Burning of books and burying of scholars

According to the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian, the First Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, ordered the burning of history, poetry and philosophy books in 213 BC and, a year later, the killing of more than 460 scholars at his capital, Xianyang. Remembered in Chinese as fenshu kengru, "burning the books and burying the Confucians", the episode became the most famous symbol of the Qin dynasty's harshness. Modern historians accept that books were destroyed and scholars killed, but doubt many of the details.

In 221 BC Qin completed its conquest of the rival Warring States and its king became the first emperor of a united China. The Qin state's official governing philosophy was Legalism. Rival schools of thought, collectively called the Hundred Schools, and the histories of the conquered states offered models of government that could be used to criticise the new order.

Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian reports that in 213 BC the chancellor Li Si proposed that all historical records other than Qin's be burned, together with privately held copies of the Classic of Poetry, the Classic of History and the writings of the various philosophical schools. Those who discussed these works were to be executed, those who used the past to criticise the present were to have their families killed, and anyone who had not handed in their books within thirty days was to be branded and sent to labour on the Great Wall. Books on medicine, divination, agriculture and forestry were exempt, and official scholars could keep copies of the banned works. Li Si's reasoning, as reported, was that tales of virtuous ancient rulers encouraged people to compare the present unfavourably with the past.

In 212 BC, according to the same history, the emperor was angered after being deceived by two alchemists, Xu Fu and Han Zhong, whom he had relied on in his search for longer life. He had the scholars at court investigated; they accused one another, and more than 460 were put to death at Xianyang. His eldest son, Fusu, warned that such severity against men who revered Confucius might cause unrest, and was himself sent away to guard the frontier. A writer of the second century AD added another 700 victims to the total.

The story first appears in the work of Sima Qian, writing more than a century later at the court of the Han dynasty, which had an interest in blackening its predecessor. No earlier text mentions the executions, Sima Qian names no Confucian victim, and the familiar phrase pairing the burnings and the burials is not found until the fourth century AD. Scholars such as Michael Nylan and Martin Kern note that the Qin court employed official experts on the Poetry and the Documents, and that Qin and early Han writings often quote the classics, which would hardly have been possible had they been destroyed. The verb Sima Qian used, keng, appears elsewhere in his work simply to mean killing, and only later came to be read as "bury alive". Nor were the victims Confucians in the later sense, since that school had not yet taken firm shape. Some historians, such as Li Kaiyuan, see the story as half real, half invented.

The prevailing modern view is that Qin did collect and destroy many texts it considered subversive, while keeping copies in the imperial library, and that it executed scholars, though not by burial alive. The worst damage may have come later: the Qin palaces, where the archives were probably kept, were burned in 207 or 206 BC as the dynasty fell. Histories of the pre-Qin states suffered most, and very few survive. Later Confucian writers kept the story alive as a warning against tyranny.

Our 200 BCE map shows China shortly after the Qin dynasty's fall, under the early Han dynasty.