A History of the World (21 page)

If this all sounds too good to be true, it may be: India had so many competing religions and was so riven by differences of caste and language that any dynasty hoping to last for long would have needed some kind of unifying idea. Almost certainly, Ashoka was self-consciously creating what modern rulers would call an ideology. Even if it was a notably gentle one, the actual administration of his empire may well have been rather less liberal. He retained capital punishment to a limited degree, and in his edicts growled from time to time at the forest-dwellers, who seem to have been both untamed and unimpressed by this Buddhist liberal. Even his vegetarianism was not absolute: he excepted venison and peacock, apparently, which he found particularly tasty. Above all, we have to rely on his word. If all we knew of Stalin were his blandly humanitarian speeches, we might
remember him as an avuncular softie. But because Ashoka so berates himself for his earlier bloody wars, it is likely that he was a genuine Buddhist convert who tried his best to establish an ‘empire of goodness’.

This seems all the more plausible because, very quickly, he failed. In his last days he is supposed to have given away all his property, ending his life as the proud possessor of half a mango. The huge range of Indian communities did not stay loyal or united for long, after his death. Little is known of his successors as Mauryan rulers, except that the last one was assassinated, and the empire broke up to be followed by half a century of chaos. Eventually it would be followed by a silver or even a golden age under the Gupta dynasty, who began to rule in
AD
320 and under whom Sanskrit writing, decimal mathematics and other advances flourished. When the Muslims poured into northern India, they began to force the Buddhists out. Facing Hindu hostility too, Ashoka’s creed virtually vanished from India.

Yet he is rather more than a footnote in history. Modern India, with its jagged fissures between different religious and ethnic groups, rediscovering year by year just how hard tolerance is, has adopted Ashoka as an intellectual hero. Ashoka’s three-headed lion is one of the republic’s most familiar symbols, appearing for instance on its banknotes. And in 1956 there was an eloquent protest against religious intolerance, showing that Ashokan political Buddhism was not quite dead.

B.R. Ambedkar was one of the great figures of early Indian democracy, a brilliant lawyer from the ‘untouchable’ caste. He rose to chair the committee that wrote the new republic’s constitution,
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which abolished untouchable status and gave special voting rights to this out-group of labourers, cobblers, cleaners and dirty-work specialists. But Ambedkar remained deeply frustrated and angered by India’s failure to do more for his people. To him, whatever the letter of the law, Hindu caste prejudice – religious prejudice – was still a fact of Indian life. So in 1956, shortly before he died, at a ceremony attended by vast numbers he publicly converted to Buddhism. A million people attended his funeral and many of his lower-caste followers also became Buddhists, contributing to a revival of the belief system in today’s India. Clearly, some of the moral message of Ashoka’s pillars was still crackling through the airwaves.

The First Emperor

China’s First Emperor is about as radical a departure from the benign if naive figure of Ashoka as it is possible to imagine. Qin Shi Huang Zheng, who ruled at roughly the same time, also erected stone pillars on hilltops to proclaim his works. But Zheng was not to be remembered in his own words. His reputation for paranoia, cruelty and ruthlessness came from a scandalous later history. It has been bolstered in recent times by the discovery of part of the awesome death city he had constructed for himself, featuring the world-famous ‘terracotta army’. If Ashoka was seeking the annihilation of all appetites and of selfhood, Zheng wanted to be protected for ever by a bureaucracy and a military machine made of mud and bronze, all painted and ready to repel demons.

His was an earthly vision, born of conquest and fear, which would have made more sense to Romans and even Egyptians than Ashoka’s Buddhist withdrawal. Zheng is more potent in today’s China and around today’s world than is Ashoka. Though, like the Indian ruler’s, his dynasty disappeared quickly, Zheng’s was just as quickly replaced by the Han dynasty, which picked up his political achievements, minus some of the savage paranoia. He may have been an unpleasant character but he unified Chinese scripts, built great public works, finally ended centuries of civil war and enlarged the idea of China itself. His message for humanity may be a sour-faced one, but it has stuck.

One of the biggest problems concerning Zheng is the written history available to us. It is by Sima Qian, whom we met earlier as the first biographer of Confucius. He is one of the great literary figures of Chinese history-writing, an Asian Plutarch, whose own life was marked by tragedy. Like his contemporary Latin historians, he knew very well that overstepping the mark in criticizing rulers could result in exile or death – or in his case, castration. Again like other historians, Sima Qian seems to have realized that he could make coded criticisms of his own rulers by attacking their predecessors, particularly if they had been defeated. So he passes on the worst scuttlebutt about Zheng. His chronicle the
Shi Ji
, a history of the Chinese dynasties, tells us that Zheng was probably the son of a barrow-boy merchant, an immigrant to the state of Ch’in, called Lu Buwei. This merchant had a beautiful
lover who caught the eye of the crown prince. He handed her over. The courtesan, however, was already pregnant. She passed off the child as the prince’s. The prince became king and the courtesan his queen. A baby was born.

The child was Zheng, and thus a bastard and a fraud. Yet, aged thirteen, he rose to the throne of the state of Ch’in when his ‘father’ died. Bad enough – but at this point the story becomes really racy. The merchant Lu Buwei returned to the arms of his lover, now the dowager queen, but became tired of her. So he . . . But at this point it is probably best to quote directly from our historian: ‘He therefore searched about in secret until he found a man named Lao Ai who had an unusually large penis . . . when an occasion arose, he had suggestive music performed and, instructing Lao Ai to stick his penis through the centre of a wheel made of paulownia wood, had him walk about with it, making certain that the report of this reached the ears of the queen dowager so as to excite her interest.’
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And excited it was. In an attempt to hush the gossip, Lu Buwei first had the well hung Lao Ai convicted of some minor charge and sentenced to castration. The operation was faked, however, and with some extra-careful shaving of the face to suggest he had become a eunuch, Lao Ai was left to enjoy a happy life in private with the queen, now an empress. She gave him gifts and two children. Sadly for them both, however, Zheng, by now surrounded by a strangely behaving mother, dodgy ‘adviser’ – who was also his rumoured real father – a fake eunuch and two half-brothers who were potential successors, decided the time had come to assert himself. He exiled his mother (though she eventually came back). He exiled Lu Buwei, who later on decided to poison himself rather than face a further banishment. He had the half-brothers killed. And he had Lao Ai, the erotic wheel-spinner, torn into four by chariots attached to his limbs. Their supporters were beheaded or banished – but mainly beheaded. Had the film-maker Quentin Tarantino turned his hand to Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
the effects could hardly have been more satisfactorily splattered.

But of course, none of this may be true. We have Sima Qian’s words to take on trust, or perhaps those of later anonymous mudslinger historians who added to the record. These were all working for the Han empire, which replaced the Ch’in, and had no reason to boost Zheng’s reputation. Yet Sima Qian, at least, seems to have been a
painstakingly serious writer. He fell out with a later emperor when he defended a friend, a general who had lost his army. For this misdemeanour Sima Qian chose the humiliation of castration as his punishment, so that living on as a half-man he could at least finish his book.

Meanwhile, at the cost of various relatives and the sniggering of chroniclers, Zheng had been left in full control of the biggest and most aggressive of the Chinese kingdoms, just as it completed a series of takeovers that would make it the hub of a unified empire. Zheng’s Chi’in forebears had done most of the work already. They had fooled the people of Shu, living in what is now Sichuan beyond the near-impassable Qinling mountains. The story goes that the earliest Ch’in king, Hui, presented the Shu king with some beautifully made stone cows whose nether quarters were painted with gobbets of gold. The credulous royal neighbour asked for these gold-excreting marvels as presents, and allowed King Hui to build a road with wooden bridges and galleries through the mountains so they could be moved to Shu. Behind them, of course, came the Ch’in army, surprising and overwhelming their rivals, and seized a vast new territory.

One by one, the other rival states of old China were outfought and outflanked by the Ch’in forces, until late in the First Emperor’s reign, driving deep into the south, he finished the job of uniting all the main regions. These were bloody enough wars, fought mainly with infantry and crossbows, but probably not as destructive of agriculture and towns as had been the earlier depredations of the warring states. What the ordinary ‘black-haired people’ of the Chinese plains, struggling to bring in their crops and avoid being conscripted by one of the passing armies, really thought of their First Emperor, we can never know.

Other areas of the world at this time were being shaped by religion, as well as by the rise and fall of kings: China was different. As noted earlier, there was a long tradition of worship of ancestor spirits and local gods. The complicated set of customary beliefs known as Daoism could at different times be used to support or to challenge imperial power. Buddhism would spread across China from Ashoka’s India with monasteries and monks who, again, were sometimes tolerated or supported and at other times persecuted. But there were no people-shaking or dynasty-rocking new religions of the kind that
would upend the Mediterranean world. The educated Chinese had philosophy as their unifier. By the time of the First Emperor, though, the humane, conservative social vision of Kongzi – Confucius – had been challenged by a new school of political thought, normally known as Legalism.

The Legalists put the need for order and submission above everything else. It was a creed based on fear of social anarchy and designed to appeal above all to rulers. Law, severe but impartial and certain, was the overriding social good. Legalists taught that the state should organize the people, irrigate the land, standardize weights and measures and allow its servants and soldiers promotion on strictly practical grounds – how many enemies they had killed, for instance. In return, the state organized families and villages into groups to spy on one another. The fearsome arsenal of state punishments included being torn apart, boiled alive, beheaded and sawn in two. For the lucky ones, there might be merely a bit of finger-slicing or kneecap removal. On the other hand, recent evidence suggests that the law was at least applied carefully and impartially and may not have been, in practice, quite as cruel as it sounds.
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Thanks to the silver tongue of the sinister Legalist sage known as Lord Shang, the Ch’in state took this doctrine to its heart. Situated on the north-western edge of the Chinese plains, Ch’in was already regarded by its rivals as mildly barbarous, too close to the edge of the known world to be properly civilized. Legalism had made it even grimmer, even tougher and more repressive. Its war philosophy now involved the mass slaughter of the enemy when possible, and terror tactics. Ch’in has been persuasively compared to that other ruthless militarized state, Sparta, and to modern dictatorships too. By the time of the First Emperor, Lord Shang was long gone (himself executed, one is glad to report, having been caught by his own system of spies), but his influence was as strong as ever.

He would have greatly approved of one of Zheng’s more notorious actions, when on the advice of his Legalist grand councillor Li Si he ordered the rounding-up and burning of most of China’s bamboo books of poetry, history and philosophy. According to Sima Qian, his purpose was to spread ignorance: by destroying records of the past, the court would wipe out people’s ability to challenge new laws by appealing to tradition and history. This makes Zheng’s move sound
like a Maoist ‘Year Zero’ attempt to obliterate memory. In fact, as historians have recently pointed out, many works of history as well as most books of practical instruction were spared; and it was comparatively easy to hide bamboo books, even if the penalties for doing so included tattooing and being buried alive. Chinese tradition is insistent that Zheng did bury many Confucian scholars alive. Mao would praise him for this, but said he should have killed more. It is possible that Sima Qian was exaggerating to make his profession seem even more martyred and heroic than it was. Certainly, the Chinese passion for historical records and poetry was barely interrupted.

Zheng’s wars against the last rival states were not his final legacy to China. He survived an extraordinary assassination attempt, when the killer gained access to him by bringing him maps of enemy territory and the severed head of a rebel general (the general had been in on the plot, and had magnanimously cut his own throat, to help). But rolled up in the map was a dagger and, according to Sima Qian, the assassin and the emperor fought hand to hand before Zheng won, his courtiers simply looking on, horror-struck. Not surprisingly, Zheng grew ever more paranoid, building covered walkways between his palaces so nobody could be sure where he was.

Grandiose building projects, including huge canals and waterways, became steadily more important to him. Famously, he ordered the extension and patching-up of earth and stone walls to keep out the barbarians – part of what would become the Great Wall of China – and established packed-earth roads to connect the many parts of the empire. The anarchic rivalry between the states concerning such things as coin values, measurements, axle lengths and scripts at last came to an end. In particular, without Zheng, it has been argued, China would have no single system of writing, and therefore no coherent cultural identity.