The First Emperor of China by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-07-12T04:00:00+00:00

5 The Longest Cemetery

Wall building had long been a regular occupation of ancient Chinese states. Wooden palisades, earth ramparts, ditches or stone walls were used to define borders, although many of them grew out of more agricultural concerns. Qin had its northern and western borders to defend against barbarian influence, but much of the technology of wall building had its origins not in defence, but in farming and communications.

After a Qin army conquered a region, it was soon joined by colonists and workers. Pardoned criminals, undesirables and the disenfranchised were transported to new regions, many of them given the harsh choice between slavery on the new frontier or death back home. All roads, so the saying might have gone, led to Xianyang, fanning out from the Qin capital towards newly conquered regions, mainly to the east, with little road development westwards. This was most obvious in Sichuan, one of the first provinces to fall under Qin control, where many decades of public works had forged strong links with the Qin centre. Qin engineers had circumvented the towering mountain regions by constructing a wooden terrace that clung to the mountainside and created a large enough flat area to permit horse-drawn carriages to speed over to Qin’s new conquests. A horseman from Xianyang would be able to gallop around perilous mountain passes on wooden terraces, cross rivers on long bridges suspended on lines of boats, and travel some stretches on convoys of linked ships. But none of these developments were there for the tourist. As in other empires, they were built to afford swift passage to troops in times of trouble, and to move resources around Qin’s conquests. The roads and canals south to Sichuan linked the Qin capital to one of China’s richest area for iron- and salt-mining, north they afforded passage to the horse plains that supplied Qin’s beasts of burden, and east to the conquered nations of China proper.

From the earliest times, state organisation in China had been largely based on water monopolies – the need to tame the unpredictable rivers, many of which had wide or non-existent flood plains. This became increasingly important in the centuries preceding the First Emperor as the ancient states embraced rice agriculture. From 1000 BC onwards, the ancient Chinese constructed ever greater numbers of rice paddies, a process that involved levelling the ground, pounding the porous undersoil until it would not drain dry, and then walling in each field with a barrier and drainage ditch. It was backbreaking labour, but it also multiplied food resources by a factor of ten, and turned every peasant in the eastern world into someone with basic knowledge of wall construction and irrigation.1

One of the main achievements of the states of pre-Qin China lay in its successful construction of dams and levees to control local water supplies. Such projects were also a large source of local tension, since they required workers obtained through compulsory corvee service, or suitable numbers of slaves and captured soldiers from rival nations. The dam schemes were also notoriously parochial, since state borders often followed natural features.

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