Warring States & the First Emperor

Why the Tiger Tally Never Came to Japan This piece continues from [Jade Gui, Bi, and Yue: The Jade Regalia of Rule], where I traced how the yue —the ceremonial axe—stood for the right to move an army. Here I follow that right forward, into the Warring States, where China turned it into something with the opposite logic: the tiger tally. And I follow it as a foreigner, because I am Japanese, and the tiger tally is the one Chinese…

 The Chang Consort of Zhao — She Broke Every Ceiling, and Was Named for the Floor The state of Zhao should not have fallen the way it did. It was one of the seven great powers of the Warring States. It had survived Changping, where it lost over four hundred thousand men in a single catastrophe. It had produced Lian Po and Li Mu, two of the finest commanders of the age. And then, three months after Li Mu died,…

This article continues the story begun in “[Posthumous Names],” and stands as one worked example of the series’ opening piece, “[History Is Written by the Victors].” In the manga Kingdom, Zhao Qian appears as the strange, unstable king of Zhao — the state’s very last ruler. The history books dismiss him in a word: benighted, a fool. But read the single poem he is said to have composed in his place of exile, and you find something else: a man…

The General Who Never Lost — and the Country That Killed Him Anyway Ri Boku(Li Mu )(李牧) never lost a battle. He buried a Xiongnu host of more than a hundred thousand riders in a single engagement. He broke Qin’s (秦) general Huan Yi (桓齮) at Fei (肥), and the following year turned back a two-pronged Qin invasion at Panwu (番吾). Read through the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), and you will not find a single line describing this…

This article continues from [The He Shi Bi (the jade that became the Heirloom Seal)]. The jade once guarded at the cost of lives was recut into the Chuanguo Xi — the Heirloom Seal of the Realm, the object that declared its holder the rightful Son of Heaven. For a thousand years it was seized, chipped, hidden, and at last lost forever. Why did emperors crave a single stone so badly? And why do replicas still sell today? This is…

In *Kingdom*, King Daoxiang of Zhao is the ruler who drove out the veteran general **Lian Po (Renpa)** and set his kingdom on the road to destruction. History carved two characters over him: *fool king.* But “fool king” hides more than it reveals. Why did he make the same ruinous choice again and again? The answer leads to one man — his lifelong teacher, **Guo Kai (Kaku Kai)** — and to a colder fact: **Zhao’s fall was quietly designed by…

If you read a*Kingdom*, you already know one kind of traitor by heart: **Guo Kai (Kaku Kai)** of Zhao — the minister who took Qin’s gold, drove out Lian Po, and slandered the great general **Li Mu (Ri Boku)** to his death. Guo Kai is a *moving* villain. He schemes, he acts, he tips his country over the edge with his own two hands. The state of Qi was destroyed by the opposite kind of traitor. His name was **Hou…

If you follow *Kingdom*, you already hate one man on sight: **Guo Kai (Kaku Kai)**, the minister of Zhao who took Qin’s gold, drove out the veteran **Lian Po (Renpa)**, and slandered the brilliant **Li Mu (Ri Boku)** into an executioner’s hands. Zhao held two of the age’s greatest generals — and tore off its own arms. Histories call Guo Kai a bought traitor and leave it there. But I don’t think gold is the whole story. Underneath the greed…

In *Kingdom*, the fall of each state usually comes on the battlefield. But **Qi**, the last of the great eastern states, fell almost without a sword being drawn. Its ruler, **King Jian (Tian Jian)**, sat on a mountain of soldiers and surrendered anyway. This is the story of how forty years of peace, a bribed chancellor, and one seductive idea — *”China will be one, so why prepare for war?”* — destroyed a kingdom from the inside. The Boy King…

Why “winning without fighting” turned out to be a matter of arithmetic If you’ve read one book of Chinese military strategy, it’s almost certainly Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. It sits on the recommended reading list at West Point and is studied at Sandhurst. What far fewer Western readers know is that Sun Tzu’s book is only the most famous of seven — the Seven Military Classics of Ancient China, the canon formalized in 1080 under the Song dynasty.…

The Fengshan Ritual: China’s Supreme Ceremony of Heaven and Earth Only the Son of Heaven Could Perform It — From the First Emperor to the Song Dynasty A Hierarchy of the Sacred: Who Could Worship What To a reader shaped by Christianity or other Western religious traditions, this may seem deeply strange. In those traditions, prayer is available to everyone — the poorest farmer and the most powerful king kneel before the same God, and no earthly rank determines one’s…

Lü Buwei: The Merchant Who Bought a King In the article on [Bu coins (the price of a person in ancient China)], we saw that in antiquity a human being could carry a price tag. One man pushed that idea to its absolute limit. Grain, pearls, talent — and finally a single prince — he cornered them all as qihuo — literally “rare huo,” rare value worth hoarding. His name was Lü Buwei: the central figure of the drama The…