262 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
lines remained until the twentieth century. Determined to reduce the power of
local lineages that might later form separatist regional states, he divided the
realm into 36 districts. To administer these regions, he rejected the old aristoc-
racy and instituted a meritocracy of men who had earned his respect by their
work for him and had no power bases other than the emperor’s approval. This
new class of administrators was appointed by the emperor and responsible to
him. If they displeased him, they were easily removed. He attempted to solve
the problem of the existing elites in the old feudal states by forcing 120,000 of
these families to move to his capital. He saw that primogeniture—passing all a
family’s property to its eldest son—was a means of accumulating wealth and
consolidating power across a number of generations. To reduce such dangerous
concentrations, he required families to divide their property when male chil-
dren came of age (Chow 1994).
Those huge standing armies out in the old states were defanged by confis-
cating and melting down their weapons, then using the metal to create 12 enor-
mous human statues of 32 tons each. Believing that people needed clear laws,
he codified them and had them inscribed on pillars. Believing laws were
obeyed if penalties were severe, relatively light offenses (by current standards)
brought flogging, mutilation, forced labor, castration, and decapitation. The
emperor himself—as lawmaker, chief executive, and court of last appeal—was
above and outside the law. He began the systematic registration of the entire
population, encouraging families to adopt surnames by which they could be
identified over subsequent generations; this new custom served to reinforce the
patrilineal principle in kinship organization and made it easier to form descent
groups based on patrilineality.
By the second century B.C.E., written Chinese had taken many forms, and
texts from one place were often unreadable in another. To further unify his
state, Qin Shihuang had the script regularized across the country, which
accounts for the fact that today, however diverse Chinese “dialects” might be,
all literate Chinese read the same script. But Qin Shihuang was determined
they would not be reading the Confucian texts. Considering Confucius’s
thought too soft-headed and dependent on individual goodness, he had these
books burned. When scholars objected, several hundred were buried alive.
Recognizing the importance of trade and communications, he regularized
weights and measures, built 5,000 miles of roads, and connected the various
pieces of northern walls into the “Great Wall,” while destroying many walls
that had divided the Chinese states. (This was only the forerunner of the Great
Wall that tourists visit today, which was mainly built during the Ming dynasty.)
The First Emperor was thus an organizational genius as well as a cruel
ruler who has been remembered with both pride and horror. He accomplished
in 221 B.C.E. what Chandragupta Maurya accomplished in India just one cen-
tury earlier: the first imperial unification of the northern portion of the country.
In subsequent centuries both countries would suffer “barbarian” (in India,
mleccha) invasions from Central Asia and would be linked to each other by