The First Emperor and the Making of the Chinese State

MC: Good evening everybody and welcome to the WA Museum Boola Bardip and this wonderful Jade Night event for our very exciting exhibition, The Terracotta Warriors. Before we get started tonight, I would just like to take a moment to acknowledge, just acknowledge the lands on which we are gathered on and learning here today, the lands of the Whadjuk people of the Nyoongar Nation. May we pay our respects to elders, past and present, and extend those respects to any First Nations folks joining us tonight.

So we have all of these events happening until February, and each of these, we have some wonderful activations and programing and some fantastic talks from some of our local experts. Kicking off the first talk tonight, we have Doctor Yu Tao, Associate Professor in Chinese Studies from the University of Western Australia. Over the next 30 minutes, Dr Tao is going to be taking us through how the First Empire laid the foundation to the political, culture and government, governance that continues to shape China today. Please make him feel welcome.

Dr Yu Tao: Good evening everyone. And we welcome you again to WA Museum Boola Bardip, where many stories come together. And it's really a real pleasure to join you here tonight on this very special event which is the first Jade Night. But as our colleague said, there will be many magnificent Jade Nights following.

I begin by echoing my colleagues to acknowledge that we now meet, tonight we meet on the traditional land of the Whadjuk people of the Nyoongar Nation, and pay my respects to elders, past and present. I'd also like to extend that respect to older Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples here tonight. I like to thank the team at the museum for this very generous invitation for me to speak as a part of this great exhibition here. You probably don't know me, but, I mean, I was actually born in this city in, in the geography of China is called Western China, but if you look at the map, it's actually in the centre of China. That is Xianyang in Shaanxi province. That is where the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who I will talk quite a lot tonight. He actually built his first capital and his palace there. So I think it's perhaps very natural for me, as someone who was born there, you know, to really kind of, just reflect on this enduring impacts that the emperor and his empire had on the, the Chinese state, but also in a way that's relevant to all of us today. However, I have to say that for me personally as well, it's really a truly rare privilege to share some of these reflections with you tonight beside, I believe over 200, I think in the precise numbers, 225, beautiful artifacts. Extraordinary artifacts here, over there actually. Some of you might have already saw that. So including a few terracotta warriors which were made, crafted to guard their empire for eternity.

And I want you all, but I want to start our journey here and now. I want to give you probably two seconds or three, I mean, I'm always already talk to you, so let's hope we can finish on time, but do, do, do ask yourself to picture an image of the Chinese, Chinese state today. Today, not, not the Emperor's state, but the state today in your mind. Now, if we got more time, I would have invite some of you probably, come and share your, your views, but, I mean, the set up like this, I think I'll, I will just continue for the convenience for everyone.

But I wouldn't be surprised if some of you would picture, for example, a very powerful centralized government or, you know, a vast and efficient infrastructures, or a military force equipped with state of weapons that became increasingly influential in the war stage. Or many of you probably have been, have traveled to China yourself and you might recall the remarkable fact that the entire country actually operates on a single time zone, even though the territory there is, is probably bigger than Australia. But I want to just ask us, like, how many of us actually have pause to consider that many of these, what now seen as very Chinese characteristics, right, they actually can be traced directly back to one extraordinary individual, Qin Shi Huang, and that's the first Emperor of China. That’s what we are going to talk tonight.

Trust your eyes. These are different, these are, these are different pictures, and then the face on different pictures do look like, quite different. But also, trust me, I mean, these are all showing, you know, portraits of, of the same person, Qin Shi Huang. The reason they look quite different was because the time that he lived was extremely long ago. To be precise, he was born in 259 BCE. So that's like 2283 years before now. And for many of us, myself included, that figure probably only means it was a very long time ago. And that was, of course, long before any, you know, long before the paper that we use today was invented. Hence there was no exact picture of him. Of course his name and many of the sayings good and bad he did that we will talk tonight was recorded in history, but we didn't know how the man actually, you know, look like. Hence later you have artists basically based on their understanding, sometimes I also like to think based on the budget they have, and then they picture him in different ways. But if, you know, 259 BCE is a very abstract figure, that means very remote in time. Let me give you some context there. That was extremely a long time ago. So at that time, Buddhism hasn't yet arrived in China. And chili peppers, many of you would associate, and correctly, with Sichuan cuisine, which is one of the signature dishes of the Chinese cuisine, and chili peppers, wasn't, you know, introduced to China. In fact, it hadn't been introduced to Europe as well. So even though Qin Shi Huang, I mean, as an emperor he must have lots of delicious food, he wouldn't, he didn't have the fortune to really taste chili pepper, if you like chili pepper, okay.

And then, in fact, the area that we call Sichuan today, the province that we call Sichuan today, was only become a part of his kingdom, no, my word, kingdom not, not yet. Empire at that time. So Sichuan wasn't a part of his kingdom, until a few decades before he was born. If we put that in the, in the global history, then in Europe at that time, Rome was just, still just a republic. Ambitious, perhaps, but a far cry from the empire that it would become, and Julius Caesar was, and he wouldn't be born for another 150 years. So the world that Qin Huang was born was fraught with danger. And that was an era in China's history was known as a Warrior, as a Warring States period and as the name suggests, it was a time of violent fragmentation and ruthless competition. For more than two centuries seven major kingdoms, and there are nine as you can see on the map, on the screen, they all compete for supremacy in a geopolitical landscape defined by shifting, idolising brutal warfare in an unfair and unforgivable struggle for dominance. So from a historical record, we know that literally at times, hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war were just massacred, collectively, so that one nation or one country knows that its remaining state will not be able to reorganize in one or three generations of time. So that's how brutal that environment was. And in that time, as you can imagine, survival depends as much on cunning diplomacy and strategic deception, as on military strengths and innovation. So here comes our, our empire. And remarkably, though, I mean, he wasn't born in his own kingdom, actually. So, this is, this is a point, well, I don't want to collect things that destroys things, but, anyway, so it's Qin. His, his kingdom, Qin is the one on your far left. And then the capital city is called as Yang. Yang, those of you in, in front, you can see that. And that's where Qin was born. But he wasn't born there. He was born on the capital of a rival state called Zhao. It's kind of a strange gray color to the north, to the up-side. So he was born there, and his father, Prince Xiang has been sent there as a political hostage. So that was a common diplomatic practice of the time. And so Ying Zheng, our Emperor entered this world as a child of a captive, basically. And he grown up under the constant threat of betrayal, assassination and inter-state hostility.

And even his parentage was not immune to controversy. So later storytellers, sometimes whisper that bit away. So this guy, a very wealthy merchant turned politician who actually sponsored Prince Xiang. And so the emperor's father's return from Zhao to Qin and eventually, his ascension to the throne may have actually been Ying Zheng's biological father. Serious historians of course will just dismiss that kind of argument, but nevertheless, lots of stories about that.

So following the death of the old king, Ying Zheng ascend the Qin throne, throne at the tender age of 13. So, our time is basically not even an adult or long before an adult. But the real power, of course, did not pass directly to him. The court was, as you can imagine, governed by the regions and including this powerful man, Lv Buwei. So they all ruled in his name, well, you know, they were asserting their influence behind the screens, or behind the scenes. The palace became a theater of conspiracies. And then there were assassinations, there are factions formed and dissolved, and trusted ministers, and eventually, fall from grace. But yet, amid all of this maelstrom, the young king, the Ying Zheng, prove himself far more than just a ceremonial figurehead. By his early 20s, Ying Zheng had quietly but decisively outmaneuvered all his political rivals and seized control of the court and consolidated real power in his own hands. What followed was a vision for greater, or far greater, and he wanted to conquer all rivalries states, all those rival states, on the map, you can see, and forge a single unified empire, one that he could rule for all under the heaven. And he did that in just two decades. As you can see from the map on your right hand side, how a single state eventually became an empire.

The secret of Ying Zheng is actually of his army. And that army that secured his victory, actually, is vividly brought to life in this great exhibition over there. So, but when you look at the Terracotta Warriors, you're not just seeing those of, you know, model soldiers there. They are, of course, life size. But you are seeing the real individuals, you know, from the Qin army. If you look carefully, each uniquely, actually crafted with distinct faces, hairstyles and uniforms, because they perform different roles in the army. And in those details, you are actually witnessing the essence of Qin's extraordinary military innovations. So these warriors represent a force that was highly disciplined, standardized and tightly coordinated. So Qin Shi Huang built an army, a military machine with a unified chain of command, clearly defined ranks and roles, and a centralized system for logistics and communication. For our friends who from the military force today, that may sound like nature, but in those times, in his rivalry space, lots of military personnel were even amateurs, not professional armies, but he built his professional army. But crucially, it was his invention, and not, not his invention, but his reinforce of a very strict merit based reward and punishment system where soldiers were promoted and demoted based on the battlefield performance rather than the birthright. So this structure gave the Qin army both the speed and the perception, allowing its generals to command vast forces across great distances, and conquer every space with remarkable efficiency. So for his time, as I said, that was a remarkable revolution. But even today, we can probably still see echoes of this legacy here, whether in the synchronized, choreography of the military parade in Beijing, there will be another one on the 3rd of September, or, you know, the way how massive infrastructure project escalate with the national-wide coordination. So Qin's vision of a unity controlled and disciplined execution continues to cast a long shadow more than 2000 years after the Terracotta Warriors we saw tonight, over there, were first buried to guard their empire. These principles remains in the blood of the Chinese state.

But I want to share with you that Qin Shi Huang’s ambition actually stretches far beyond just the military conquests. Once he had unified the Warring States he set out to, he set out to unify everything else. So, through a sweeping set of reforms, he revolutionized how the new empire would be, would function. His government actually standardized the writing script to ensure that the people across the vast and culturally diverse, empire could all follow the same laws. So if, for those of you who can see clearly the screen there, in the middle of the screen, it, you know, there was seven kingdoms, as you might remember. And the figure, the character there is actually a horse, or as in contemporary Chinese, Ma and they, as you can see in different kingdoms, that character were written in different way, but Qin actually unified that written script. And that's great in many regards, for those of us who have read Chinese today, you probably can, more or less, still have recognized that script there, because it's the same system that the Chinese culture inherit from Qin all the way down to contemporary time. So Qin Huang also introduced the uniform weights and measures, a common currency, and he even regulated the width of the carts as well, so that all these vehicles can travel smoothly on standardized roads. And of course, he built lots of those roads long before his very famous Roman counterparts. And some of those, and these are the roads you can see, some of them remains visible today, as, as the one on the left, upper left hand corner from your direction. And the one on the bottom left is the major road system that Qin Huang have build from the capital Xianyang. So some of those roads remain today as archeological sites, but others actually become the backbones of China's modern national highway and high speed railway systems. So, the map at the, at your bottom right corner, that's the today's China's high speed rail systems and of course, I mean, it wouldn't look exactly like the Qin roads because the capital has changed, economy has changed. And also those are high speed roads. They're much more difficult to build in the roads, but if you use some imagination, you probably can still see the resemble in there.

So I know that many of you, have come to the museum tonight to see the very eye-catching treasures in this exhibition. So, of course, the famous Terracotta Warriors, but also the stunning gold tiger, the masterly made jade pieces and the bronze bell for the Duke of Qin, and that weighs nearly 50kg. So I can completely understand these things are extraordinary. And I put them on my slides anyway. But if I may, I'd also like to gently encourage you to spend a moment with less eye-catching, but incredibly important objects, artifacts. One is this, and the other is this set of things. So the one on the top is, these are some more simple coins called the ban liang from the Qin Dynasty. And the sets on the bottom, they are the measuring tools from the Western Han Dynasty, just after Qin. They might look very humble in comparison with other artifacts, but together they tell the story of how Qin Shi Huang reshaped everyday life. He reshaped how people bought and sold goods, how these trends in weight were calculated, and how standardization became a powerful tool for governance. So this might sound like, you know, very technical, but they had a profound impact. And in fact they transform a patchwork of former kingdoms just within a few decades, two decades to be precise, into a single functioning state or empire. And we can still see the impact today to some extent. So consider contemporary China, the national wide use of Mandarin Chinese. So profound as a common language to bridge those national differences. Some of you might have heard me talking on, on other occasions or when the Chinese reformer coming here, or coming here in 1900, he was actually speaking Cantonese, and my, my colleagues recently recovered all this archive from, from literally over there. This they archive and find his the spelling of his name was actually Cantonese, not Mandarin, but today is old Mandarin, and the vast network of the high speed rail lines which I showed you on the last slide, that connect provinces with the military-like precision, all running, as you can imagine, on the same gauge.

So Qin Shi Huang’s reform wasn't just about efficiency. They were about creating a unified identity, a shared, a framework under which a massive, and this vast population, could be governed. So in that regard, in many ways, the centralized systems we see in China today still carry the very DNA of Qin Huang's 2000-year vision there. But of course, the story of Qin Dynasty isn't just one of success, victories and triumphs and, Qin Shi Huang rules with a very iron grip, guided by the philosophy of legalism, a system that value rigid rules and harsh punishments. Punishments over mercy or debate. And his government was incredibly efficient, but also deeply unforgiving. And he was obsessed with controlling of people, ideas of and, of course, land itself. So he ordered the construction of some magnificent and massive defense, such as the early Great Wall. Not the current wall you see in Beijing, but, that was built in the Ming dynasty, but you still can see some of the Qin Great Wall even today. But to, to, to some extent, if you think about that, those walls were not built just to keep the enemies out, but also to keep his own army and people occupied. And he also, of course, built spectacular palaces because he could afford to do that. And the picture on your right side is a recent archeological excavation on the wall, just outside the wall of one of his palaces in Xi’an. And as the emperor grow older, he became incredibly obsessed with the idea of living forever. He sent expeditions across the sea in search of magic medicine for immortality. And for all his greatness, Qin Shi was also deeply afraid. Afraid of rebellion, afraid of death, and afraid of losing the control. In the end, it was that fear, and the rigid regime that he built, that led to the downfall of his dynasty just a few months after he died, in 210 BCE. And that's merely a decade after he had made himself the first emperor of the United China. So not even two decades, a little bit more than a decade basically. And just within one year of death, a massive peasant rebellion broke out which was followed by even larger and more frequent uprisings and eventually a brutal civil war. And within five years, Qin Shi Huang's Grand Palace were in flames, his successor had been executed, and the mighty Qin dynasty had collapsed almost as quickly as it had risen.

So that was his tomb, people's imagination when they were built, and that's today’s picture from an airplane. The silent, Terracotta, Terracotta Army which guarded the emperor's vast tomb was soon forgotten. They were buried under, they buried underneath the earth. And they were, of course, remember occasionally, or faintly, in some Asian past. It was not for over 2000 years, until 1974, they were seen again, thanks to archeological excavations and I believe my friend and colleague, Associate Professor Qian Gong next week will talk more about that here, because she used to work as journalist and she witnessed, I think, not the 1974, but the 1994 for the second excavation. So however, I have to remind us that even after the Qin Empire collapsed, its legacy actually endured. The Han dynasty, for which you also see many artifacts tonight there in the exhibition, the Han dynasty officially rejected Qin's very harsh, legalist approach and embrace a softer, more human ideology of Confucianism. But beneath that, changing in the form, in the narratives, in the discourse, the Han quietly retained many of Qin's core administrative structures, the same bureaucratic system, the same emphasis on centralized control, and that Han dynasty itself lasted for nearly four centuries with a few interruptions in between. And over time, many of the bold reforms first introduced by Qin Shi Huang like to standardize the laws, the unify, unified instrument, institution, and a powerful central government, they all become further consort, further consolidated. And what had once been very revolutionary then became fundamental in Chinese political system. And in many ways, Qin Shi Huang’s vision for governance sets the template for the Chinese state, not just for Han, but for centuries and millenia’s to come, arguably even into the present day. And this fascinating mix of legalist efficiency and Confucian morality emerging Han, just a few decades after Qin Shi Huang had become the backbone of the Chinese governance for centuries to come. And that very tension before, between Legalism and Confucianism, and the fear and the persuasion is actually the subjects of my next talk, which will be here on the 22nd of August. There we will take a closer look to how these two powerful schools of ideas shaped not only Qin Dynasty's rise and fall, but also the very foundations of Chinese political life that followed.

So thank you very much for your time and company this evening so far. I warmly invite you to explore the remarkable artifacts if you haven't done so, in this extraordinary exhibition just over there. And also the magnificent cultural performance I understand the team in the museum has carefully prepared for you over there. Later I will be available for a while to answer some questions, and I look forward to seeing some of you again, perhaps next month on the 22nd of August. Thank you very much.

Voice Over: Thanks for listening to the talks archive brought to you by the Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip. To listen to other episodes, go to visit.museum.wa.gov.au/episodes/conversation where you can hear a range of talks and conversations. The talks archive is recorded on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja. The Western Australian Museum acknowledges and respects the traditional owners of their ancestral lands, waters and skies.