的第一個皇帝的陵墓
The Tomb of the First
Emperor
Chinese Afterlife; Why & How it Changed.
Caitlin Baird
East Asian Civilization to 1600 (Fall 2011)
The tomb of the First Emperor is a world renowned site that has captured the
imagination of the public, historians, and archaeologists alike for generations. Nothing of this
magnitude in terms of burial tombs had even been seen before in China and has yet to be seen
since. From its discovery has arisen an international interest in Chinese history and tradition. As
a student of Chinese history, the prominence of this burial site becomes even more enticing as
one soon comes to discover that not only is it a unique find in an archaeological context, but a
unique occurrence in Chinese history. The exceptionality of this site demonstrates the
importance and impact of ideologies in Chinese antiquity, and the context of the First
Emperor’s tomb in history and philosophical ideology as well as its comparison to later burial
rituals is the subject of this investigation. What led to the construction of such a massive burial
tomb, and what changes in Chinese society during the Han and Tang dynasties saw to it that
nothing of its significance was ever constructed again? It was the personal ambitions of the
First Emperor that gave rise to the great monument, and the repercussions of his personal
ambitions that gave rise to the institution of ideologies that ensured no such monument would
rise again.
The state of Qin was established in 897BC and passed into the hands of Ying Zheng in
256BC, who eventually united China in 221BC and became the first human to claim the title of
Emperor.1 Qin was a powerful military state before and during the Warring States period,
during which it conquered its enemies using massive infantry armies, advanced weapon
technology including the crossbow, and demanded loyalty through legalist political policies. It
was Lord Shang Yang who first instituted a legalist political system in the state of Qin entailing
1
Mark E. Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires: Qin & Han (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) 268.
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strictly centralized government control, severe punishment, and proportional rewards. Ying
Zheng continued these policies during his reign, and as he adopted the title of Emperor Qin Shi
Huang in 221BC and appointed Li Si as his chancellor these legalist policies became a defining
feature of the Qin dynasty and its legacy.2 At the outset of his reign Qin Shi Huang
commissioned massive works including the Great Wall and his own tomb, but after three
assassination attempts against his life Qin Shi Huang became obsessed with his own mortality
and extremely suspicious of any dissent within his state and his court.3 At the time of his death
Qin Shi Huang had amassed the largest state seen thus far, standardized a feudalist state, and
unified China for the first time, but in doing so had squandered the resources of the state,
alienated and infuriated the conquered people, and earned a reputation as a ruthless and
immoral leader.4
The tomb itself was a result of Qin Shi Huang’s fear of conspiracy around him and his
coming to terms with his accomplishments and mortality. Through this monumental task the
Emperor sought to cement his place as a universal and eternal ruler, in other words, to
continue his rule throughout eternity in the next world.5 The outer wall of the compound
enclosed an area of 395.93km2 containing the rammed earth mound of the Emperor’s tomb
reaching 150m into the sky,6 and the four pits containing the infamous terracotta warriors half
a kilometer across the stream to the east. Although the tomb itself is yet to be excavated,
records written by the Grand Historian Sima Qian described the tomb as a recreation of the
2
P. Ebrey, A. Walthall, J. Palais, East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 2009) 37.
3
Jane Portal, The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) 69.
4
Ibid., 79.
5
Ibid., 114
6
Arthur Cotterell, The First Emperor of China (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1981) 17-18.
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Emperor’s world both earthly and heavenly. According to the Records of the Grand Historian
miniature palaces and scenic towers were constructed as representations of the unified lands
of China, mercury filled rivers flowed like the Yangtze and Yellow, and heavenly bodies adorned
the ceiling above the Emperor’s coffin.7 The immense terracotta army consisted of individual
foot soldiers, commanders, chariots, and horses, all armed with working crossbows, spears, and
bronze swords reading to defend and serve the Emperor in the next world and continue his
unification of the world. It is has also been suggested through Sima Qian that the Emperor’s
tomb holds the remains of once-living court officials, concubines, horses, and slaves who were
essential members of the Qin Shi Huang’s afterlife. This tomb was not simply a resting place or
memorial for a former leader; it was the Emperor’s world, his universe that would continue on
after death that encompassed his palace, his army, and his court.8
Qin Shi Huang was an ambitious man in all aspects of his reign, even to the point of
insanity in some respects. His unlimited control and grand achievements such as unifying China
and reforming the writing system had given him a god-complex, for as he undertook his first
journey across his empire he began to realize the fruition of his efforts and the responsibility
that lay on his shoulders. It was during these expeditions that three assassination attempts
were made against the Emperor’s life, and combined with the weight of his achievements
caused the First Emperor to truly recognize his own mortality. By this point the Emperor now
saw himself as a divine being,9 a living god as it were, proven capable of conquering the world
and creating order in chaos. If he was able to conquer the world then he was surely able to
7
Jane Portal, The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) 127.
Ibid.
9
Jonathan Clements, The First Emperor of China (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2006) 117.
8
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conquer death as well. The second half of his reign would be characterized by this insane
obsession with the source of immortality characterized by surrounding himself with Taoist and
Confucian scholars who claimed they could find an elixir for eternal life, and huge sums of
money spent of expeditions to the islands of the immortals Penglai, Yingzhou, and Fangzhang.10
But as the years passed by with no results of the source of eternal life, the Emperor realized
that his only chance to achieve immortality lay in the construction of a tomb that would be so
incredibly lavish it would allow him to continue on in the next life.
The construction of the tomb itself and the ideologies that led to its manifestation lie in
the Emperor’s utilization of legalism as a political structure, and his own ambitious and slightly
unstable personality. Legalism was first introduced to the Qin state under the reforms of Lord
Shang Yang in the fourth century,11 and was expanded and amplified by Qin Shi Huang and
especially by his chancellor Li Si. Under the Qin dynasty, legalism made the state and its laws
tools of the Emperor instead of protectors of the people, granting the Emperor unlimited
control over the lives of his subjects and the right to punish any who disobeyed him. Laws
became clear and uniform, organizing the Emperor’s subjects, and created a system where the
people became pawns to their leader in terms of unyielding obedience to fight and work
exclusively for the benefit of the Emperor. This explains how the Emperor was able to
accomplish such a feat as the construction of his tomb; the control he had over his people
10
Jane Portal, The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) 115.
P. Ebrey, A. Walthall, J. Palais, East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 2009) 31
11
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allowed him to relocate 120,000 families and 700,000 workers to Mt. Li near Lintong in order to
construct his tomb and his army of terracotta warriors.12
Qin Shi Huang began the construction of his tomb at the beginning of his reign, but as
mentioned above, the realization of his own mortality intensified its construction and
extravagance towards the end. The people brought in for the construction process were mostly
slaves and poor farmers who had been absorbed into the empire as the Qin army conquered
other kingdoms. They already resented the Emperor as their conqueror and were now being
forced to erect a frivolous tomb in his honor. This conscription had displaced them and their
families for months and even years, many even died during the construction, and farmers
especially were enraged for being taken away from their lands and crops that were left to rot
and die.13 People were going hungry and dying for a leader that was not even their own, and
his ideas of immortality and self-proclamation as a living god discredited him even further. The
Emperor had become too excessive and forgotten the needs of his people, and as such his
people rose up against him using pillaged weapons from the tomb he had instructed them to
build.
The First Emperor’s ambitions were both his immortal legacy and his imminent downfall.
With the help of his predecessors China was unified under one central government, and masses
of different peoples were brought together into a sphere of equality and peace. This can be
seen in the very faces of the terracotta warriors, whose individual expressions and morphology
show the varying features of the people of the Chinese empire.14 But these people did not feel
12
Jane Portal, The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) 115
Jonathan Clements, The First Emperor of China (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2006) 116.
14
Arthur Cotterell, The First Emperor of China (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1981) 28.
13
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unified as many now found themselves as slaves for the Emperor’s own personal labor force,
and still saw themselves as members and warriors of their original kingdoms. Qin Shi Huang
and his chancellor Li Si also introduced a strict legalist policy that granted equality to all subjects,
regulated laws, and reformed writing, measurements, and dissolved the former Zhou feudal
system in place of the imperial system. However, the system created an autocracy with no
margin for any opposition of any form and led to the most infamous moment in Qin dynasty the
‘burning of the books’ and the ‘burying of the scholars’ in 212BC.15 Qin Shi Huang’s ambition to
erect great monuments such as the Great Wall and his tomb were grand achievements as a
ruler making his mark in history. But his abuse of his people and neglect of their needs were
the makings of his downfall, and instead of being remembered for his achievements, the First
Emperor was remembered by later Emperors as an example of an immoral ruler who lost the
Mandate of Heaven. The Mandate of Heaven being perhaps the most important ideological
concepts of the age was introduced by King Wen during the Zhou period and stated that a
leader who was given the Mandate of Heaven was given the right to rule, but when that leader
became corrupt he lost the mandate and thus any claim to the seat of authority.
However, a bad reputation could not have been the only deterrent for later Emperors to
discard the magnificence of a grand tomb such as that of the First Emperor. For even though it
was left unfinished, the great mound and outer wall fulfilled their task of making the Emperor
immortal in the sense that his memory lived on in the minds of the people. What
predominantly influenced the abandonment of this style of burial tomb, and what is the main
focus of this investigation, was the change in ideologies in later dynasties. The two most
15
Jane Portal, The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) 27
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influential ideologies of China that can be seen to this day are Confucianism and Buddhism, and
both can be seen as strict opposites to everything the First Emperor’s tomb stood for.
Confucianism should be looked at first as it was the direct predecessor to the First
Emperor’s tomb in the following dynasty of the Han beginning in 206BC. It was during the Han
dynasty that the first Confucian bureaucratic system was put into play under the leadership of
Emperor Han Wu Di, which is to this day regarded as the one of the greatest dynasties in
Chinese history and the Chinese people refer to themselves as ‘Han Chinese.’ Confucianism as
it was applied as a political ideology stressed above all looking to the past in order to solve the
problems of the present, especially looking to the early period of Zhou that Confucius himself
saw as the ideal rule.16 This is important to the shift away from First Emperor as it
reemphasizes the warnings of his failures as a leader, and secondly because it stresses the
importance of the past and not the future and afterlife. In the Confucian mind there was less
emphasis placed on the life after this one, so followers were taught to do the best with the time
that they had to improve themselves through education, study of the Classics, and selfcultivation. In this sense there was no need for the Emperor to have a tomb containing the
entire universe for him to carry into the next life, because a man’s fate would be decided by his
morality that he cultivated during his lifetime.
Han tombs themselves were very small and modest in comparison to the tomb of the
First Emperor, and followed many Confucian ritual philosophies. Instead of containing an entire
universe, a Confucian tomb was modeled on the house of the deceased with the coffin
symbolizing the carriage and the cover and decorations imitating the hangings and drapery
16
P. Ebrey, A. Walthall, J. Palais, East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 2009) 26.
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found in a home.17 As time progressed some aristocratic burial tombs became more ornate
being carved into the side of cliffs and involving more rooms beneath the mound, but as before
the burial centered on the home as did the Confucian ideal of cardinal relationships. Within the
theory of the cardinal relationships hierarchy is a natural phenomenon that cannot be escaped
and is reflected in the relationship between the head of the household the father and his family,
and the relationship between the ruler and his subjects. This does sound similar to the
hierarchy found in legalism, but the important difference is that in the Confucian hierarchy the
ruler also has a responsibility to his subjects to provide for them. Thus the Confucian burial
tomb representing the home instead of the universe shows how the empire had progressed
from being an autocratic society to one modeled after a family household.
Another important aspect of Confucian thought comes not from Confucius himself, but
from one of his loyal followers Mencius. Mencius emphasized two important aspects of
Confucian ideology that ran opposite to many of the things the First Emperor prized about his
own reign. First was the leaders responsibility to ‘unify all under Heaven’ which may at first
seem parallel to what Qin Shi Huang accomplished, but Mencius was referring to a benevolent
government that puts the needs of the people first and proposed tax cuts and other ways to
improve the people’s lives.18 If the leader had this responsibility to his people to provide for
their needs in order to unify them and quell any ideas of rebellion, another contribution of
Mencius, then he could not act as the First Emperor did displacing over half a million families
and putting them to work on his monuments. No, in Mencius’ eyes, taking all the resources of
17
Mark E. Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires: Qin & Han (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) 189.
P. Ebrey, A. Walthall, J. Palais East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 2009) 28.
18
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the nation both labor and economic for the sake of a monument was not acceptable, especially
when it involved taking farmers from their land and crops that were needed to feed the empire.
Mencius’ second important contribution was his stressing of the evils of overindulgence
and leaders seeking out military violence. A leader who actively seeks out conflict and lusts
after material goods is only inviting misfortune into his state in the form of enemies and civil
unrest among his subjects. To Mencius, the squandered materials used to construct the First
Emperor’s tomb and the obvious warmongering Qin Shi Huang expressed specifically in his
terracotta army were prime examples of behavior a moral leader should avoid. In the Han
dynasty this evolved into practices of including tomb gardens and natural elements, as well as
incorporating tomb temples.19 This was another important Confucian aspect of burial rituals
that incorporated ancestor worship into the layout of tombs and temples where sacrifices could
be made to the family ancestors. Compared to the First Emperor’s tomb which was
purposefully removed from any other family tombs20 and held no temple for sacrifices to the
ancestors, it is clear that Confucian ideals clashed heavily with Qin burial practices.
After the long reign of the Han dynasty the next line of rulers came with the Tang
dynasty, and with the Tang dynasty came the influence of Buddhism. Whereas there were
some similarities between Confucianism burials and the First Emperor’s tomb, Buddhism was a
completely different track that completely altered how many Chinese subjects and rulers saw
the afterlife. One main aspect of Buddhist thought is reincarnation, the idea that after a person
dies they are reborn into the world anew depending on the good they achieved in their
19
Gao, Chongwen, “On the Evolution of the Mourning and Burial Institutions in the Pre-Qin & Han Periods” Acta
Archaeologica Sinica 04 (2006) 1, Online.
20
Mark E. Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires: Qin & Han (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) 198.
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previous life.21 This is why many Buddhism funeral practices involve cremation as the soul had
already moved on and the body is only a shell, there is no afterlife and so no burial goods are
necessary. In just this one respect, Buddhism has completely undermined the entire thought
process behind the First Emperor’s immortal intentions.
The other aspect of Buddhist thought that undermined these aspirations of immortality
was the basis of the eight-fold path of enlightenment. Within this eight-fold path are the four
truths; that pain and suffering are a part of life stemming from human desires and attachments,
and thus the only way to overcome suffering is to follow the eight-fold path and detach oneself
from all material things and people.22 One of the key paths is to abstain from taking life and the
realization that human desires can never be fulfilled. When we then analyze the First
Emperor’s tomb there is a clear antagonism with these Buddhist beliefs, in so many aspects.
The terracotta army does not exactly preach peace and respect for human life, and the
thousands of jade and gold objects and human sacrifices were a far cry from detaching one’s
self from material objects and people.
By the end of the Han and Tang dynasties Confucianism and Buddhism had taken a
strong hold in Chinese society and bureaucracy, and to this day can still be seen as influential
ideologies. Individually they had a momentous impact on government, social structure, and
thought within Chinese society and internationally, and in the context of this investigation
changed the way burial practices were performed. Confucianism opposed the burial practices
seen in the First Emperor’s tomb through its stress on ancestor worship, concentration on the
21
P. Ebrey, A. Walthall, J. Palais, East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 2009) 56.
22
Ibid.
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lessons of the past, and the cardinal relationships centered on the home. Buddhism contrasted
the tomb through highlighting abstinence from material attachment and violence, and the
process of reincarnation and the eight-fold path. However, one must also include the ideology
of the Mandate of Heaven introduced at the beginning of the Zhou dynasty which held an
underlying theme throughout all these periods influencing a leader to always aim to be a
virtuous leader for fear of losing the right to rule. These three ideologies and their influences
combined show a strong case for why burial practices such as that practiced by the First
Emperor were never seen in such majesty after his death.
The case of the First Emperor’s tomb is one of magnificence and exceptionality,
highlighting a grand achievement in Chinese craftsmanship and political power. Qin Shi Huang
as a ruler has been portrayed throughout Chinese history as a ruthless dictator who ruled China
with an iron legalist fist. However, that doesn’t cover the many achievements and ambitious
nature of a man who helped unify China, sought to rule the world, accelerated the elimination
of feudalism and replaced it with imperialism,23 erected the Great Wall and a great burial tomb,
and sought to beat death itself. His tomb exemplified these qualities with grand architectural
feats, rich burial goods, and models of the universe he hoped to carry with him into the next life
along with his world renowned terracotta army to serve him. A legacy such as this made him
immortal in the eyes of history, but was not continued by his successors because of the legacy
and the ideologies that arose in opposition to it. Qin Shi Huang’s reign left such a wake in its
path that the Chinese people turned away from his legalist policies to Confucianism and
Buddhism, that in turn turned away from the ornate practices that were the pinnacle of his
23
Arthur Cotterell, The First Emperor of China (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1981) 81.
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legacy including his burial tomb. Ideologies in China had such power over politics, society, and
even burial rituals because they were a reaction to the hardships the people faced such as the
oppression of the First Emperor’s legalist policies. Although it’s sad to think nothing else as
grand as the First Emperor’s tomb is there to be discovered, the people of China benefitted
greatly from the change in ideology.
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