16. This Emperor Kept All of China Working on Massive Projects
With unchecked power and the resources of an entire empire to draw upon, Qin Shi Huang grew megalomaniacal. He launched huge projects with massive amounts of forced labor, such as 700,000 laborers working on his tomb for 30 years. The famous Terracotta Warriors site, discovered in the 1970s and now open to tourism with its thousands of life size statues, is but a fraction of his gigantic tomb complex, the bulk of which is yet to be unearthed.
As if obsessed with the solution to the problem of idle hands being the tools of the devil, Qin Shi Huang put everybody to work. In addition to the hundreds of thousands laboring on his tomb, millions more labored to dig canals, level hills, make roads, and build over 700 palaces. The biggest project of all was the Great Wall of China. It did double duty: keeping the northern barbarians out, and Chinese seeking to flee Qin Shi Huang’s heavy taxation and tyranny.
