Fall of the Ch’in Empire

Fall of the Ch’in Empire

In 209 BC, during the reign of the Second Emperor, 900 conscript soldiers bound for the frontier to take up general duties, found their route blocked by floods. To be late in reaching their destination would bring the punishment of death. In desperation they killed their commander and raised the cry of revolt against tyranny. The revolution spread like wildfire from province to province as peasants armed themselves with sharpened bamboo sticks and joined the fight. Three years later the capital of the mighty Ch’in Empire fell to soldiers led by Liu Pang, a junior official. In 202 BC Liu Pang took the title of Eminent Emperor, and became first Emperor of the Han dynasty which was to last more than 400 years.

Warrior leading a bullock cart, date from this period.

The tragedy of the burning of the books at the orders of Li Ssu and the Ch’in Emperor had an even more disastrous sequel. When Liu Pang’s peasant armies stormed the Ch'in capital, the royal library - the only surviving complete collection of China’s ancient classics  caught fire. It burned for three months and all its treasures perished.

The first Han Emperor was a man of action who came from an illiterate family. He had scant respect for the pedantry and ceremonies of the Li scholars and - so the records tell - showed his contempt by urinating in their high hats. But, conqueror though he was, Liu Pang could not govern an empire competently. Nor could his quarrelsome, uneducated soldier-ministers. The Han Emperor soon found himself obliged to call in the Confucians to establish a court procedure. Their success in doing this ensured a stable government; as a result they came back into favour. Emperors of the T’ang dynasty (AD 618 -907) built temples for the worship of Confucius. Even the Manchu emperors, last rulers of China, publicly worshipped Confucius as a god. When their empire collapsed in 1911, his cult went into decline.