cut his own throat to accomplish his goal, be it preserving his honor or
furthering a plan to kill his enemy. Jing Ke did not, however, seem to have
imagined his mission as a one-way trip. He angrily upbraided Dan when
the Heir questioned his delay in setting out while waiting for his assistant:
“One who sets off without considering his return is a whelp!”
In any event, Jing’s plan succeeded up to the point where he pulled out
the hidden dagger and grabbed the Qin king’s sleeve with his left hand to
stab him. The Qin king was able to pull away before he got stabbed. Jing
then chased him around the upper audience chamber while his attendants
panicked. The Qin court physician struck at Jing ineffectively with his
medical bag. All of the armed guards were in the lower chamber, and could
only be summoned by the Qin king. The Qin king was too busy trying to
free his long sword from its scabbard while evading Jing. Once the long
sword was free, he quickly wounded Jing, who in a last ditch effort threw
the dagger at the King, missing him and striking a bronze pillar. (Jing was
later executed.)
It took the Qin anotherfive years to conquer all of China, and in 221
bceelevate the Qin king to the new title of emperor“huangdi皇帝.”After
this all of Jing Ke and the Yan Heir Dan’s retainers were pursued. Gao
Jianli, the dulcimer player and old friend of Jing Ke’s, went into hiding.
Eventually he revealed himself, and through his skill as a dulcimer player
was brought to Qin Shihuang to perform. The emperor had pardoned him,
but also had had him blinded with acid. Gao placed a piece of lead in his
dulcimer, and when the emperor drew close to him as he played, he tried to
strike Qin with the weighted dulcimer. He missed, and was executed.
Sima Qian completes his portrait of Jing Ke by inserting a comment by
Lu Goujian, the man Jing had backed away from when he shouted at him
during a board game. Having heard of Jing’s failed assassination attempt,
Lu lamented:“Alas, what a shame he did not study carefully the method of
assassination with a dagger! How profound has been my failure to under-
stand men! When I shouted at him before, he must have thought I was not
[his kind] of man!”^6
The attempts of Jing Ke and his friend Gao Jianli to kill Qin Shihuang
were not the last. After thefirst emperor’s encounter with Gao Jianli, he
made sure to keep men from the states he had conquered away from his
immediate presence. Later in his rule, however, his party was attacked while
touring Bolangsha. The two assassins mistakenly attacked his attendants’
carriage and thenfled. One of the would-be assassins was a man named
Zhang Liang, an aristocrat from the conquered kingdom of Han; to assist
him in the attack he had enlisted the aid of a man renowned for his strength.
The First Emperor and His Would-Be Assassins 59