Burning Books, and Burying Scholars Alive
With unchecked power and the resources of an entire empire to draw upon, Chin Shi Huang grew megalomaniacal, and launched huge projects with massive amounts of forced labor. One such project had 700,000 laborers toil on the First Emperor’s tomb for thirty 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 it is yet to be unearthed. 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, which did double duty: keep out the northern barbarians, and keep in the Chinese seeking to flee the emperor’s heavy taxation and heavy-handed rule.
The Warring States period had been chaotic. However, it had also been a golden age of Chinese philosophy. 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. Chin Shi Huang ended that by banning all schools of thoughts, except Legalism. He saw his new state as a radical break from the past, so he ordered all history books burned. He also burned books on philosophy, and every other subject except for agriculture, science, and magic. When scholars protested, they discovered just how big a jerk the First Emperor could be. Until then, intellectuals and scholars had been revered figures, highly respected by China’s rulers. Chin Shi Huang was different: he ordered 460 scholars buried alive.
