Chapter 13 3. A fire in winter

But what he did next was immoral: burning books and burying scholars. After Qin Shihuang unified the country, he asked the big guys to discuss and discuss. What kind of rule does my Great Qin adopt?The prime minister Wang Wan stood up, the princes were first broken, Yan Qi Jing is far away, Jing is Chu, that place is too far away, it is not a place to be a king, so don't fill it in, please set up your sons, but fortunately.This Wang Wan advocates enfeoffment.The sons of Qin Shihuang were entrusted.You assign your sons to those places to be kings, because the lands are too far away for you to control Yan Qijing, so you entrust your sons to rule them.The first emperor made a discussion with the officials, and the officials all thought it was convenient.The ministers all think it is high!As a result, Li Si's brother quit, and he became angry.Li Si was a Ting Wei at the time, the Minister of Justice, not the prime minister.Li Si said: Zhou Wenwu enshrined many children with the same surname, and then they were alienated. They attacked each other like enemies, and the princes even punished each other. The emperor of Zhou could not stop it.That is to say, you have the same surname?King Wen and King Wu were 71 countries in China at that time, and there were 53 princes with the surname Ji, all with the same surname!what's the result?Hit it!You are very close to your uncle's child, but when your child is with his child, the relationship becomes estranged, and the next generation will be even further apart, and the next generation will not know each other at all.

Li Si went on to say: "Today, His Majesty Lai's gods and spirits are united in Hai Nei, and they are all prefectures and counties (flattering to the emperor!"). The princes are inconvenient.That is to say, your son and your heroes should be rewarded with public taxes. Don't let him take power, don't make him a prince with the same surname.So since the Qin Dynasty, it has been feudal but not established for a long time. The emperor named you the king of Qi, but it is impossible for you to establish your own rule in Qi.You can enjoy the taxation of the entire land, but administration, civil affairs, and military affairs are out of your control. Your job is to earn more rice.In short, Li Si talked for a long time, meaning that he clearly opposed enfeoffment and advocated the establishment of prefectures and counties.

The first emperor continued and said: The world is fighting endlessly (for a long time), so there are princes (it is because of these princes).Lai Zongmiao (blessed by the ancestors), the world was initially established, and the country was reestablished.That is to say, I managed to annihilate all the six kingdoms, rule the world, and immediately go to seal the frontiers to establish the country. Didn’t I cultivate enemies by myself when I was full, so Qin Shihuang agreed with Li Si’s point of view, let’s not engage in enfeoffment, but prefectures and counties. Later, at a palace party in 213 BC, the doctor Chun Yuyue (this doctor is different from today’s doctor, it is an official position, responsible for teaching the Five Classics at the time), this guy may be drunk, so he told Qin Shihuang, you don’t What does it mean to enfeoff and prefectures?It is to make your majesty have the world, and the children are ordinary people (you own the world, and your son's relatives are all ordinary people).There are Tian Chang and the ministers of the six ministers, but there is no assistant Fu, how can they save each other?What if there is a courtier who divides the Jin from the three families and the Tian family replaces Qi?Your son has no soldiers, how can he save you, how can he help you fight Tian Chang and Liuqing, how can he help you do this?

Chunyu Yue said this, of course, for the sake of the emperor, it was originally a good thing, and it was an academic debate.But he said one more sentence: I have never heard of those who do not learn from the past but can last for a long time.That is to say, you can do things well without learning from ancient times?never heard of that.Chun Yuyue is a typical Confucian of the legalist kings, and Li Si of the Legalists was annoyed by one sentence.Li Si said, what do you mean kid?What I do is not in ancient times.Where did the prefecture and county system exist in ancient times? You viciously attacked the prefecture and county system, and you did not agree with the central government. Aren’t you counter-revolutionary?So Li Si suggested that these Confucian scholars, when talking about poetry and books, regarded the past as not the present, and committed a heinous crime, they simply burned all their books, except for Qin's history books and natural science books, and burned all the rest. It is said that at that time The descendants of Confucius preserved the scriptures by hiding them in the walls of the Confucian mansion, or they would also burn them.This is called fire disaster.

Scholars regard books as life, and when they burn the books, they talk about Qin Shihuang behind his back, and when Qin Shihuang heard about it, he dug a hole and buried them all.More than 460 people who gossiped about me were all buried alive.This is called Earth Tribulation, and the Five Elements Tribulation can be made up without water, wood, and gold.This is the first cultural catastrophe in Chinese history.The Qin Dynasty did not do well in this matter, and it belonged to cultural dictatorship. Take the law as the teaching and officials as the teacher.It is strictly forbidden to study privately, and the policy of obscuring the people is a strategy of ancient Chinese rulers.The so-called superior wisdom and inferior stupidity means that wisdom is in the hands of the ruler, and the common people below are best to be stupid, so that it is convenient to rule, because ignorance is the only soil for autocracy.This method of ruling the country with legalist ideology, harsh punishments, and severe punishments for minor crimes finally drove the common people to rebellion, which triggered the peasant uprising at the end of the Qin Dynasty.

The reason for this is firstly that the corvee is heavy, and 7 million people are extorted into corvee a year.As mentioned above, the total population of the Qin Dynasty was 21 million. Half of the women were excluded, and there were only 10 million men. The 7 million corvee workers were all except the old men and children.In addition to corvee, there is also military service, which is used to fight against the Huns and South Vietnam.At that time, the common people of the Qin Dynasty, Ding men were armored, and Ding women were transferred. The men wore clothes to fight or do labor, and the women gave things and transported.In other words, basically all the young and middle-aged people in this country have gone to this business, and the rest in the fields are the old, weak, sick, disabled and pregnant who have been given up seats on the bus.

This is not the end, there are still heavy taxes waiting for you.You said that I have gone to labor, will our family pay the taxes that should be paid?Don’t pay, try not to pay, you can’t miss a penny, otherwise you will be served with severe punishments, such as cutting off ears, gouging out eyes, cutting off noses, chopping off feet, all of which are corporal punishments.Corporal punishment is so disgusting that anyone who chooses one of them can be made into a disabled person. The punishment is so severe that it completely destroys the labor force.In addition, there is annexation of land, farmers have nothing to eat, and they have no land to grow, and those who have land have no energy to grow. Isn't this a rebellion? Could it be that they build airplanes?

In 209 BC, Chen Sheng and Wu Guang launched a peasant uprising in Daze Township, Anhui.Then, with the slogan of "cutting down the innocent and punishing the Qin Dynasty", the Zhang Chu regime was established.After their failure, Liu Bang and Xiang Yu continued to revolt. In 207 BC, Liu Bang went to Xianyang and Qin died. "The king of Qin swept Liuhe, and the tiger looked at He Xiongzai! Swinging the sword to break the floating clouds, all the princes came to the west."The Qin Dynasty was so powerful that within fifteen years, the second emperor died. "Guo Qin Lun" concludes that this is "the difference between offense and defense when benevolence and justice are not applied."It is tyranny.As a result, "the body dies and the country is destroyed, the seven temples die, laughing for the world", why?If benevolence and righteousness are not applied, the offensive and defensive momentum will be different.Therefore, as soon as the Han Dynasty was established, we learned this lesson, how to achieve long-term stability, we must pay attention to the power of the people, pay attention to the power of the common people, and start to reduce the burden on the common people.