The Imperial Transition

The first house to rule a politically unified China was the Qin dynasty. In 221 bce, during the reign of man who became the First Emperor of Qin, the Qin overcame the states with whom they had long contended and ended the Warring States period.

The Qin went to great pains to make their success in unifying the realm known across their new empire. One of the first changes to the laws that they made was to replace varying local systems with a new set of standard weights and measures. The following claim prefaced the command ordering the implementation of the system: ‘In the twenty-sixth year of his reign (221 bce), the emperor unified the lords of the realm, [and] the common people had great peace'.^[868] This presents the two sides of the unification from the perspective of the Qin, both of which were linked to violence: on the one hand is the pacification of the different states; on the other, the peace the common population was to enjoy.

A series of steles put up in prominent places throughout the realm gives clear voice to these tendencies. An inscription on one proclaims: ‘Warfare will not arise again! / Disaster and harm are exterminated and erased'.^[869] Another describes the Qin achievement as ‘having pacified all under heaven'.^[870] Still another claims, ‘Rebellion and banditry are wiped out and gone'.³² Thus, as the Qin presented it, their political unification ended violence both in terms of military conflict between the states they had subsumed and in terms of criminality within the territory that constituted the new empire.

The advantages of peace for the realm's populace cannot be doubted. Yet a profound discomfort about the process of unification emerges in the steles' repeated justifications for the act. One says of the First Emperor, the ‘August Thearch', who stands pars pro toto for Qin rule,

The six kingdoms had been restive and perverse,

Greedy and criminal, insatiable - Atrociously slaughtering endlessly.

The August Thearch felt pity for the multitudes, And consequently sent out His punitive troops, Vehemently displaying His martial power.³³

Another stele says the goal was ‘To punish and behead the lawless'.³⁴ The results of these actions and subsequent enlightened rule, the steles claim, brought benefits that penetrated all of society. One inscription says the following of the commoners, whom it refers to as ‘black-haired people':

The black-haired people are peaceful and tranquil,

And do not use weapons and armour.

Within the six kin relations, they protect each other, So that ultimately there are no bandits and robbers.³⁵

Even if we grant that the Qin felt concern for the common population of the realm, to characterise the unification as done on their behalf is of course disingenuous. That said, the peace of the realm and the highly effective Qin government systems surely brought with them a decrease in violence for the ordinary populace compared to the years of the Warring States period. It is reasonable both to doubt some Qin claims and yet to give credence to others.

When the Qin dynasty fell, in 207 bce, it did so due to a variety of factors, many internal. The years that followed saw civil war that lasted until the Han dynasty established itself in 202 bce. The governmental system the Han put in place was essentially a reconstitution of the Qin structure. Although changes and developments began almost immediately, the Han faced a problem of legitimacy. They were subjects of the Qin dynasty, and the condign course of actions would have been to restore the Qin.

Han historical records neither elide violence nor present it in the flat forms familiar from earlier texts. This is not limited to depictions of the Qin, but I suggest that the problematisation of violence among the philosophers, fol­lowed by the Qin claims of pacification, and Han period revisionism led to a shift in presentation. Violence was criticised, to be sure, implicitly or directly; but we find in the Han sources narratives filled with gore that are without precedent in the earlier texts.

A startling example of the violence the Historian’s Records presents comes in its portrayal of the widow of the Han dynasty's founder. She never held formal political power, but is known as Empress Lu because she in fact ruled after her husband's death. The Historian’s Records, dating to around 100 bce, has the following account of how she dealt with the mother of a potential rival to her son: ‘Empress Lu later cut off Lady Ch'i's hands and feet, plucked out her eyes, burned her ears, gave her a potion to drink which made her dumb, and had her thrown into the privy'.^[872] The brutality of this narrative suggests exaggeration rather than historical accuracy. The events themselves date to the time before Sima Qian was alive, indicating that he was probably not alone in his willingness to write violence in a new way. Yet the fact of its representation is something not seen in any extant pre-Han text.

Revenge

The discussion here so far has treated violence mainly in terms of government-sanctioned actions. But there is one individual-level locus for much violence in early China: revenge.

As I have shown, early texts generally exhibit negative attitudes about violence as a tool of governance. But things get complicated when it comes to revenge. The canonical Ritual Record, for instance, is a compendium of proper behaviour of all sorts. It expresses, with varying degrees of stridency, the duty of vengeance that falls upon one when a father, a brother or a friend has been killed. Another classic, the Zhou Rituals, expresses its version of ritual ideals through the depiction of a theoretical government bureaucracy. One of its many officials is supposed to assist the common population with difficulties, including ritually proper revenge. It furthermore explicitly allows for cases of homicide that are morally proper and thus not subject to revenge. The strongest canonical expressions in favour of violent retribution for wrongs come in the Gongyang Commentary, another exegesis on the Annals. It declares absolutely the duty of a vassal to violently avenge the killing of his lord.^[874]

The trend toward increasing willingness to depict violence in Han sources is visible in tales of vengeance. The story of one famous example illustrates these developments. The man Yu Rang supposedly lived in the time around the fifth century bce. His lord was killed by an enemy whose enmity was so extreme that he made the lord's skull into a cup. Yu Rang was determined to obtain vengeance and the narrative of his attempts, including repeated attacks, the harm he did to himself by way of disguise, and his final capture and death are worthy of Dumas. What is most indicative in terms of the moral perspective on revenge is that Yu Rang is praised for rectitude by none other than the man he seeks to kill.^[875]

While these events are supposed to date to the Warring States period, records of them come to us in forms achieved centuries later, primarily in the Historian's Records from around 100 bce and still later compilations. There was surely original source material of some sort, but it is impossible to separate later additions from any original account. The bare bones accounts of killings in the Annals and Zuo Commentary suggest that embellishment seems likely. Indeed, even the canonical sources that speak favourably about revenge are late. How late exactly is a matter of discussion among specialists, but the general trend of developing attitudes toward violence and its depic­tion is, based on present evidence, clear; there was a shift in how violence was presented in early Chinese sources from before imperial unification and after.