The image of Qin Shi Huang's tyrant has been labeled for more than 2,000 years, and it is only in recent years that historians have begun to analyze the relevant information in "Yunmeng Qin Jian" that people have begun to re-examine Qin Shi Huang's achievements.
Qin Shi Huang was the first emperor in the history of the mainland. He ascended the throne at the age of 13 and became pro-government at the age of 21, and spent ten years annexing the Six Kingdoms, unifying China, and ending more than 500 years of war during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods.
He created an imperial system, centralized power, abolished division and sealing, counties and counties, books with the same text, cars on the same track, and lines with the same wheel, unified the script, currency, weights and measures, built the Great Wall to resist the Xiongnu, fought hundreds of yue in the south, conquered the Xiongnu in the north, swept away troubles, and opened up the territory, such a great man, but in Chinese textbooks he wrote him as the image of a tyrant, focusing on his arbitrary behavior, enslavement of the people, etc., the most widely known of which is the book burning pit Confucian, Meng Jiangnu crying the Great Wall and other familiar stories.
In December 1975, 1,155 Yunmeng Qin Jian were excavated in the Qin Tomb of Sleeping Tiger Di in Hubei Province. The tomb owner, named "Xi", was a judicial official in the county of the Qin Dynasty, and these bamboo tablets are his personal notes, and 612 of these bamboo tablets are related to Qin Dynasty legal documents. What is recorded in this bamboo sketch subverts everyone's perception.
Now the three problems that ordinary people misunderstand Qin Shi Huang the most deeply are:
1. Book burning pit Confucianism, Meng Jiangnu crying the Great Wall;
2. Chen Sheng and Wu Guang revolted because of tyranny;
3. The construction of Afang Palace.
Let's analyze these three issues one by one in combination with "Yunmeng Qin Jian".
1. Rumors about the book burning pit Confucianism and Meng Jiangnu crying on the Great Wall
The most popular are the book-burning pit Confucian and Meng Jiangnu crying on the Great Wall, which were actually imposed on Qin Shi Huang by future generations of literati. "Book burning" is that Qin Shi Huang burned a large number of Confucian books in order to unify ideology and culture, but he completely retained many medical and agricultural books. "Keng Confucianism" is when Qin Shi Huang killed more than 400 charismatic sorcerers, but later he was framed and killed thousands of Confucianists.
The original version of the story of Meng Jiangnu crying on the Great Wall in the textbook came from the Spring and Autumn Warring States period "Zuo Chuan", which tells the story of a great general of the State of Qi, Qi Liang, after the death of Qi Liang, his wife weeping on the side of the road for the death of her husband. It was not until Liu Xiang wrote "Warring States Policy" in the Western Han Dynasty that he added the plot of his wife crying the city on the basis of this story, saying that the wife drowned a city in tears because of her husband's death. Later, in the Tang Dynasty, the poet habitually wrote a poem "The Wife of Qiliang", placing this story during the period when Qin Shi Huang was building the Great Wall. Another Tang Dynasty poet wrote a poem "Tongxian Ji", which directly changed Qiliang's nameless wife to Meng Jiangnu, which was portrayed as the heinous legend of Meng Jiangnu crying down the Great Wall in order to mourn her dead husband.
At the same time, it is clearly recorded in the "Yunmeng Qin Jian" that labor was paid when building the Great Wall. Qin Law stipulates that even if a criminal works, it is a salary of eight dollars a day, and in the official grain stamps of the Qin Dynasty at that time, one or two dollars could buy 4 kilograms of corn, so the salary of eight dollars a day was completely enough for a person to support his family, and it could even be said that the salary was rich. This also supports the fiction of Meng Jiangnu crying on the Great Wall.
2. About Chen Sheng and Wu Guang revolting because of tyranny
Everyone knows that Chen Sheng and Wu Guang's "Dazexiang Uprising" occurred during the Qin II period, when the imperial court sent more than 900 pawns such as Chen Sheng and Wu Guang to Yuyang to defend, because of the delay of heavy rain, according to the law, they should all be killed, Chen Sheng and Wu Guang launched a mutiny in a hurry. Therefore, many people attribute the reason for this uprising to the strict laws of the Qin Dynasty, believing that this set of strict laws began to be used by Qin Shi Huang and extended to Qin II.
However, we found a passage from the bamboo brief about the regulations of the Qin Dynasty army: If you delay by three to five days during the conscription, you will be verbally criticized; Six to ten days, a fine is required for the value of a shield; After ten days, the fine will reach the value of a set of armor. But most importantly, in case of bad weather, such as rain or fog, all penalties are exempt. It can be seen from this that the laws of the Qin Shi Huang period were very just and humane. Therefore, the biggest possibility is that during the reign of Qin II, because of Qin II's murderous nature, he not only killed all his brothers and sisters, framed the minister, but also favored the traitor Zhao Gao. It also intensified the enslavement of the common people, which led to many laws set by Qin Shi Huang to the point that he was unrecognizable, and there was a situation in which Chen Sheng and Wu Guang revolted.
The bamboo brief also mentions the humane side of the laws and regulations of the Qin Dynasty: when you are less than one meter three, you will be exempted from conscription; Each family must leave a male to take care of the family and support the elderly; It is also stipulated that it is forbidden to go into the mountains to cut down trees and kill young birds in February every year. Not only that, Qin Jianli also recorded various things from national floods to the appointment and dismissal system of counties and counties, and its breadth and depth were shocking.
3. The construction of Afang Palace
The Tang Dynasty poet Du Mu's "A Fang Palace Fu" describes that the Afang Palace covers an area of more than 300 li, not only magnificent, but also contains various gold and silver treasures and beautiful women sent from the Six Kingdoms. After people saw it, they left an image of the arrogant and tyrannical Qin Shi Huang in their hearts. However, in October 2002, the archaeological team of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences began excavating the ruins of Afang Palace and concluded that Afang Palace was not actually built. Later, in 2006, archaeologists spent more than a year to survey the Afang Palace, and as a result, they found only a few red-burned clay remains in the 200,000-square-meter exploration area of the front hall of the Afang Palace, but a large number of traces of burned earth were found on the site of Xianyang Palace.
We see in the "Shiji Xiangyu Benji" that Sima Qian only recorded that "the Qin palace room was burned, and the fire was not extinguished in March", and did not mention the Afang Palace. At the same time, in the description of Afang Palace in the "History", Sima Qian also clearly wrote that Afang Palace was just a planning map. Experts believe that the historical record of Xiang Yu setting fire to Afang Palace is inaccurate. Therefore, experts have come to a very credible conclusion: the fire that Xiang Yu set when the Qin Dynasty collapsed was most likely to burn the Xianyang Palace, and the Afang Palace was not completed at that time.
Du Mu's purpose in writing Afang Gongfu was to advise the rulers at that time not to covet pleasure, exploit the people, and repeat the mistakes of the Qin Dynasty. In fact, after the unification of the six countries of the Qin State, most of the taxes collected were used on infrastructure that benefited the country and the people, and the most criticized was the construction of the Great Wall by Xingshi and the masses, but without the Great Wall, the number of Xiongnu invasions would definitely increase several times, causing the lives of the common people to be ruined. The spiritual canals and chasms built have also irrigated thousands of acres of fertile land in Guanzhong, which have greatly benefited future generations.
epilogue
Because of these stereotypes, some people accused Qin Shi Huang of being unscrupulous, but he never became an empress in his life, and advocated equality between men and women and protected women's rights and interests; Some say he was tyrannical and cruel, but he did not kill a single loyal courtier during his reign; Some people say that he worked hard and lost money to build a mausoleum, but in the past, most kings were buried by living people, and he, as an emperor of the ages, could not bear to kill innocents indiscriminately, and chose to use pottery maids instead of living people to be martyred, and there is also a saying that the Terracotta Army is a place for the loyal souls of thousands of Qin people who died in battle.