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A Disturbing Collection of History’s Most Brutal Rulers

Khalid Elhassan April 30, 2022 37 min

25. A Departure from Chinese Reverence for Scholars

The burial of the scholars and the burning of the books. University of California, San Diego

The Warring States period had been a period of chaos. However, it had also been a golden age of Chinese philosophy and free-thinking. The centuries before China’s unification in 221 BC came to be known as the “Hundred Schools of Thought”. It was an era in which various philosophies, such as Confucianism and Taoism, emerged and were freely debated. The First Emperor brought that to an end by banning all schools of thoughts, except Legalism. He saw his new state as a radical break from the past. To emphasize that break, as well as to keep his subjects from pining for bygone days, he ordered that all history books in China be burned.

Chin Shi Huang also ordered the burning of books on philosophy, and every other subject except for agriculture, science, and magic. When scholars protested, they discovered just how brutal he could get. Until then, intellectuals and scholars had been revered figures, highly respected by China’s rulers. Chin Shi Huang was cut from a different cloth: he ordered 460 scholars buried alive. What the First Emperor was most interested in was immortality through a “Life Elixir“, but his quest for immortality backfired. It was not only that all his efforts to find a Life Elixir failed, as they were bound to do. It was that those insane attempts at living forever did the opposite, and shortened the life of China’s First Emperor.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.