Ziying

The Qin dynasty lasted fifteen years. Its last ruler held power for forty-six days, and he was not an emperor. He is called one by convention rather than by any document: later ages have given him the name "the Third Emperor of Qin", and a sixth-century Daoist text even supplied a posthumous title. Neither has any basis in what the Qin actually did. What the Qin did was to abolish his title. Zhao Gao, the minister who had just destroyed the second emperor, wanted the position himself; he put on the imperial seal, and the officials of the court refused to follow him. He then announced that the Qin, having lost the six states it had conquered, had no business keeping an empty name: it should be a kingdom again, as before. So the man he installed was King of Qin, and the dynasty closed with a ruler who had no empire to rule.
Who that man was is a separate question, and the sources do not answer it. He appears in the Records of the Grand Historian under a name that may be one word and may be two, and under a relationship to the imperial house that changes depending on which chapter one reads. Sima Qian recorded both versions and set them side by side. The uncertainty is itself the historical fact.

1. The Question of Who He Was

Three sentences in three chapters of the same book describe three different men. The annals of the First Emperor say that Zhao Gao installed "the son of the Second Emperor's elder brother, the prince Ying, as King of Qin" — making him the Second Emperor's nephew and the First Emperor's grandson. The chronological tables read instead "Zhao Gao installed the Second Emperor's elder brother Ying", which would make him the emperor's brother and the First Emperor's son. And the biography of Li Si says that Zhao Gao, finding the officials would not accept him, "summoned the First Emperor's younger brother and gave him the seal".
A fifth-century annotator noted a variant: some manuscripts read "the son of the First Emperor's younger brother". Modern scholars have sometimes taken that brother to be Chengjiao, who rose in rebellion against the First Emperor and died at Tunliu; others have placed him in a distant branch of the ruling house. So the possibilities run — grandson, son, brother, nephew, or cousin. The reading that has travelled furthest is the first, because Ban Gu adopted it in the Book of Han and the dictionaries followed him; in that version the elder brother is usually identified with Fusu. But no Han text and no early commentary calls him Fusu's son. That identification was made only in the Song.
Three arguments are brought against the grandson reading. The first is a matter of vocabulary: the annals call him gongzi, a word for the son of a ruler, where a grandson would have been gongsun. The objection is not airtight, since the third century BC was already loosening these terms. The second is arithmetic: the annals have him conspiring with "his two sons" to kill Zhao Gao, sons old enough to be trusted with such a plan. If he had been born around 229 BC as Fusu's son, he would have been twenty-two at his accession and his sons would have been small children. The dating rests on guessing Fusu's birth from his father's, which is itself a guess, but the result is tight enough to suggest a wrong starting point.
The third is the pattern of the killings. In 210 and 209 the Second Emperor destroyed his brothers and sisters in numbers the Records gives twice, and differently, and no member of the line of succession survived. A man outside the line had nothing to compete for; a grandson inside it would have been killed with the rest.

2. The Man Who Spoke Up (210 – 208 BC)

He enters the record arguing against an execution. In 210 BC, after the First Emperor's death at Shaqiu and the accession of Huhai, Zhao Gao moved against the general Meng Tian and his brother Meng Yi. Both were arrested. The protest came from Ziying.
His argument is made almost entirely of precedents. The king of Zhao killed his good general Li Mu and replaced him with Yan Ju; the king of Yan broke his agreement with Qin on Jing Ke's word; the king of Qi killed the loyal ministers of earlier reigns and followed Hou Sheng. All three, he said, had ruined their states by changing a system that had been working. The Mengs were the Qin's own great ministers; to discard them in a day would teach the whole bureaucracy that no service was safe and break the spirit of the men who did the fighting. Huhai did not listen, and the brothers were killed.
What is interesting is not the argument, which failed, but that it was made at all. Someone with no office, no command and no recorded position at court could speak to the emperor directly against a purge in which the emperor was personally invested — and then survive it.
Not all of this appears in the Records. The Zhao Zheng Shu — "the book of Zhao Zheng", using the First Emperor's personal name — is a manuscript of some fifty bamboo slips and fifteen hundred characters, acquired by Peking University in 2009; on palaeographic grounds it was written in the early Western Han. It is built around speeches, and gives a large place to Ziying's. Its version of the first protest is occasioned differently: when Huhai proposed to tour the empire with a train of ten thousand carriages and begin the world afresh, Ziying objected. And it alone records a second protest, in 208 BC, when Huhai turned on Li Si — a warning that a court which destroyed its loyal ministers would find the ministers plotting abroad and the people resentful at home, closing with a detail the Records does not carry: with Zhang Han's army in the field and its supplies not arriving, a court fighting among itself was in danger.
The two versions of that first protest share a skeleton — the same three lost kingdoms, the same closing formula about trust at home and morale abroad. In the literature of the dynasty's end he functions as the last person who said the sensible thing, and traditions of that kind tend to supply such a person when one is missing.

3. A King, Not an Emperor (207 BC)

In the eighth month of 207 BC, Zhao Gao's son-in-law, the magistrate of Xianyang, led troops into the Wangyi Palace and forced the Second Emperor to kill himself. The minister then did the thing he had spent years clearing the way for, and found it could not be done. The biography of Li Si describes the moment with an economy more damning than any denunciation: he hung the imperial seal at his own waist, and the assembled officials would not follow him; he climbed the steps of the hall, and the hall seemed about to collapse — three times. He understood that the ministers would not consent, and sent for the First Emperor's younger brother and gave him the seal.
His announcement to the court is the founding document of the reign. The Qin, he said, had been a kingdom; the First Emperor had ruled the world, and so took the title of emperor. Now the six states had re-established themselves and Qin's territory had shrunk, and it would not do to keep an empty name. It was proper to be a king as before.
The argument was self-serving and it was also true, and the two are not separable. Zhao Gao was lowering the rank of his own candidate to keep the position available for himself later — he had also sent envoys to bargain with Liu Bang over a division of the region, and been refused. But a ruler whose writ ran over the Guanzhong plain and not much else could call himself a king; he could not credibly call himself emperor of a country that had ceased to exist. The last ruler of China's first empire took office as a demotion.
The convention that calls him the third of the Qin emperors treats him as having in substance succeeded the second, and a posthumous title was even invented for him. But the First Emperor had abolished posthumous names precisely so that no subject could judge a ruler, and the title has no standing in any Qin or Han document.
One small piece of evidence shows that the question of the title was live at the time and not only afterwards. The Zhao Zheng Shu calls the First Emperor "King Zhao Zheng of Qin" and the Second Emperor "King Hu Hai of Qin" throughout, and never calls either of them emperor. Its editor has argued that this reflects an early-Han view that the Qin had never legitimately held the mandate — that they were not a dynasty but an interruption.

4. Five Days of Fasting (207 BC)

Zhao Gao gave him a ritual to perform. He was to fast, then present himself at the ancestral temple and receive the seal of the king. The fast was set at five days. He used them.
The annals record what he said to his two sons while he was supposed to be preparing. Zhao Gao had killed the Second Emperor and feared the ministers would kill him for it; that was why he had put on a show of propriety and installed a king. But he had also, Ziying said, made an agreement with Chu to wipe out the Qin royal house and take the region for himself, and now he wanted his king to fast and go to the temple — where he meant to have him killed. So the plan went the other way: he would plead illness, and wait for Zhao Gao to come to him.
It went as planned. The envoys came repeatedly and were sent away. Zhao Gao came in person and asked how the king could fail to attend a matter of such importance to the ancestral temple. Ziying had him killed in the fasting palace, and exterminated his family to the third degree, and had the heads displayed in Xianyang.
Three accounts survive of who struck the blow. The annals have Ziying do it himself; the biography of Li Si has him order a palace attendant named Han Tan to do it; and the Zhao Zheng Shu gives the killing to the general Zhang Han, whose army had been the last serious force the Qin had in the field. All three agree that Zhao Gao died within days of installing his own candidate, and that his clan was destroyed with him. Ban Gu, writing some two hundred years after Sima Qian, says Ziying had Gao torn apart between chariots; the Records says only that he was stabbed. The disagreement about the method is minor. The disagreement about who did it is not, because the versions differ in what they are trying to show: a king braver than his position, or a court that disposed of its own monster without needing him.

5. Forty-Six Days (207 BC – 206 BC)

He had, by the annals' count, forty-six days. The army that ended the dynasty was not the largest in the field — Xiang Yu commanded the greater force, still tied down in the north — but it reached the capital, led by a man who preferred to arrive first and negotiate afterwards. Liu Bang's troops forced the Wu and Yao passes and came out onto the plain at Bashang within sight of Xianyang, and he sent an envoy to offer terms.
The answer was unconditional surrender, staged with precision. The king came out to the road at Zhidao in a plain carriage drawn by white horses — the vehicles and animals of a funeral — with a white cord around his neck, which was how a man presented himself for execution, carrying the seals and tallies of the imperial office. It was the ceremony of a man who expected to be killed and wanted the ritual observed either way. Those seals became, in later tradition, the "seal handed down through the dynasties"; its form and inscription are described only by writers of the fifth and sixth centuries, and no Qin seal has ever been found.
Liu Bang declined to execute him. His officers wanted it; his answer was that the king had already submitted, and that killing a man who had surrendered was bad fortune. He handed him over to his own officials and went on into Xianyang.
The month needs a word, because it is usually reported wrong. The Qin counted the year from the tenth month, and this tenth month was simultaneously the first month of the year the Han would count as their first. The change of dynasty therefore happened inside a single month that belonged to two calendars, which is why the fall of the Qin is dated both to 207 and to 206 BC. A second figure is likewise unsettled: the annals give the reign at forty-six days, while the biography of Li Si says he had been king for three months. Forty-six days is short enough that killing Zhao Gao and surrendering are nearly the whole of it; three months would leave room for a government. The annals' number is usually followed, and the variant is a reminder that even the length of the last reign is not agreed.
Xiang Yu arrived some two months later and had the king killed, together with the surviving princes of the Qin house, before his troops burned the palaces of Xianyang. The killing of a man who had surrendered became one of the counts Liu Bang later drew up against him, in the ten crimes he recited before the two armies met: the fifth was that Xiang Yu had put the surrendered King of Qin to death. The last ruler of the Qin did not survive as a person. He survived as a line in his enemy's indictment of his other enemy.

6. The Grave and the Verdict (206 BC –)

No text says where he was buried. The kings of Qin had been buried near their capitals and their graves are known; the First Emperor lies under his mound at Lishan, his son Huhai under a small earthen heap south of the capital. For the last of the line there is nothing. In 2003, during work for a heritage park, archaeologists found a large tomb about five hundred metres west of the outer wall of the First Emperor's necropolis: of the "middle" shape used for rulers below the sovereign, with two ramps, some one hundred and nine metres long.
The archaeologist Yuan Zhongyi has argued that it is Ziying's. The reasoning is circumstantial but careful. The scale is royal, and the location is outside the main cemetery, on the western margin where the workshops and the graves of the men who built the tomb were — a place no member of the imperial family would ordinarily be given, but exactly where a king buried in a hurry would end up. The tomb has no mound, no surrounding wall, and is oriented against the tradition of Qin royal graves, which fits a reign too short to prepare anything. It has not been opened, and in 2011 the national heritage administration refused an application to excavate it. If Yuan is right, the only Qin ruler whose burial place was never recorded lies in one of the few tombs of the period that nobody is allowed to open.
The verdict on him was written early, by two men who disagreed. The historian's own judgement, printed at the end of the annals of the First Emperor, is a long quotation from the Han statesman Jia Yi containing the sentence on which everything later depends: that had Ziying been no more than a mediocre ruler, with middling assistance, the trouble in the east might still have been contained. The sentence says not that he was a great king but that he did not need to be one — that the bar was ordinary competence and he failed to clear it.
Ban Gu rejected it outright, two hundred years later, in a passage appended to the same chapter. The Qin had been decaying for a long time; when the world fell apart, even a Duke of Zhou could have done nothing; to blame a lone man for a single day was a mistake. And then, more generously than any other writer: he had read the annals down to the point where Ziying had Zhao Gao pulled apart, and had never failed to admire the decisiveness and pity the intention. The obligations of the living and the dead, he wrote, had both been met. Later writers added colours of their own, but none could supply the two things the record omits: a father, and a grave.
A fifteen-year dynasty produced two rulers on whom no one argues, and a third on whom everything is argued: his parentage, his birth, the length of his reign, the manner of his one decisive act, and the location of his bones. That is a heavy load of uncertainty for forty-six days, and in a way it is the most accurate monument the Qin could have been given. The people who wrote its history wrote after it was over, for a dynasty that needed the Qin to have failed — and a state that fails needs a last man to fail with it, or the failure belongs to no one in particular.