it being considered the best, the surest, and the cheapest way of weakening a rival state.”
⁴

The warring states were helped along by the invention of crossbows. About the same time, battle tactics shifted from chariots to cavalry. Increasingly the Chinese made weapons and armor from iron rather than bronze. All of these innovations made war cheaper, meaning everyone could get involved, not just the nobility.

Rise of Qin

By the 360s BCE, only eight feudal states were still on the board, chief among them Wei in the central north. Wei had reduced the kingdoms of Han, Lu, and Sung to vassals, which provoked a counter-alliance of two more kingdoms, Zhao and Qi, to keep Wei under control. This briefly created an equilibrium in which no one state was strong enough to expand, so peace broke out.

Most states were compressed in the center of China along the Yellow River, small in size but densely populated; however, a couple of outer states held vast frontier territories with large armies hardened by battles with barbarians in the wilderness. In the west, backing up against the open steppe, was Qin (pronounced “chin”). This land was good for raising horses, and the kingdom was inhabited by tough, no-nonsense people who were considered crude by the rest of China. One ancient critic described their music as nothing more than beating clay jars with thigh bones and chanting, “Woo! Woo! Woo!”

Duke Hsiao ruled Qin from 361 to 338 BCE, guided by his minister Lord Shang. Together they organized a totalitarian state to maximize the state’s agricultural output and war-making abilities. They abolished the nobility and replaced it with a professional army in which soldiers were promoted for bravery rather than connections. They crushed dissent. They restricted travel. These reforms gave Duke Hsiao the most powerful army in China, which he used in a surprise attack that broke Wei’s hegemony in 351 BCE.

Lord Shang’s reforms stirred up a lot of anger inside Qin, so when Duke Hsiao died, Shang’s enemies hunted him down. He tried to flee anonymously, but his own laws made unauthorized travel impossible. He didn’t get very far before an innkeeper turned him over to the authorities for failure to produce the right documents. Shang was hauled off and torn apart with chariots. His reforms, however, stayed in place.
⁵

In 316 the Qin kingdom annexed the barbarian lands of Shu and Pa, which added thousands of tribal warriors to the army.
⁶
By now, most of the initiative in international relations lay with Qin, and the other kingdoms could only respond. The only other state powerful enough to have its own foreign policy was Chu, a large kingdom that was expanding into forests of the southern frontier.

To keep Qin from expanding eastward into the Chinese heartland, the states that lined up north to south on Qin’s eastern border joined Chu in a “vertical” alliance—
hezong
in Chinese. Qin leapfrogged this barrier to advance down the Yellow River and link up with the states on the other side in a “horizontal” alliance, called
lianheng
.

The wars came quickly after this, from all directions, and it would take dozens of pages to sort them out in any meaningful way. The general flavor can be sampled from one incident in 260 BCE, in which ruthless cunning defeated honor. At Changping in northwestern China, a Zhao army in a good defensive position faced the army of Qin, which could only settle down and wait. As the wait dragged on with no resolution in sight, Qin agents started a whispering campaign about how those Zhao cowards were avoiding battle. Eventually, the Zhao king was stung by the rumors of cowardice, so he replaced his cautious general with one he thought more honorable. This new general set out to attack, but as soon as he left his fortifications, the Qin army lurched forward and easily surrounded the Zhao force. The Zhao general laid down his weapons and surrendered, but Qin soldiers killed every last member of the Zhao force anyway.

Endgame

In 256 BCE, Qin soldiers marched into Loyang and deposed the last Zhou emperor.
⁷
No replacement was appointed, and after this China didn’t even pretend to be one country.

In 247 BCE, at the age of thirteen, Prince Zheng came to the throne of Qin when his father the king died. Most members of the court expected him to be easily manipulated, so they conspired all around him. His mother, Queen Dowager Zhao Ji, renowned as a great beauty and graceful dancer, was given control of the government until Zheng came of age. She shared this regency with Prime Minister Lu Buwei, who was rumored to be Zheng’s real father.

To free himself from his entanglement with the queen dowager, the prime minister “found a man named Lao Ai who had an unusually large penis, and made him a servant in his household. Then, when an occasion arose, he had suggestive music performed and, instructing Lao Ai to stick his penis though the center of a wheel made of paulownia wood, had him walk about with it, making certain that a report of this reached the ears of the queen dowager so as to excite her interest.”
⁸

The queen dowager quickly fell in love with Lao, which opened the happy couple to great risks, so they came up with a scheme to keep it secret. Lao arranged to be accused of a crime for which the punishment was castration, but he and the queen bribed the gelder to leave Lao’s mighty genitalia intact and pluck out his beard instead. Now that everyone thought he was a eunuch, Lao could openly and legally become part of the queen’s household.
⁹

Eventually, they had two children together, whom they kept carefully hidden from her son, the king. Knowing the danger they were in, they planned a coup against Zheng and secured personal command of nearby troops using forged documents. Unfortunately, Zheng was way ahead of them. When Lao’s troops arrived at the royal chamber, King Zheng had his own troops ready in an ambush. Lao barely escaped the trap and fled. With a price of one million copper coins on his head, Lao was quickly captured and sentenced to die. The queen dowager was forced to watch while her lover was torn apart with chariots. Their two secret sons were tied in sacks and beaten to death.