The land of Qin is a stronghold sheltered by mountains and encircled by the Yellow River, a country defended on all four sides. For over twenty Qin lords, from Lord Mu down to the King of Qin, Qin’s leaders were among the mightiest of the Zhou lords. Was this because Qin had talented leaders generation after generation? No; it was their geographical position.
—JIA YI (201–169 BCE), “On Qin’s Faults”
QIN’S WAS THE SHORTEST dynasty in Chinese imperial history but also the longest. By the time Qin collapsed only fourteen years after it founded China’s first empire in 221 BCE, its royal family had reigned for over six centuries. For most of this time Qin had been a regional power, formidable enough, but not one that anyone would have expected to conquer the known world. But that is what it did, laying the foundation for over two millennia of bureaucratic agrarian states in East Asia. Qin’s successors have played a key role in transforming the ecology of the subcontinent.
A few decades after Qin’s collapse, prominent thinker Jia Yi pondered why Qin had prevailed over the other Zhou states. He concluded that Qin’s success was due to the fertility and natural defenses of the Guanzhong Basin. Given that Qin was the only Zhou state that did not need to build a wall around its capital, it is hard to deny the role of geography. Unlike its rivals, which were mostly clustered together in the central and lower Yellow River valley, Qin could endure internal strife or incompetent rulers without the threat of immediate attack from its distant neighbors. And while Qin had little pressure to adopt the state-strengthening reforms that its eastern rivals developed to stay ahead of their neighbors, it had the luxury of doing so in its own time.
But it was not all geography. Qin would not have been able to conquer the Guanzhong without a strong military, and it had particularly powerful rulers. Unlike rival states, many of whose ruling houses governed alongside other aristocratic houses of similar strength, Qin’s ruling family seems to have had no internal rivals at all. It was one of only two ruling families of the period that was never deposed, and this longevity gave it considerable legitimacy. Like England two millennia later, Qin achieved hegemony after centuries as a second-tier power partly because its government had been more centralized than those of its rivals all along. Without the strength of its royal house, it is doubtful that Qin would have succeeded in enacting the radical fourth-century reforms that reorganized its society and its landscape.1
Qin’s reforms are what make it so important to the environmental history of East Asia because they greatly increased the state’s power to modify the ecosystems under its control. In its early centuries Qin grew by conquering land and people. But its reforms went beyond simple expansion and improved the state’s ability to extract surpluses from the population it already controlled. These policies, traditionally credited to minister Shang Yang (d. 338 BCE), not only systematized the central government but also reorganized society to improve the state’s ability to govern it. In order to strengthen its military, the state awarded men ranks based on their success in war, providing substantial incentives for men to fight. Qin moved its capital into the center of the Guanzhong Basin, which had previously been sparsely occupied, and laid out fields in standardized plots that could be redistributed to families. The higher their rank, the more land they received.
Qin’s emphasis on expanding agriculture surely helps explain the dramatic increase in charcoal in the region’s soil in the first millennium BCE. People burned vegetation to create new fields and to prepare the old ones for tilling. Qin also built dams and canals that reorganized the hydrology of whole regions, including the Zheng Guo Canal just north of its capital at Xianyang 咸陽 (map 8). Qin and other Zhou states also made society more ethnically and ecologically uniform by conquering and assimilating other ethnic groups, such as the Rong, their traditional enemies. Qin’s reforms created an effective administrative system that was inherited and improved by the Han Dynasty and became the classical model of an empire. Qin’s institutions were developed by transforming the agricultural landscape of its core region, and they later came to transform ecosystems across East Asia.2
Map 8. Important locations in Qin history.
This chapter examines the history of Qin from its origins until the mid-third century BCE, when King Zheng, later called the First Emperor, took the throne. We will begin by reviewing the ecological basis of society through the annual cycle in the lives of farmers. We will then review Qin’s enigmatic early history before discussing its subsequent movement into the central Guanzhong, its state-strengthening reforms, and the Zheng Guo Canal project. This will be followed in the next chapter by an analysis of the political ecology of the Qin state during the reign of the First Emperor, the pinnacle of Qin’s power.
Before getting into the affairs of the political elite, let us consider the lives of everyday people, whose labor was, after all, the foundation of state power. It can be difficult for those of us accustomed to electricity and internal combustion engines to imagine what life was like without them. It was a world much slower and quieter than the one we live in. Before the light pollution of modern times, celestial bodies shone far more brightly in the night sky, and people paid careful attention to them. The loudest sounds were birds singing, dogs barking, pigs grunting, and chickens clucking, not to mention people talking, yelling, singing, and laughing. As the Book of Odes makes clear, this was a world in which people had a much deeper familiarity with plants and animals than modern urbanites can imagine. Their lives followed the seasons much more closely than do those of modern urbanites.
We know about the annual farming cycle in this period from the kinds of archaeological and textual evidence presented in chapter 2 and from several early “almanacs” that lay out the changing seasons, the most famous of which was the “Monthly Ordinances.” These are probably written examples of an oral folk genre through which people communicated common wisdom on the passing of the seasons. They include plenty of information that we would consider inaccurate or superstitious: hawks become doves, mice become quails, and birds enter the sea and become mollusks. I will leave these issues for intellectual historians and will quote only passages that I consider plausible. These texts follow several different early Chinese calendars, so I will organize them according to the months of the Gregorian calendar.3
Let us begin in the winter, when people celebrated the new year. In December “the ice becomes harder, the ground begins to crack, and the nightingale no longer sings.” Winter was clear and dry; it rarely rained or snowed. An average January day in the Guanzhong rose above freezing in the afternoon and dropped below it at night. People burned wood to cook and to heat their smoky, chimneyless, mud-walled houses. Winter was the agricultural off-season, when people built and repaired the materials they used during the rest of the year. They twisted hemp into thread, wove it into fabric on simple looms, and then fashioned clothes from it. They plaited reeds, bamboo, and other plant materials into baskets, mats, and fences. They built and repaired farm tools, carving wooden handles and polishing stone blades. People continued to fish even when the water froze over. Large animals like water buffaloes and rhinoceroses had mostly been eliminated from the lowlands by this time, but deer and boars were still common in the early centuries of this period, and people hunted them. Since wild mammals like foxes, raccoon dogs, and wild cats had their winter coats, people hunted or trapped them to make their own winter coats. This was also the time when lords called up their subjects to do labor service, which could include construction and repairs, large-scale hunts, and war.4
In early March, “hibernating creatures all stir, opening up their burrows, and making their first appearance.” In subsequent weeks, “the rains begin, the peach and plum trees blossom, the golden oriole sings,” “swallows return,” and chives begin to grow, the first fresh herbs of the season. In April, “all the sprouts issue forth and the buds fully open,” “the paulownia trees begin to bloom,” “the doves flap their wings and the hoopoes alight on the mulberries.” Mulberry trees were valued both for their sweet berries and because their leaves were the main food of silkworms, whose cocoons were unraveled and woven into cloth far lighter than hemp and skins. In the late spring, “breeding bulls and stallions are allowed to roam the pastures with the cows and mares.” They had been kept separate while the females raised their young but were now allowed to couple so that calves and foals would be born early the next year. People repaired water infrastructure such as ditches and dikes in preparation for the coming rainy season. Dust storms blew across North China from Inner Asia at this time of year, turning the sky beige. Despite the flourishing vegetation, this was the time of year when food supplies began to run short and people foraged for wild resources to supplement them. They hoped the rains arrived on time. Winter wheat was harvested at this time, the first harvest since the fall.5
Most of the year’s rain falls in the summer, sometimes in torrential downpours. From June to August the afternoon temperature regularly exceeds 30°C (86°F). In June, “the apricots ripen in the orchards, the frogs croak, the royal melon blooms,” “cicadas begin to sing, the midsummer herbs begin to grow, and the tree hibiscus blooms.” As anyone who has been in China during the summer knows, cicadas can be very noisy, an arboreal orchestra of miniature power saws. Gnats gather in clouds. This was the height of the agricultural season, and the crops were vulnerable to drought, violent storms, and animal pests. The annals periodically record swarms of insects attacking crops, sometimes causing famine. In July, “the soil is steaming wet, and great rains arrive regularly. People burn the cut grasses on the ground and flood it with water that kills the plants as effectively as boiling water. The grass can then be used as a green manure for the fields and pastures and as a fertilizer to enrich the ground.” As populations grew over the centuries, fallow times diminished and people had to put more effort into fertilizing their fields. The summer was the time of fresh fruit: peaches, cherries, mulberries, and melons. Leafy vegetables like mallows were plentiful, as were others, like gourds and beans.6
In September, “cooling breezes arise, the wild geese arrive, and the swallows depart.” Autumn was a time of pleasant weather and, if harvests had been good, plentiful food. But there was plenty of work to do. People harvested millets with stone hand knives, cutting off the dry, ripe heads of the millets and storing them whole in granaries, where the intact husks could protect the grains for several years. They had to be threshed and winnowed before being boiled, either into soupy gruel or until the water evaporated and they could be eaten dry. Because millets lack some amino acids, people who depended too heavily on them became malnourished, and skeletal remains from this period show that people were often much less healthy than their Neolithic ancestors. This was less of a problem for the carnivorous aristocracy. In the early Zhou period, fall was the time when people had to harvest their lord’s crops for him, but this service was gradually converted to a tax, so they had to give some of their grain to the state. According to the “Monthly Ordinances,” at this time of the year the king “orders the several directors to hasten the people’s gathering of the harvest, making them devote their attention to accumulating large stores of vegetables and other provisions. He then urges the people to sow the winter wheat.”7
In October, “the leaves of the plants and trees turn yellow and fall, after which they can be cut for fuel and made into charcoal. Insects burrow deeper holes and plaster up the entrances.”8 Jujubes were harvested in the autumn and were among the only fruits that could be stored for the winter. This was also the season for cutting wild rushes, which were used to thatch rooves and weave baskets. Hemp stems were soaked to break them into fibers. As vegetation withered, leaving little for livestock to eat, people slaughtered many of their animals, perhaps giving a pig to their lord (fig. 7). They prepared meat by curing and pickling it and by making the meat sauces that were popular in this period. In November, when “water begins to freeze and cold starts to penetrate the earth,” people took out their coats, hemp-padded clothes, and furs, without which they would not survive the winter. As the weather cooled, people began to heat their homes, attracting pests: “In the seventh month crickets are out in the wilds; in the eighth month in the farm. In the ninth month at the door. In the tenth month the cricket goes under my bed. I stop up every hole to smoke out the rats, plugging the windows, plastering the doors.” As human ecosystems expanded across the landscape, their various inhabitants flourished, such as the mice and rats that took a cut of their grain in addition to the one taken by their lords. People used parasitic rodents as a metaphor for parasitic rulers when they sang, “Big rat, big rat, do not gobble our millet!”9
Figure 7. Ceramic livestock from Yangling, the tomb of Emperor Jing of the Han dynasty (d. 141 BCE) in Xianyang. Along with humans, livestock were now among the most numerous animals in the low-lands, while many of the animals shown in figure 2 were gone.
Labor was divided by gender in ways that are common to agricultural societies. Women who were pregnant or raising children stayed closer to the home. They therefore tended to do more weaving and clothes-making, and weaving silk came to be the stereotypical female activity. The flip side of this, according to classical Chinese gender stereotypes, is that men were supposed to work in the fields, though we can be sure that women did, too. Archaeological studies carried out on a small sample of human bones reveal that people fed boys better than girls. In later periods of Chinese history this was often justified on the grounds that girls would leave home once they were married, whereas boys remained central to the family.10
Most aspects of the seasonal cycle described here continued across the centuries, but some things changed. As population density increased, the amount of grazing land in core farming areas diminished, crowding out grazing animals such as cattle and sheep and leaving only animals that could live in human settlements, namely, dogs, pigs, and chickens. People ingeniously enclosed pigs in pens and built their own toilets over them. This kept pigs from damaging crops, converted household waste into meat, and provided a ready source of manure for fields. In the most densely populated areas, which at this time were mostly in the modern provinces of Henan, Hebei, and Shandong, there was so little grazing land that only wealthier people could afford to keep cattle and thus plow with oxen. The Qin heartland was not as densely populated as those regions, and cattle were more common. And, of course, there were large herds just to the north, on the Loess Plateau.
Apart from the growth of state power, the most important change in society was probably the increase of commerce. Markets grew up and gradually integrated the manors and villages that had once been self-reliant into local and long-distance trade networks. By the third century BCE, merchants were getting rich by selling commodities like grain, timber, bamboo, fruit, and livestock; processed goods like pickled foods, liquor, textiles, and hides; and craft products of metal, ceramic, and lacquer. Larger markets prompted artisans to invent new kilns for pottery, better spinning wheels for making thread, and improved looms for making fabric. Farmers in agricultural centers like the Guanzhong could sell their products and buy craft goods of higher quality than they could produce themselves. They were no longer dependent on their own local communities for goods. Unfortunately, we have little record of mercantile activity in this period and cannot evaluate its effects on people’s lives or on how they used their environments. We can be sure that local products of the woods and wetlands were increasingly used as commodities. Iron tools became more common in the third century BCE, though it was only in the Han era that they became ubiquitous. Iron probably made some farm work easier and facilitated digging wells and ditches, but for most of this period Qin people used stone and wood tools not so different from those used by late Neolithic farmers. Now that we have briefly reviewed the subsistence economy, let us turn to the history of the state of Qin.11
Qin’s early history is something of a mystery. How did such a powerful polity arise from the western hinterland of the Zhou world? Records of early Qin history are so sparse that we usually know little about the people involved, leaving us to simply speak of “Qin” as if it were a person. Our main source is the “Basic Annals of Qin” in Sima Qian’s Historical Records (c. 100 BCE). It includes material from Qin’s annals, the only official historical records of the Warring States period that survived Qin’s conquests above ground (though others have since been excavated). The earliest reliable records in the “Basic Annals” probably date to the ninth century BCE. They state that Zhou King Xiao assigned a local leader named Feizi to breed horses and enfeoffed him at a place in the upper Wei River valley called Qin, which is the origin of the dynasty’s name. Qin’s control of prime horse-breeding land was a key source of its strength throughout its history.12
As a reward for fighting against their mutual enemies the Rong, a group discussed below, the “Basic Annals” further records that Zhou King Xuan awarded Qin’s Lord Zhuang another fief. Both of these fiefs are located in the upper Wei River valley and can be associated with burials from the late Western Zhou period that have been excavated in that region. We can identify corpses buried in a cemetery at Maojiaping with Qin because later Qin people buried their dead in a flexed position with their heads pointing west. The connection with Qin is further strengthened by the similarity of artifacts in these burial places with those found at the enormous tombs of early Qin rulers excavated just to the south at Dabuzishan. These are the earliest archaeological finds that can be convincingly linked with Qin, which means that these were the same groups from which Qin arose, not that the people buried at Maojiaping were directly affiliated with the Qin polity. Unfortunately, it is impossible to securely identify textual records of the Rong with any specific excavated remains, though they are probably connected with an archaeological culture known as Siwa.13
The fall of the Zhou court in 771 BCE was probably traumatic for Qin leaders when it happened, but in the long run it allowed them to move into the Guanzhong Basin. In that year, a coalition of disgruntled Zhou nobles and Rong people drove the Zhou court eastward from the Guanzhong to Luoyang. This marks the transition from the Western Zhou to the Eastern Zhou period. Qin’s armies helped the Zhou king flee to Luoyang, and he rewarded them by promoting Qin’s leader to the status of lord (gong 公), allowing Qin to engage as an equal in diplomatic rituals with other Zhou states. The “Basic Annals” records that the Zhou king then awarded Qin the core agricultural areas of the Guanzhong, namely the Zhouyuan and the Zhou capital area west of modern Xi’an. This was not much of a gift because the area was occupied by the Rong and it took Qin almost sixty years to conquer it. Qin finally moved its capital to a site in the Baoji area of the western Guanzhong in 714 BCE. The arrival of Qin people in the Guanzhong is clear archaeologically because their flexed-body, west-pointing burials contrast with those of the Shang and Zhou, who buried their dead lying flat on their backs in north-south-oriented tombs. The Qin newcomers probably ruled over an existing population of Zhou and Rong commoners who gradually merged to become the Qin people.14
In 677, Qin moved its capital thirty kilometers eastward to Yong 雍, in the Zhouyuan, where it was to remain for almost three centuries. Yong lay at the confluence of the travel routes that connected the upper Wei River valley to the west, the Sichuan Basin to the south, and the Yellow River valley to the east, a natural meeting point for the movement of people and commodities between these regions. As its name suggests, the Zhouyuan (which means “Zhou Plain”) was considered the heartland of the Zhou people. It had been a primary ritual center of the Western Zhou state, and Qin’s occupation of it must have increased its standing among the other Zhou lords, each of whom traced his lineage to the founders of the Zhou dynasty. Worship of the Zhou dynasty’s founding ancestors remained central to the ritual system that symbolically united the Zhou alliance even as the Zhou ruling house declined in importance.15
The power of the Qin royal house is clearly demonstrated by the enormous sizes of its royal burials. Elite tombs in other Zhou states of the Spring and Autumn period reveal a gradation in the sizes and wealth levels of tombs: those of rulers were somewhat larger than those of the upper elite, but the two were otherwise similar. In Qin, however, the tombs of the rulers were vastly larger and more lavish than those of other lineages, while those of other aristocrats were “roughly comparable to those of equivalent status from other parts of the Zhou realm.” This is already apparent in the massive and lavishly furnished tombs at Dabuzishan, which were built when Qin was still based in the mountains of the upper Wei River valley. During their three centuries at Yong, the Qin people buried their leaders in a 24-square-kilometer moated necropolis located just south of the town that includes 44 tombs. The labor force available to the Qin rulers is clear from the only one of these tombs to have been excavated (fig. 8). It is by far the largest tomb that we know of in East Asia up to that time and is believed to be the tomb of Qin Lord Jing 景 (r. 577–537 BCE). It contained the remains of 166 people who were killed to accompany the lord in death. Several of Qin’s other royal tombs are almost as big. The expense of building these complexes was just the beginning. Regular sacrifices were made at the tomb of each Qin ruler, whose number of course increased over the centuries. Each tomb complex was provided with an estate to furnish the livestock and other resources used in the sacrifices, so over time considerable areas of the Guanzhong became ritual landscapes dedicated to the royal ancestors. Qin’s tradition of massive royal tombs continued throughout its history, culminating in the mausoleum of the First Emperor, which is not only the largest tomb complex in all of Chinese history but arguably the largest tomb complex ever built for a single person in human history.16
These massive tombs suggest that Qin rulers sought to rival the Zhou kings. This is made explicit in the inscriptions on bronze ritual vessels claiming that the Qin ruling house had “received the celestial mandate.” Qin’s rulers may have felt entitled to make this claim because their court was located in the previous heartland of Zhou. But they probably chose Yong as a capital not so much because of its symbolic importance to the Zhou ritual system as because it was the best tract of farmland in the Guanzhong. The foundations of Qin’s palaces and temples at Yong are among the best preserved of any elite architecture from this period. Yong was built alongside a natural waterway that was gradually expanded to form two moats, one around the central palace area and another around the whole townsite. There was also a small dam built to the northwest of the site to create or expand a small lake that provided the town with water and probably also fish and other edible creatures. These discoveries reveal that the Qin people were engaged in large-scale water control works hundreds of years before they built the Zheng Guo Canal, the earliest one mentioned in traditional sources. This is not surprising because the Western Zhou had modified the waterways around their capital at Feng a few centuries earlier.17
Figure 8. Qin Lord Jing’s tomb being excavated in the early 1980s. This picture was taken as archaeologists were just beginning to uncover the coffins of dozens of people killed to accompany the lord in death. The main tomb chamber lay under those. Like most large tombs in China, it had been thoroughly looted over the centuries. Between the ramps on each end the tomb measures three hundred meters and is twenty-four meters deep.
The Zhouyuan seems to have had plenty of wildlife at this time. The century of wars between the fall of Zhou and the arrival of Qin probably reduced the human population and left space for wild animals. Like the rulers of Shang and Zhou before them, Qin’s rulers hunted regularly. Sometime in the mid–Eastern Zhou period Qin’s rulers had large drum-shaped stones inscribed with poems on hunting and fishing. Discovered hundreds of years later, these stones became among the most famous examples of Eastern Zhou writing and are now on display in the Forbidden City in Beijing. They commemorate Qin elites hunting sika deer, elaphures, boars, pheasants, and hares. One of the damaged inscriptions suggests that Qin established a hunting park in the Zhouyuan. Perhaps Qin’s success in expanding agriculture reduced the amount of land for wildlife, making it necessary for rulers to protect their dwindling habitats so they could keep hunting.18
Qin’s early administration had little in common with the centralized bureaucracy it would later become. Like other Zhou states of this period, Qin had few regular offices with defined duties. It was governed by a group of aristocrats who served the ruler as advisors, generals, and administrators. Instead of being assigned to offices, these men were appointed to specific ranks that signified their positions in the political hierarchy, and they were assigned to carry out administrative tasks as necessary. Writing did not play a major role in Qin administration at that time, but there was no strong incentive to modernize it. Qin’s capital at Yong sat at the extreme west side of the Zhou world, hundreds of kilometers from any other powerful state. From this position Qin began to consolidate its power.19
Like other Eastern Zhou states, Qin grew by conquering and absorbing other polities. After moving into the Guanzhong, Qin conquered various settlements, which led it to experiment with new ways of administering land and people. According to the Historical Records, Qin made four of these settlements into xian, which are the earliest recorded xian. As discussed in chapter 3, xian were initially more like fiefs, but as the central government came to administer them more directly they became closer to counties, which is how the term is usually translated. These four early xian were established in well-watered lowland sites along the Wei River that made excellent farmland. In contrast, when Qin later conquered sites in arid regions to the north, it did not create xian, but instead left the people there to rule themselves, presumably because they would not provide enough income to repay the cost of administering them directly. The textual records of Qin’s conquests make clear that political power was understood primarily in terms of human subjects rather than territory. The population was sparse enough that there was plenty of uncultivated land between many settlements, so Qin focused on the population centers.20
In its early centuries, Qin’s longstanding rivals were a people known as Rong, which means “weapons” or “martial.” This is what Chinese speakers called them, not what they called themselves. The history of the Rong people has traditionally been seen through the lens of the later conflict between sedentary Chinese and nomadic pastoralists, anachronistically interpreting it as a conflict among Zhou and Qin farmers and Rong pastoralists. In fact, the sedentary agrarian states and nomadic pastoralists were separated at this time by an extensive zone where people combined farming and herding, and this was the subsistence strategy of the Zhou, Qin, and Rong people. The conquest of the Rong by the Zhou states, including Qin, played an important role in creating the rivalry between the steppe and the sown areas.
Nomadic pastoralism is often imagined as a kind of primitive lifestyle that came before the more advanced stage of sedentary agriculture, but this is exactly backward. It is actually a highly specialized subsistence strategy that arose only after people had had thousands of years of experience herding sheep, goats, and cattle. It developed on the Inner Asian steppe over the last two millennia BCE, the same period in which the agrarian societies of the Yellow River valley organized themselves into powerful political organizations. For most of this time there was no simple division between steppe and sown areas for the simple reason that it made more sense to combine these two subsistence strategies than to separate them. The only good reason anyone would choose to subsist fully from herding is that there is a huge area in the middle of Eurasia that is very well suited to pastoralism, but too cold or dry to support much farming. Once people tamed horses, and later camels, they were able to move with their herds into these forbidding lands but were forced to move regularly as their herds ate all the vegetation in a given area. Even so, pure pastoral nomadism (without any farming) has been very uncommon in human history. It was limited to the steppes of Inner Asia, and the nomads still relied on grains and other resources from farming peoples.21
Between the increasingly nomadic groups on the steppes and the sedentary farmers of the Yellow River lowlands lay a vast region in which people farmed the narrow river valleys and herded in the hills.22 These farmer-herders included not only the Rong, but also many of the Zhou and Qin people. Before moving into the Guanzhong, the Qin people lived in the upper Wei River valley, which is mostly composed of semiarid uplands that are divided by thin strips of arable valleys, an environment well suited to a mixed farming and herding lifestyle. The people of this region raised pigs, horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, and chickens, and studies of a few tombs excavated in this region suggest that they ate plenty of meat. We have no reason to think that there was any difference in subsistence strategies between the Rong and the Qin people; they both farmed crops and herded livestock.23
At the beginning of the Eastern Zhou period in 771 BCE, the Yellow River valley was home to hundreds of more or less independent settlements that included various different cultural and linguistic groups. Over the next five centuries a handful of Zhou states conquered and assimilated all of them, a process of cultural hybridization in which the conquerors held the upper hand. This process of conquest and assimilation created the relatively homogeneous core population of the Qin and Han Empires. It was the three northernmost of the warring states, Qin, Zhao, and Yan, that occupied the semiarid farmer-herder zones of the north and then began to push farther into the nomadic zone. In particular, the northward conquests of the Qin Empire forced pastoral nomadic groups to unite for defense and was one factor that led them to form the world’s first nomadic empire, the Xiongnu. The boundary between steppe and sown is often interpreted as an ecological boundary, but it is an artifact of political events, namely, the growth of rival agrarian and nomadic empires. In fact, the people of the semiarid zone, which includes most of the Loess Plateau, continued to farm and herd. They paid their taxes to either the nomadic empires of the north or the agrarian ones to the south, depending on who was in control.24
Qin’s early history involved a series of wars with the Rong. Once it had conquered their settlements in the Guanzhong, Qin traveled farther east to attack their settlement near modern Sanmenxia in 659 BCE. Qin decisively defeated the Rong in 623 BCE, extending its territory by hundreds of kilometers and taking twelve walled towns. Although we cannot be sure where these Rong settlements were located, some of them were probably north and west of the Guanzhong in the Wei and Jing River basins of the Loess Plateau (see map 2). We know that Qin colonized the Jing River valley because Qin graveyards began appearing there in the sixth century BCE.25
Conquering the Rong not only removed Qin’s biggest threat but also gave it more prime horse pasture just as horses were becoming more important in warfare. In the early centuries of the Zhou period, people did not ride horses but used them to pull chariots, a rather clumsy way to travel in a world without good roads. Sometime in the Eastern Zhou period, people learned to ride horseback, making horses much more useful in warfare and further increasing their importance for state power. Riding horses also greatly increased the speed at which people could travel, which was essential for Qin’s expansion. Qin’s control over large tracts of good horse pasture gave it a significant advantage over the small states of the central Yellow River valley. As people across Eurasia came to use more and more of the wild horse’s range to raise domestic horses and other livestock, they eventually drove the wild horse to extinction.26
The Rong people disappeared as a distinct group as their people were assimilated by Zhou kingdoms like Qin, and perhaps also by northern pastoralists. As they conquered the people and land that had once divided them, Qin people and the northern pastoral groups came into regular contact. Qin engaged in regular trade with the pastoralists, and Qin artisans even produced metalwork in the style of northern pastoralists, which they presumably exchanged for steppe products such as furs, leather, and horses. Just as the availability of northern horses played an important role in Qin’s political culture, control over the luxury goods coming from Qin became an important aspect of power for elites on the steppe. While it is often stated that the northern states of Qin and Yan had an advantage over other states because of their access to the equestrian skills of nomadic peoples, this is slightly misleading because it implies that the farmers and herders were otherwise separate. In fact, Qin was in an enviable position of being a full member of the Zhou culture group while also having many subjects with strong equestrian skills and longstanding relations with pastoral peoples of the Loess Plateau and beyond.27
Because most historical records from this period were written in regions to the east, our most detailed records of Qin’s history in this period are narratives of Qin’s relations with its eastern neighbor Jin. It is not surprising that these two states were rivals because Jin was the closest of the Zhou powers to Qin. Jin was based in the Fen River valley, which is geologically the same basin as the Guanzhong, from which it is separated only by the Yellow River. The two states fought over the flat fertile strip of land that ran along the western bank of the Yellow River north of the Wei River, an area separated from other Qin settlements by the expansive seasonal wetlands to its west. Qin first won this area from Jin in 644 BCE, but soon lost it again. In the late fourth century BCE Jin’s three most powerful lineages overthrew its royal house and divided its territory between them (Zhao, Wei, and Han on map 7). Of these, Wei took over the contested land and built a wall to defend it from Qin. Qin only managed to wrest this land from Wei, and thus control the entire Guanzhong, in 330 BCE.28
After its wars with Jin in the mid-sixth century, the Qin rulers tended to stay out of the constant warfare of the other Zhou states. Qin’s capital at Yong sat hundreds of kilometers from other Zhou states, to which it seemed secluded. Qin’s absence from routine Zhou inter-state affairs in the early Warring States period made it easy for its rivals to depict it as a barbaric state, insults that later historians accepted as facts. The truth is probably that Qin’s rulers wisely perceived the futility of fighting with other Zhou states and instead consolidated their hegemony over the Wei River valley and surrounding areas. Initially this consisted of settling more arable land in the Guanzhong and taking control of resources in the surrounding mountains, but Qin also looked to conquer fertile river valleys. The valleys to the east were occupied by powerful states, so Qin expanded southward. Although our records of Qin’s southward expansion are spotty at best, they do show that Qin was active south of the Qinling in the early fifth century, which means that Qin had firm control over some routes through the Qinling Mountains by this time. The Qinling would have provided Qin with an enormous supply of timber, furs, and other forest materials, as shown by records of laborers logging in this region in the last years of the empire. Much of this land was so rugged that only goods small enough to be carried on the backs of horses or humans were practical to carry out, but the Qin state eventually found itself with a lot of human and animal labor to exploit.29
The Qinling Mountains were a valuable source of resources but were also an obstacle to Qin’s southward expansion. Qin had no incentive to conquer anything to the arid north or west because there was little arable land. Powerful states lay to the east and southeast. But southwest of the Qinling lay the fertile Hanzhong Basin and beyond it the Sichuan Basin, one of the largest tracts of arable flat land in all of East Asia. But to get there Qin’s armies had to travel through the towering Qinling on mountain paths that were narrow and dangerous in sections. Roads like the one shown in figure 9 were the easy parts. Sichuan was home to the state of Shu, which was probably relatively weak, depending on its remoteness rather than its strong armies for protection. Qin and Shu seem to have fought over the Hanzhong Basin, the only large stretch of arable land that lay between them. Unfortunately, we have only a few brief records of Qin’s southwestern expansion. The Historical Records states that Qin built walls around a town in the Hanzhong Basin in 451 BCE. This region rebelled ten years later, and Qin and Shu fought a war over it in 387 BCE. We can be sure that Qin took over this region because Qin conquered Shu and the Chengdu Plain in 316 BCE, an invasion that Qin could have launched only if it had already turned the Hanzhong region into a military colony. This is all we know about what must have been a complex history of diplomacy, warfare, and conquest in the upper Han River valley. Conquering Sichuan was a major event in Qin history. It vastly increased the resources Qin could mobilize in the south, though of course we should not underestimate the cost of colonization for the colonizers. We know almost nothing about the colonized.30
Figure 9. An early twentieth-century road in the Qinling Mountains. The steep terrain is typical of the region.
The route through the southeastern Qinling was less arduous than the one to the southwest, but it brought Qin into conflict with the powerful state of Chu. From the central Guanzhong Qin troops could follow steep trails up the tributaries of the Ba River into the mountains. After a short but difficult hike they reached the upper valley of the Dan River, which they could fairly easily follow downstream into the Han River valley, the heartland of Chu (see map 8). Chu’s leaders were quite aware that keeping control of the Dan River valley was their best defense against Qin. Qin seems to have conquered the upper Dan River valley in the mid-fourth century BCE, around the time it moved its capital into the central Guanzhong. The two rivals fought over the region for the next few decades. Qin’s conquest of Sichuan must be understood in this context. Qin began to colonize Sichuan soon after conquering it to build up a productive base for an eastward attack on Chu. In the 270s BCE, Qin conquered the entire Han River valley, driving Chu from its capital in the central Yangzi valley (this was Ying, modern Jingzhou; see map 7). Qin now controlled the Sichuan Basin, the entire Han River valley, and the Yangzi valley that connected them. Between those regions lay a large expanse of wild and rugged mountains into which Qin’s administrative control probably never extended very deep. By defeating Chu, Qin established itself as the superpower of East Asia, and it began to gradually expand eastward into the Central Plains.31
The history of more recent empires shows that the innovation required to conquer and colonize new lands profoundly shapes how political power is exercised in the metropole. Techniques and technologies developed to administer conquered people and land often end up being deployed back home. The process of conquering and absorbing new territory must have played a part in Qin’s development of new administrative techniques. In order to provision its armies as they conquered on, Qin established a network of agricultural colonies in the prime farmland of the regions it conquered. In some cases, it displaced conquered people and gave their land to reliable subjects, probably including its own soldiers. But Qin’s population was small and its territory vast, so its ability to repopulate conquered territory with loyal subjects was limited. Instead, as its expansion continued, Qin began to force tens of thousands of conquered people to move far from home to other conquered regions. This was an attack on the solidarity of conquered peoples, many of whom had strong regional identities. It also helped Qin colonize strategically important areas, for example, by forcing families skilled in iron production to move to southern frontier regions, where they could enrich themselves while provisioning Qin’s armies. Over the long term, forced migration worked alongside Qin’s various other standardization projects to create a more culturally homogeneous population, which probably contributed to the stability of the subsequent Han Empire.32
In the fourth century, Qin’s rulers enacted a series of reforms that transformed the nature of the state itself, greatly increasing its control over people and land across its domain. These reforms took more than a century to achieve but are firmly associated in the historical record with Shang Yang, a.k.a. Gongsun Yang (d. 338). His emphasis on warfare, law, and punishments came to epitomize Qin’s ruthlessness, and for the next two millennia his reforms served as a kind of paradigm of harsh governance. But Qin’s centralized, standardized, law-based bureaucratic governance methods were inherited and adapted by subsequent empires, becoming the unspoken paradigm of political thought in China. As Michael Loewe puts it: “While all successful imperial regimes claimed to govern on the basis of the ethical ideals of Confucius, few were able to last long without recourse to methods that originated with Shang Yang.” Because they greatly increased the power that states could exercise over their ecosystems, Shang Yang’s reforms marked a turning point in China’s environmental history.33
Other Zhou states had long been carrying out state-strengthening reforms, as discussed in the previous chapter. In Qin they were initiated by Lords Xian 獻 (r. 384–62) and Xiao 孝 (r. 361–338). The decades before Lord Xian took the throne had seen Qin lose territory to Wei and palace insiders forcibly depose two Qin rulers. This was presumably the result of conflicts between noble families seeking to place their kin on the throne, a story familiar to monarchies everywhere. But from the reign of Lord Xian onward, Qin’s throne was often held by men who ruled for several decades. This was probably an important factor in Qin’s stability and power, as was its practice of appointing talented officials like Shang Yang to take the reins of government.34
Shang Yang was a prince of the ancient, but by this time irrelevant, state of Wey 衞. He first became active in the politics of Wei 魏, where he learned the most modern ideas of statecraft and warfare. Wei’s effective civil and military administration made it perhaps the strongest state of the early fourth century, even though powerful rivals surrounded it on all sides. Shang Yang based his reforms on those of Wei and other Zhou states, and Qin officials continued to study Wei’s laws long after his death. Shang Yang was famous because he had achieved more power than most other political thinkers—at least until he was tied to chariots and torn apart—but his ideas may not have been particularly original. Other works of political theory proposed similar reforms, and the ideas of other thinkers were also implemented in Qin with little fanfare, such as those of Shen Buhai. According to third-century thinker Han Feizi, Shen emphasized practical administrative techniques such as creating offices with defined duties, matching job titles with their responsibilities, and making sure that officials had the right skills for their jobs. In contrast, he described Shang Yang as emphasizing written rules and a clear system of penalties, rewards, and punishments. Shen’s administrative methods played an important role in political organizations at this time but were not as visible as those of Shang Yang because they focused on internal administration.35
Qin seems to have been able to carry out these reforms relatively quickly because its royal house was so powerful. It was also one of the oldest ruling families in the Zhou world, which probably gave it considerable legitimacy. Most of Qin’s rivals to the east carried out these types of reforms through experiments and negotiation over several centuries, which often involved bloody conflicts between aristocratic houses. The power of the Qin rulers was essential for the success of these reforms since they directly attacked the unearned privileges of the aristocracy. In other states similar attempts resulted in the ruling house’s being deposed by other elite families. Archaeological evidence reveals that the reforms had substantial effects. Qin elites dramatically changed the types of objects they placed in their tombs, suggesting that these reforms disrupted the ways aristocrats had traditionally demonstrated their status. It is not surprising that Qin’s reforms have been considered harsh by subsequent Chinese authors, since the authors of most books written in imperial China were men who had gained their positions as much from their families’ wealth and pedigrees as from their talents. Although we have no writings from Qin commoners, it is worth considering the possibility that they saw much to recommend these reforms. After all, they did provide economic opportunities for all and made governance more predictable by reducing the arbitrary rule of aristocratic elites.36
The most important sources on Shang Yang are Sima Qian’s semifictional biography and the Book of Lord Shang, a collection of texts assembled by later editors based on what they considered representative of Shang Yang’s school of thought. Generally speaking, Sima’s description of Shang Yang’s reforms matches remarkably well with the system seen in excavated Qin documents, which are described in the next chapter. However, it should be emphasized that these reforms continued after his death and we have no way of discerning which elements were actually achieved in his lifetime. We know that Shang Yang did hold the positions mentioned in early texts because objects have been excavated with his edicts cast into them. These confirm that he standardized measures and supervised weapons production. Another clear indication of his importance is that political theorists of the late Warring States and early Han periods frequently referred to him, making clear that he was a famous, and polarizing, figure. The core chapters of the Book of Lord Shang date to around the time Shang Yang lived, and it is possible that he wrote some of them. Their rhetoric suggests that a government official wrote them to convince a ruler. Not only is there virtually no attempt to argue that the ideas proposed would benefit commoners, the texts are openly hostile toward classicists (a.k.a. Confucians) and toward the unearned privileges of aristocrats. In other words, they would have offended almost everyone, which suggests that they were written for high officials or a ruler. They may well have been written for Qin’s king.37
State-strengthening is the goal of the Book of Lord Shang, and the text argues that agriculture is the key to achieving it. It espouses an agricultural fundamentalism that sees nonagricultural occupations as economically unproductive and essentially parasitic, a belief that was not uncommon at the time. It made some sense from a political perspective because fourth-century Qin derived little of its income from commercial taxes. Agricultural surpluses and corvée labor were the fuels of the state. The text argues that the state should discourage people from nonagricultural occupations and encourage the expansion of farmland. One way of doing this was to take direct control of nonagricultural landscapes and force their inhabitants to become farmers: “If mountains and wetlands are unified [under the control of the state] then those who hate farming, are lazy, or are greedy, will have no way to obtain food. With no way to obtain food they will have to farm, and when they farm, uncultivated land will be cleared for farming.” This expresses a disdain commonly found in agrarian states for those who live off the land in ways that are difficult to tax. It also reveals that states drove the transition from mixed subsistence toward heavy reliance on farming, a transition that is often incorrectly imagined as a natural process. People were encouraged to farm not only to increase the state’s tax income but to ensure that they stayed in one place so they could easily be mobilized to do statute labor and to serve in the army. Shang Yang also levied new taxes on top of the regular grain tax, though it is unclear what these consisted of.38
The goal of the state-strengthening reforms was increasing military power, and the Book of Lord Shang contains several chapters on warfare. In order to expand the military, the state had to recruit, equip, and feed as many men as possible and, just as important, motivate them to fight. The key to motivating men was to make military service a real route to social and economic advancement. To this end, Qin established a system of ranks (perhaps more accurately described as “orders of merit”) and awarded them to men based on their military exploits. For each rank granted, men were entitled to a specific size of farm plot. Sons inherited lower ranks than their fathers in order to give them an incentive to fight well and gain ranks. People convicted of crimes could exchange their ranks for reduced sentences, a valuable option given that punishments included physical mutilation, heavy fines, and brutal hard labor. The fact that the state could treat land and people as two separate things suggests that it owned the land and the farmers did not, an example of the separation of workers from their means of subsistence discussed in chapter 1.
One of the most radical aspects of the rank system was that it also applied to aristocrats, replacing noble privilege with military meritocracy. Sima Qian’s biography states that “members of the royal family who did not win military merit would be punished by not entering them in the royal family’s lineage-register.” Similarly, it aimed to break down lineages, the broader kinship-based forms of social organization that had organized Zhou society, and make nuclear households the basic social units. This was intended to establish a personal relationship between the state and individual families that ensured that they paid taxes and provided labor. This was a radical change, and we can guess that the rank system would not have lasted if it had not given many people their promised rewards. According to Sima Qian, Shang Yang “clarified the positions of both honorable and base people in the order of official ranks, each being registered with farmland and residential plots according to official rank; male and female slaves and clothing were ordered sequentially according to the family. Those with achievements appeared glorious while those without achievements, even if wealthy, had no way to flourish.” The documents examined in the following chapter show that this system was indeed written into Qin laws. We can guess that some of these laws might have come from Wei based on a statute from the state of Wei that was excavated in a Qin tomb. It specified which categories of people should not be issued fields and houses.39
Establishing a system of ranks for all adult males requires a high degree of control over the population. As the Book of Lord Shang instructed: “In registering the number of people, record the living and erase the dead. If the people do not abscond from producing grain, fields will not be covered by wild grasses. Then the state will be rich, and being rich it will be strong.”40 A few lines later the author presents a more detailed argument for the importance of administrative knowledge, arguing that states should keep statistics of granaries, the population, able-bodied people, old and weak people, officials, servicemen, horses, oxen, hay, and straw. The fact that this needed to be argued shows that gathering such statistics was not common but was rather an innovation of this period. In earlier periods, Zhou states did surveys to determine taxable resources and the number of able-bodied men, but these seem to have been one-time affairs, not a regular administrative practice. Regular surveys require the kind of bureaucracy that was only just coming into existence in this period. Most of Qin’s population lived in the circumscribed area of the Guanzhong, and these reforms were first enacted on the people living there. But the later Qin population registers excavated at Liye in Hunan, over a thousand kilometers by road and boat from the capital, prove that the Qin Empire eventually extended many aspects of its rigorous administration across its massive empire. This could have been possible only if such a system had already been worked out in the capital region.41
Qin sought not only to break down larger family units and establish the nuclear family as the standard household but also to organize these families into groups of five that were mutually liable for each other’s crimes. This was a cheap way to get people to police one another. The organization of men into mutual liability units of five seems to have originated with the army and was only later extended to civilian use. The term wu 伍 (member of a group of five) came to be the official term for commoners, a hint of how officials viewed their subjects. The mutual liability system made up for the relative scarcity of officials on the ground by forcing people to police their neighbors, a classic example of how states try to make up for weak administrative capacity by using harsh punishments.42
Because each rank came with land, the government had to reorganize the landscape in standard field sizes to make it easy to award plots to soldiers who had gained ranks. When a man died, officials took land away from his sons, unless they had earned the same rank as their father. According to Sima Qian, Qin “grouped small districts and settlements into counties and appointed magistrates and assistant magistrates. There were thirty-one counties in all. They made fields, creating roads and paths, and mounds indicating field boundaries, and equalized levies and land taxes.” Another goal of granting land to anyone willing to pay taxes and serve in the military was to attract colonists. Like the breakdown of larger family units, the reorganization of the agricultural landscape is a clear example of how states reorganize society to match with their own administrative logic, as discussed in chapter 1. The division of territory into counties, standardized administrative units, was another important innovation.43
Qin’s field system is explained in a statute excavated in northern Sichuan that was issued in 309 BCE, thirty years after Shang Yang’s death, and was later copied almost verbatim into Han law. It reads, “Fields are one pace wide, in strips eight ze [332 meters] long. Make raised paths. Each field strip has two raised paths and one walking path. One hundred mu equals one qing. A lane should be two zhang wide [4.6 meters]. A border mound is four feet high; as tall as it is wide.”44 The general idea was that raised paths were built 332 meters apart, forming fields of that width. Between these wider paths, narrow footpaths were laid out 1.39 meters apart, forming long, narrow fields perpendicular to the raised paths. Each of these long, skinny fields was one mu in area. One hundred mu added up to one qing, precisely the area of land granted to people without rank. Each ten qing a road was laid out perpendicular to the paths. This divided the landscape into a grid of standard units that made it easy to allot fields to men, redistribute land, and calculate taxes. Of course, not all land could be laid out so cleanly, and officials were trained to calculate the area of differently shaped fields.45
A close look at maps or satellite images of the Guanzhong Plain reveals that many areas are arranged in strips that vary between 320 and 350 meters wide. This averages around 332 meters, which corresponds to the 240 paces of the standard field length in Qin and Han law. Of course, this is true only of some parts of the plain, and even in those areas the roads between fields are not altogether straight. Nonetheless, large areas are organized in this way, and this can only be the result of state efforts. There are several reasons to believe that this occurred in the Qin and Han periods. The first is that measures grew longer over the centuries, so the 240 bu measure of later times would have been considerably longer than 332 meters. Second, while the later Northern Wei and Tang empires also enacted land control systems, neither controlled the region for nearly as long as the five hundred years from Shang Yang’s reforms to the fall of the Han. The third, and most obvious, reason is that once a standardized field system existed, later states were more likely to use it than to rebuild whole landscapes. So it seems likely that these standardized field measures were established in the Guanzhong under the Qin and Han.46
Despite Qin’s rationalization of landholding and taxation, there were still feudal elements insofar as high-ranking officials were granted large landholdings. We know this from records of large, populated areas granted to top Qin officials like Shang Yang, Lü Buwei, and Zhang Yi. There is also an inscribed ceramic tile dating to 334 BCE that records a plot of land permanently granted to a high-ranking official to build an ancestral temple.47 But it seems that only the highest officials were given land.
Given that Qin’s rule lasted for well over a century after Shang Yang’s reforms and that the Guanzhong remained its economic core, it is very likely that these reforms were carried out quite rigorously there, at least. And they certainly made Qin stronger. As a Qin official said in the following century,
Qin’s territory occupies half the world and her troops are a match for the countries on all sides of her. She is backed by mountains, girt by rivers, and lies secure behind barriers in every direction. She has more than a million mettlesome troops, a thousand war chariots, ten thousand cavalry, and grain stores as high as hills. Since her laws and ordinances are clear, her soldiers are calm in adversity and happy to die.”48
From the perspective of Qin rulers, the reforms were successful. From an ecological perspective, the reforms rebuilt the agricultural landscape and greatly augmented the power of the state over both people and land. These political reforms were accompanied by several other major changes. Most important, Qin moved its capital from the west of the Guanzhong into its center, which proved to be a permanent transition.
For reasons that remain mysterious, Qin moved its capital from the western Guanzhong to the center of the plain in the fourth century. Around the same time, people began to migrate into the basin’s flat center, which has remained the region’s population center ever since. This was a major change. Since the beginning of farming, people had congregated in the Zhouyuan and the land south of the Wei River. These areas had adequate water and had enough of a slope that excess water drained off. In contrast, much of the land in the central Guanzhong either had little surface water or had such poor drainage that it was waterlogged or saline. The significance of this change is clear in map 9, which shows how the population shifted from the Zhouyuan, the main center of population in the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods, to the center of the basin, where the Qin and Han Empires established their capitals. The timing of the shift is revealed by the archaeological record. Most tombs dating between roughly 700 and 350 BCE were excavated in the western Guanzhong. Qin burials after that period are mostly found in the central and eastern Guanzhong, closer to the new capital at Xianyang.49
The center of the plain had little running water, but its water table was only a few meters deep in many places, so people could dig wells for water. Wells were a main source of irrigation water in later periods and may have played a central role in Qin’s move into the area, as suggested by the many wells excavated at Xianyang. Ditches were probably also important for draining summer rains off of flat areas that were prone to waterlogging. The spread of iron tools in this period may have facilitated all this digging. Given that iron-smelting technology arrived from Central Asia during this period, it is not surprising that the earliest evidence of iron in the Zhou region comes from western regions controlled by Qin. Iron-tipped tools such as picks may also have facilitated the large-scale earth modification projects of this period, including the Zheng Guo Canal project. Chinese scholars, influenced by the technological determinism of the Soviet Union, have often overemphasized the consequences of metal tools for the agricultural economy. Iron-edged tools should not be considered any more important to social history than factors such as how much time people spent working, how much land they had, and the incentives and pressures exerted on them to produce food. But iron undoubtedly facilitated these kinds of land modification projects and generally increased the human impact on the soil. The Qin state may well have provided some metal tools to facilitate this.50
Map 9. The movement of population into the central Guanzhong Basin. The upper map depicts all of the sites known from the Yangshao culture to the Western Zhou period, while the lower one includes those from the Qin and Han periods, including some sites from the late Warring States period. The route of the Zheng Guo Canal is approximate.
Qin rulers informally moved to the central Guanzhong in the late fifth century, and in 383 BCE Lord Xian moved his administration to Yueyang 櫟陽, east of the Jing River. Yueyang became a major city with walls nine kilometers in circumference and remained an important city even after, in 350 BCE, the capital was officially moved back westward to Xianyang, where it remained until the end of the dynasty. By moving back westward from Yueyang to Xianyang, Qin again put the Jing River between its capital and its rivals to the east. Combined with the Wei River, this formed a natural moat against invaders from the east and south. Some believe that the move of Qin’s capital to the center of the valley was a state-led effort to open up the central Guanzhong to farming, but it is also possible that independent farmers began settling the area and the state followed. In any case, the state must have participated in the expansion of farmland around its new capitals. Qin’s subjects were required to do statute labor for the state, and agricultural improvement was the type of work the state often used their labor for.51
Let us now turn to the capital city itself. In general, the political and economic processes that have allowed humans to extend our control over the planet have been organized from urban areas, so that the urbanization of humanity is inseparable from the rise of civilization. Increases in social complexity are inseparable from expansions in the division of labor, and the central organization of this division has usually been based in cities. Resources tend to be centralized, processed, and redistributed in cities. Just as the division of tasks in the workshop is necessary for the production of more complex handicrafts, increasing the reach and power of the state requires increasing the division of labor within the military and the civil administration. Most relevant to our story, political institutions that extract surplus value from primary producers and decide how it is used are usually based in urban areas.
That being the case, it would be nice if we knew more about the economy and society of Xianyang. But we have very little information about the Qin capital beyond the general layout of city walls, roads, and palaces. Archaeologists have discovered the foundations of twenty-six large-scale building complexes in Xianyang, seven of them within the 875-by-500-meter walled central palace complex. This was where the court and central government officials lived and worked. Archaeologists suspect that commoners lived to the southwest of the palace quarters. Although there must have been housing areas for commoners and markets, it is quite possible that a significant percentage of the population lived and worked in the palaces. The large role of the state in commodity production would have reduced the nonstate economy that would otherwise have led to the growth of a city outside of the palace. At the height of the dynasty, there must have been tens of thousands of people living and working in the palaces of the capital and the surrounding areas.52
The Xi’an area has been home to the largest and most important cities in the region for most of recorded history because its location south of the Wei River gives it an excellent supply of fresh water from the Qinling. It is therefore curious that Qin built Xianyang on the north side of the Wei River in an area with no significant waterway. The people of the city seem to have pulled water from wells, of which archaeologists discovered over a hundred. Archaeologists also excavated the remains of the Lan Pond, which was probably not merely ornamental but also served as a water reservoir and a fish pond. Waste water drained into the Wei River through a subterranean sewer system of ceramic pipes. Qin rulers eventually discovered the advantages of the area south of the river, since they later built several of their main palaces there, and these later became the core of the Han capital Chang’an. Archaeologists have yet to find city walls around Xianyang, and they have been surveying the site since the 1950s. All the other Zhou states had huge walls around their capitals, so Xianyang’s lack of them is a testament both to Qin’s power and to the advantage that its geographical position gave it. Xianyang was protected by the Jing and Wei Rivers and by the natural barriers surrounding the Guanzhong, which, it should be recalled, means “within the passes.”53
Evidence from better-documented Chinese empires suggests that the central administration and imperial household consumed a considerable share of the state budget. Up to a quarter of the imperial tax revenues in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) were spent within the palace walls. This was probably less true in the Qin, which did not have a Grand Canal to bring grain to the capital, but we can at least guess that much of the Guanzhong’s surplus was consumed in the capital. A particularly useful source for imagining the economic life of the palaces is the Offices of Zhou, a text written around the same period that Qin’s capital flourished. It lays out in considerable detail what its authors considered an ideal bureaucracy, including the offices for provisioning the court. The text is imaginary, but not entirely unrealistic. Excavated Qin and Han documents and seal impressions prove the existence of many offices similar to those mentioned in the text, whose author(s) clearly had a deep knowledge of palace life and administration. We can expect that many of the other details mentioned in the text were also based on reality.54
The scale of the bureaucracy described by the Offices is appropriate for a court that fed and clothed a few thousand people. For food, it includes offices of butchers and cooks and those in charge of meat preserves, vinegar preserves, alcohol, drinks, salt, rice, curing meat, and storing ice to preserve food. Many of the raw materials were provided by people in charge of catching or growing food for the court, such as hunters, fishers, turtle catchers, and people in charge of gardens and orchards. For clothing there were tailors, cobblers, hairdressers, and specialists in furs, skins, silk, hemp, and cloth-dying. There were also a variety of offices concerned with human and animal medicine, cleaning, building, maintenance, prisons, horses, and the emperor’s royal guard, which was itself a small army. Many of these produced food and clothes for both sacrificial offerings and human use, and the Offices also includes a whole bureaucracy of ritual specialists, which Qin must also have had. Qin’s Guanzhong was administered by standard Qin administrative units such as counties and districts, but also contained imperial parks and mausoleums of previous Qin rulers. The tomb complexes included large grounds and villages whose taxes supported their upkeep and provided animals to sacrifice. By this time Qin maintained the tombs of five hundred years of Qin rulers, which probably consumed a significant amount of land and resources.55
Control over the labor of artisans had been a source of economic power for elites in the region for many centuries. So it is not surprising that the Qin state produced commodities not only for the palace and the army but probably also for sale. The Offices of Zhou lists a variety of artisans working for some Warring States court, including chariot builders, weapons manufacturers, potters, and fabric makers. Qin certainly had all of these. There is plenty of evidence of pottery production in Xianyang, including hundreds of pottery fragments inscribed with the names of the workshops that produced them. There were both private and state-run kilns. There were also state-owned bronze and iron foundries that produced a variety of products. Excavators consider a site where metal arrowheads were cast to have been a state arsenal. Large-scale metalwork and ceramics production would have produced plenty of smoke—early air pollution. This would have consumed a lot of firewood, but probably only a small fraction of that consumed by the entire city, though we have no idea where all this wood came from. Some of it was surely brought in by boat from the upper Wei River valley.56
The Guanzhong outside of the capital was administered by the Metropolitan Superintendent, and the whole region was referred to by the name of that office, which literally translates as “scribe of the interior” (neishi 內史). The Guanzhong was kept administratively separate from Qin’s other territory until the end of the dynasty. People had to present the appropriate documents to pass through the passes that surrounded it. Its population in 2 CE was probably over 2.3 million, with a population density of up to 150 people per square kilometer. We can assume that it would have been somewhat lower under Qin. The area south of the Wei River from Xianyang, much of which is now the city of Xi’an, seems to have been within Xianyang’s jurisdiction, which included several districts and guard posts as well as many villages. There were also cemeteries there. At least one bridge connected the palaces on each side of the river. This bridge, whose southern end was recently excavated, was built by driving large numbers of sturdy timbers into the riverbed and building a wooden surface on top. The location of this and later bridges at the site reveal that the Wei River in this area shifted northward as late as the eighth century CE, destroying parts of Qin Xianyang.57
Qin had various imperial parks that were directly owned by the king, not the government. Han Feizi refers to a time of famine in Qin when a noble pleaded with the king, saying “the grasses, vegetables, nuts, dates and chestnuts in the five parks are enough for the people to live on, please open the parks to the people,” a request that the king refused on the grounds that it would subvert his policy of rewarding people based on their service. This shows that at least some of these parks contained gardens and orchards. The monopolization of certain areas for rulers to hunt and relax in continued into the early twentieth century and represents one of the only examples of Chinese states’ preserving land from agricultural encroachment for the benefit of wild animals. Qin’s largest imperial park was Shanglin 上林, located in what are now the western suburbs of Xi’an. Han-era Shanglin was traditionally believed to stretch tens of kilometers between the Wei River and the foothills of the Qinling, though we do not know how big it was under Qin. It included ponds, rivers, and Qin’s massive unfinished Epang palace. In the Han era there were farms in Shanglin, and this may well have been true in Qin as well. We have evidence that it was off limits to commoners from a story in which the second Qin emperor, while hunting in Shanglin, encountered a commoner, whom he promptly killed.58
We know even less about Qin’s other parks; our only detailed information comes from much later sources. The First Emperor had a palace built in Liangshan Park, in the mountains about fifty kilometers northwest of Xianyang. In the foothills of the Qinling about forty kilometers east of Xianyang was Mount Li Park, near the First Emperor’s mausoleum. Mount Li is still a scenic area famous for its hot springs, and archaeologists have excavated a system of ceramic pipes there that was probably used to pipe hot water into baths. Both Shanglin and Li Mountain were imperial hunting grounds. There was also Yichun Park in what is now southeastern Xi’an. Qin also took control of the hunting grounds of other rulers as it conquered their kingdoms. Although we know little about these parks, they were clearly large areas that provided considerable income to the emperor and may have protected animals for the rulers to hunt.59
Just east of Xianyang, across the Jing River, Qin built a large water control project that transformed the eastern Guanzhong, bringing the last wild areas of the plain under cultivation for the first time. This was the Zheng Guo Canal project, one of the most famous hydraulic engineering projects in Chinese history.
As states grow in power, they become capable of transforming the earth in more ambitious ways. This is exemplified in Qin’s megaprojects, which required the coordinated labor of many thousands of people. The Zheng Guo Canal project was one of two major irrigation works built by Qin in the late Warring States period and one of the largest water control projects that had ever been built in East Asia (see map 8). The other was Dujiangyan, which Qin built after conquering Sichuan’s Chengdu Plain, permanently transforming it into a fertile farming area. The construction of the Zheng Guo project completed the agricultural colonization of the Guanzhong Basin and greatly improved the agricultural productivity of the Qin (and Han) capital area. Unfortunately, there is still much we do not know about the Zheng Guo Canal project. Early texts celebrate its success, but the history of more recent centuries reveals that it was difficult to maintain an irrigation system in that location using premodern technology.
Until recently, most histories of early Chinese water control were based on the water control chapters of the Historical Records and the Han History, but archaeological materials are revealing a much longer and more complex history. For example, archaeologists have discovered an extensive water control system in South China from the third millennium BCE. And, as discussed above, we now know that the Western Zhou and Qin both modified the hydrology of their capital sites. The earliest textual records we have of a state-sponsored water control project dates to 563 BCE, when a minister of the state of Zheng ordered ditches dug that caused powerful families to lose land, so they had him assassinated. In the 430s the state of Wei dug a ten-kilometer irrigation canal that created some of its best farmland. The states of Wu and Chu also dug transportation canals in this period.60
But historical texts discuss only the largest water projects. We know that smaller-scale water works were common because many texts mention officials charged with maintaining water control systems. For example, Xunzi wrote that “the official duties of the director of public works comprise repairing dikes and bridges, keeping open irrigation channels and ditches, draining off overflow waters, and storing up water in reservoirs to maintain the water level according to the season so that even in bad weather, in times of flood or drought, the people will have something to plant and weed.” Similarly, a passage from the Annals of Lü Buwei suggests that digging irrigation ditches was a common practice.61
The story of the Zheng Guo Canal, as described by Sima Qian, is that the state of Han sent a water control expert named Zheng Guo to convince Qin to expend its energies on building large-scale public works instead of invading Han.62 The king of Qin discovered the plot halfway through construction and was going to execute Zheng, but he managed to convince the king that this project would actually benefit Qin. This belongs to the genre of romantic stories about clever advisors and their wily plots collected in the Intrigues of the Warring States (Zhanguo ce) and cannot be taken as fact. But the canal was indeed built, and this is how Sima Qian concludes its story: “When it was finished, it was used to spread muddy, silt-laden water over more than 40,000 qing of land in the area, which up until this time had been very brackish, bringing the yield of the land up to one zhang per mu. As a result the Guanzhong was converted into fertile fields and no longer suffered from lean years; Qin became rich and powerful and eventually was able to conquer all the other feudal lords.”63 According to Sima Qian’s account, the canal flowed from the Jing to the Luo River. As can been seen in map 9, this was an area that had always been sparsely populated. Not only did it lack running water, it is so flat that when summer rains fell it became waterlogged, and then natural salts accumulated as the water evaporated. For this reason, it had remained in a semi-wild state, the last remaining uncultivated lowland in the region. The Zheng Guo project converted some of this region to agriculture, digging ditches to drain the lowlands and using the water from the Jing River to irrigate and desalinize the area. It was completed in 246 BCE, the year King Zheng, the future First Emperor, became king.64
The general plan of the canal is clear. The canal flowed parallel to the Wei River, but at a higher elevation, making it possible to tap it at various points to irrigate areas to the south. It also cut across numerous smaller waterways and springs that also fed into it, allowing the canal to function at a limited capacity even when the intake from the Jing River was not working, a situation that has often been the case in subsequent periods. Sima Qian states that the canal flowed from the Jing River to the Luo River along the Northern Mountains. Because of where the Northern Mountains are, and the lay of the land east of them, the path of any canal flowing between those two points cannot have varied greatly, and is shown in maps 8 and 9 (bottom).65
The 40,000 qing described by Sima Qian equals 1844 square kilometers, which would form a square over forty kilometers on each side. This is not far off the total area between the canal route and the Wei River. Although it has conventionally read as the area irrigated by the project, Sima Qian’s 40,000 qing is probably just an exaggeration, but it may indicate the total area within which the irrigation water could potentially have been used. Even now, when the system has been rebuilt with a concrete dam, the Jing River rarely has enough water to irrigate such a large area and it extends less than half the distance to the Luo River. The Jing River’s water could have been diverted all the way to the Luo or used for irrigation, but not both. This was probably true even when the upstream vegetation was not as overgrazed as it is now, which would have made the river’s flow more consistent.66
The most difficult technical problem in the construction of the Zheng Guo Canal was finding a way to channel water out of a river whose volume fluctuates enormously. When the landscape is frozen in the winter the Jing river’s average discharge is only 5–28 cubic meters per second (cms), low enough that one could probably jump across it in some places. But during summer floods its flow has been measured at 8,000 cms. Moreover, a 1911 flood may have exceeded 14,000 cms, and 4000-year-old sediments have been estimated to have been produced by floods that exceeded 20,000 cms. And the floods come quickly: during summer rains in 1931 the river was seen to rise seven meters in under ten minutes. These floods are extremely muddy because they cause so much erosion in the loess regions upstream. Qin’s engineers had to build a dam to create a reservoir that could channel water into the canal without being destroyed by summer floods. Even if they succeeded perfectly, the silty water would eventually fill in the canal, forcing them to dig it out. The difficulty of building a dam at this site was only solved in the twentieth century with concrete.67
The key was to build a dam whose reservoir held water to feed the canal in dry periods and allowed some of the sediment to settle out before entering the canal. In theory, a well-built dam would have caught so much sediment that it would eventually have filled in the reservoir, but the problem for premodern engineers was more likely keeping the dam intact. Qin Jianming and his colleagues from the Shaanxi Institute of Archaeology have discovered and mapped the rammed-earth dam, as seen in map 10. We know that it was Qin’s because it had tombs from the early to mid Han dug into it. Sima Qian spent most of his life in this region and would have mentioned if a massive dam had been built in the early Han, so the dam must have been built by Qin. The dam was 2600 meters long, enormous for an ancient dam. In contrast to both the current dam and intake canals built over the past millennium, which were located in narrow gorges farther upstream, Qin’s dam was built across a particularly wide section of the valley, which is probably the only way to dam a river using a material as weak as rammed earth. Remaining segments are around 130–160 meters wide at the base and stand 2–8 meters above the soil on which they were built, though the cross section of the dam shown in map 10 shows that the tallest part of the dam was probably the section that has since been destroyed by the river (between A and B).68
The dam was eventually destroyed, and we can assume it was flood waters that did it. The reservoir behind the excavated dam was far too small to be able to hold the amount of water flowing in the river during a summer flood. Therefore, the dam had to have an overflow mechanism. But how could they have built an overflow mechanism that could withstand the torrent? The late Ming scholar Yuan Huazhong suggested that the Qin dam was built with tubes of bamboo filled with rocks, as was done at Dujiangyan in his time. This is quite possible, though such dams had to be rebuilt frequently, often annually. In later periods they also dismantled the diversion structure before the flood season to prevent damage, using the dam only during low-water seasons. This is a very labor-intensive solution to the problem, but one which Qin and Han Empires could have managed with their enormous supplies of unpaid labor. The Zheng Guo Canal may have been an early example of a high-level equilibrium trap, a project whose initial benefits were outweighed in the long run by the constant effort required to maintain it. The construction of the dam may also have permanently transformed the shape of the valley. Before the dam was built, floodwaters could spread out across the floodplain, weakening the flow. However, Qin built a dam across a wide section of the floodplain, and when the water eventually cut through it, the remaining sections of the dam forced the entire river into the single channel, increasing the flow rate and forcing it to cut downwards. This downcutting can be seen in the cross section of map 10. This forced later engineers to cut intake canals higher up the valley, which required them to carve channels out of the rock on the side of the valley.69
Map 10. Archaeologically surveyed remains of the dam at the head of the Zheng Guo Canal. The location depicted here is indicated by the small rectangle near the center of map 8, above. The Jing River flowed in from the northwest, filling the dam. The canal began in the outflow canal, which led water to the east. Excess water in the outflow canal was released in the overflow channel at the bottom right. Excess water from the dam probably flowed out near section A, where the spillway sediments are identified. The cross section at the top shows the relative height of remaining sections of the dam (in meters).
The canal could not have irrigated anything close to 40,000 qing, but it is unclear how much it could have irrigated. Our best indication to what was irrigated is the distribution of archaeological sites from the Qin-Han period shown in map 9. That map contrasts the distribution of Neolithic and early Bronze Age archaeological sites (top), with those of the Qin-Han period. The map reveals that the area whose population grew the most during the Qin and Han periods was not the area irrigated by the Zheng Guo Canal but was just to the west, in and around the Qin capital, Xianyang (north of the Wei River), and the Western Han capital, Chang’an (south of the river). The one area that was very likely irrigated by the Zheng Guo Canal is just north of Xi’an’s eastern suburbs, directly below the word “Canal” on map 9. This is precisely the area currently irrigated by the system. While it is far less than 40,000 qing, we should not underestimate the value of an area of this size being reliably irrigated. Having an extensive tract of irrigated land directly across the river from its capital meant that Qin had a reliable source of food even during the worst droughts. Some areas farther east may also have been irrigated.
Irrigation may have helped make wheat more popular. Wheat had been around for millennia by this time, and we might have expected winter wheat to be more popular since it offered the substantial benefit of being harvested in the spring, when food stores often ran low. However, wheat requires more water than millets, so it was too risky to grow extensively without irrigation. Its spread in the Guanzhong may have been a result of increased irrigation. It was also due to the invention of the stone grinding mill which allowed people to grind it into flour. The earliest stone mill excavated in China was found in Qin’s city of Yueyang and dates to the late Warring States period. But grinding mills became common only after the period we are discussing, in the Han dynasty, which is when wheat-based foods like breads, noodles, and dumplings first started to become staples of North Chinese cuisine.70
Another benefit of irrigation is that it can be used to flush out excess salts by repeatedly flooding fields and then draining out the salt-laden water using ditches. The Zheng Guo Canal may have been used not only to irrigate but also to desalinize land. Apart from Sima Qian’s claim that the canal made saline land arable, the agriculture chapters of the Annals of Lü Buwei also contain an ambiguous reference to using ditch water to clean soil. We cannot even guess whether this was widespread or successful, but it was surely attempted. Nonetheless, plenty of low-lying land remained saline and is still marginal farmland.71
On the whole, it seems that the Zheng Guo system really did work, at least in some areas, as Sima Qian claimed when he said that it “eliminated bad years.” Not only did it provide Qin with a drought-free breadbasket very close to the capital; it also opened up a huge region that had previously been “wasteland” to colonists. The system was expanded in the Han and was apparently still working three centuries later when Ban Gu wrote, “At the base of the mountains are the fertile lands watered by the Zheng and Bo canals, sources of food and clothing. The entire area totals fifty thousand, with borders and plots arranged like silk squares. The ditches and ridges were etched and carved out, with plateaus and bogs dotting the area like dragon scales. Dredging canals, they made rain fall; shouldering spades, they formed clouds. The five grains hang heavy with spikes; mulberry and hemp spread and flourish.”72
Qin arose as a small polity on the edge of the Zhou world and went on to conquer it all. The changes required for this transformation were so profound that it seems almost meaningless to consider Qin the same entity from beginning to end. But the continuity of the state and the dynasty were real, and they gave Qin’s leaders the legitimacy to remold their society and its ecology.
Qin must have already been quite formidable to be able to take control of the Guanzhong in the seventh century BCE, and its power only grew as it conquered more territory and people. Once it had established itself on the west of the Zhou world in the Guanzhong Basin, Qin faced relatively few external threats. Its royal house was unusually strong, and its military power was the equal of any state in East Asia. By the fourth century, Qin faced the powerful state of Wei and its leaders realized that their administration was relatively primitive. Shang Yang’s reforms provided administrative strength to a state situated in an ideal geographical position for long-term warfare. The reforms emphasized control over people and land. By surveying its resources and counting its population, the Qin state attempted to find all available resources and laborers in its domain and use them efficiently. The Zheng Guo project completed the agricultural colonization of the region by opening the northeast of the plain to farming. From that time on, the only large wild animals in the lowlands were those in the king’s hunting parks.
Qin’s state-strengthening reforms constituted a profound and permanent change in the relationship between human society and the environment. Its system of land redistribution made the state an important player in how land was organized and used, as did its control over nonagricultural resources. Its ability to mobilize large numbers of workers vastly increased its ability to transform the environment. The new powers that the central government gained through these reforms made it capable of systematically encouraging the spread of agriculture. With its armies of laborers, it could expand the infrastructure that allowed it to extract resources from new areas as it conquered them, and eventually these made it strong enough to conquer the other Zhou states and found an empire. The following chapter will examine the ecology of the Qin state at its height, during the reign of the First Emperor.