With the Beijing Olympics about to commence, it’s China time on television, with channels unleashing their stories of China past, present and future. The winner of the Gold Medal now seems apparent: the History Channel docudrama “China’s First Emperor,” a lavish and fascinating look at the rise and fall of Qin Shi Huangdi, the brilliant, ruthless ruler who led a 10-year war to unify China two centuries before Christ. The show began Monday night and repeats Saturday at 7 p.m.
Once the battlefield struggles were won, the real battles began.
Qin spent much of his life trying to provide governance and security (he was the first to build sections of the Great Wall) only to tumble into megalomania (he declared himself a god) and paranoia.
This one has it all: bloody battles, assassination plots, palace intrigues, historic perspective provided by Chinese and Western academics, and terrific photography.
The young Qin created a warlike society likened to the Spartans and launched a war to do what other rulers had failed to accomplish: subjugation of rival regions and peoples. He promoted soldiers based on how many enemy heads they had severed.
“This discipline no doubt was sharpened by 200 years of battles they engaged in with their nomadic neighbors to the north,” says Jeffrey Riegel, professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
While the overall theme is unification of much of Asia, there are gems embedded in the tale: how advances in the lethality of arrowheads and swords gave Qin’s troops a battlefield edge, the disputes between Qin’s generals and Qin’s quest to become “the ruler of the underworld” after his death.
His soothsayers had convinced him that he could continue to rule from the grave.
Qin created “an ancient military-industrial complex, a society that was organized down to the tiniest detail for the production of weapons,” says Robin Yates of McGill University in Montreal.
The numbers are staggering: Qin assembled an army of more than 600,000 (Alexander the Great had about 40,000, by comparison), 1.2 million people were killed during the unification war, an additional 100,000 died building the Great Wall and 400-plus intellectuals were buried alive after annoying Qin with their criticism.
“Emperor’s” final episode tells of the terra-cotta soldiers, the 7,000 life-size figures built to guard Qin’s tomb after his death at 49 in 210 B.C., possibly of mercury poisoning. The soldiers, and the rest of an intricate underground network, were discovered by archaeologists only in 1974, helping historians unravel the twists of this land’s volatile history.
Qin remains the model for modern Chinese rulers on how to keep their sprawling country from bursting apart. One ruler in particular saw himself as a latter-day Qin, Yates notes. A fellow called Mao Tse-tung.