Biography
Family Background and Early Life
Li Si was born in Shangcai County of Runan Commandery in the state of Chu during the late Warring States period, in present-day Shangcai County, Zhumadian, Henan. His courtesy name is not recorded in such sources as the *Records of the Grand Historian* or the *Book of Han*. Wei Xu's Tang-period *Mosou* and later works call his courtesy name Tonggu, but the reliability of this attribution is uncertain. As a young man Li Si served as a minor commandery clerk. On one occasion he noticed the sharply different circumstances of rats living in a latrine and rats living in a granary and reflected that human prospects were likewise shaped by environment. The *Records of the Grand Historian*, vol. 87, Biography of Li Si, records that as a young clerk he saw rats in the office latrine eating filthy food and repeatedly frightened by people and dogs, whereas rats in the granary ate stored grain under a large roof without fear of either. Li Si therefore concluded that human worth and unworthiness were like the rats and depended on where one placed oneself. This famous "rat in the granary" reflection shows his strong awareness of circumstance and status and foreshadowed his later pursuit of rank and achievement.
Li Si then went to study under Xunzi, learning methods for a ruler to govern the realm. Xunzi was a major Confucian thinker of the late Warring States period whose teachings contained strong Legalist elements, including the doctrine that human nature is bad and an emphasis on education, ritual, and institutional restraint. Li Si studied alongside Han Fei, a member of the Han ruling house who was especially interested in techniques of law, administrative method, and political power. Li Si believed that his own learning was inferior to Han Fei's. After completing his studies, he judged the ruler of Chu unworthy of service and the other states too weak to offer opportunities for great achievement, and therefore decided to travel west to Qin.
Leaving His Teacher and Entering Qin Service
When taking leave of Xunzi, Li Si said that an opportunity should not be allowed to pass; the great states were then struggling for supremacy, persuasive advisers held influence, and the king of Qin sought to annex the other states and rule as emperor. For men of humble birth who sought political achievement, he argued, this was the moment to act. Remaining in low status and poverty while condemning society and professing indifference to wealth and rank was, in his view, not the proper ambition of a scholar. He therefore announced that he would travel west and seek an audience with the king of Qin.
After reaching Qin, Li Si arrived just as King Zhuangxiang of Qin died. He requested a place among the retainers of Lü Buwei, Lord Wenxin and chancellor of Qin. Lü Buwei valued him and appointed him a palace gentleman, giving Li Si an opportunity to address King Zheng of Qin. Li Si argued that ordinary men often missed opportunities while great achievers recognized and seized them. Duke Mu of Qin, he said, had become a hegemon but could not conquer the eastern states because the feudal lords were still numerous and the Zhou house had not yet lost its moral authority. Now, by contrast, the other rulers submitted to Qin almost as commanderies and counties submitted to the central court. With Qin's strength and the king's ability, the remaining states could be swept away and the realm unified. If the opportunity were missed and the states recovered and renewed their alliances, even a ruler as wise as the Yellow Emperor would not be able to annex them. King Zheng promoted Li Si to Chief Clerk and adopted his strategy: agents bearing gold and precious objects were sent among the other states to bribe those who could be bought and assassinate those who could not, thereby sowing dissension between rulers and ministers before Qin armies attacked. King Zheng then appointed Li Si as a Guest Minister.
Memorial against the Expulsion of Guest Officers and Service as Commandant of Justice
In 237 BCE, the tenth year of King Zheng of Qin, Chancellor Lü Buwei was dismissed after being implicated in the Lao Ai affair. At about the same time, it was discovered that Zheng Guo of Han had come to Qin under the pretext of constructing an irrigation canal while acting as a spy. Qin princes and ministers urged the king to expel all guest officers from the other states, arguing that most served their native rulers and sought only to divide Qin. Li Si was among those ordered expelled. He therefore submitted the *Memorial against the Expulsion of Guest Officers*, citing the achievements of Duke Mu, Duke Xiao, King Hui, and King Zhaoxiang of Qin, all of whom had employed talented outsiders. King Zheng withdrew the expulsion order, restored Li Si to office, and ultimately adopted his policy. Li Si later rose to become Commandant of Justice, one of the Nine Ministers.
The Death of Han Fei and Assistance in the Imperial Enterprise
In 233 BCE, the fourteenth year of King Zheng of Qin, Han Fei came to Qin as an envoy. King Zheng had greatly admired Han Fei's writings, including "Gu Fen" and "Wu Du," and reportedly said that if he could meet and associate with their author he would die without regret. Li Si told the king that Han Fei had written the works, prompting King Zheng to intensify military pressure on Han. After Han Fei arrived in Qin, Li Si and Yao Jia grew jealous of him and spoke against him to King Zheng. The king ordered Han Fei prosecuted, and Li Si sent poison to Han Fei in prison and told him to commit suicide. Han Fei eventually died at Yunyang.
In 221 BCE, the twenty-sixth year of King Zheng of Qin, Qin conquered Qi and unified the realm. King Zheng ordered the chancellor, the imperial censor, and other officials to deliberate on a new title for the ruler. Chancellor Wang Wan, Imperial Censor Feng Jie, Commandant of Justice Li Si, and others argued that the Five Emperors had ruled only a limited territory and could not fully control whether distant feudatories came to court, whereas the present ruler had mobilized a righteous army, destroyed rebels, pacified the realm, turned all lands within the seas into commanderies and counties, and made all laws issue from a single ruler. Such an accomplishment, they said, surpassed even the Five Emperors. King Zheng removed the element "Tai," retained "Huang," and combined it with the ancient title "Di" to create the title "Huangdi," emperor.
Advocacy of the Commandery-County System and the Burning of Books
In 221 BCE, the twenty-sixth year of Qin Shi Huang, Chancellor Wang Wan and others proposed enfeoffing imperial sons as kings to guard distant regions. Li Si opposed the proposal. He argued that Kings Wen and Wu of Zhou had enfeoffed many members of their own lineage, but over generations blood ties became distant and descendants attacked one another like enemies, while the Zhou king could no longer stop their wars. Now that the whole realm had been organized into commanderies and counties, imperial sons and meritorious officials could instead be richly rewarded from state revenues and remain easy to control. Qin Shi Huang agreed, declaring that endless warfare in the past had resulted precisely from the existence of feudal lords and that the Commandant of Justice's proposal was correct. Qin therefore adopted the commandery-county system throughout the empire.
In 213 BCE, the thirty-fourth year of Qin Shi Huang, the emperor held a banquet at Xianyang Palace attended by seventy erudites. Zhou Qingchen, Director of the Erudites, offered a laudatory speech praising the emperor's unification. Chunyu Yue, an erudite from Qi, objected and called for restoration of enfeoffment. Qin Shi Huang referred the matter to his ministers. Li Si submitted a memorial opposing Chunyu Yue, accusing scholars of studying antiquity rather than the present and using the past to criticize contemporary government, thereby misleading the people. He proposed burning privately held works of the various philosophical schools, banning private teaching, taking the law as the basis of instruction, and officials as teachers. Qin Shi Huang accepted his proposal, giving rise to the historical event known as the "burning of books."
Later Years and Death
In 210 BCE, the thirty-seventh year of Qin Shi Huang, the emperor died at Shaqiu while on an eastern tour. Zhao Gao and Huhai conspired to alter the succession order. Li Si initially objected, but Zhao Gao threatened him by arguing that acceptance of the scheme would preserve his hereditary rank while refusal would bring disaster upon his descendants. Li Si eventually yielded and joined Zhao Gao and Huhai in falsifying an order placing Huhai on the throne and commanding Prince Fusu to die. After Qin Er Shi became emperor, Zhao Gao sought monopolistic control of power and engineered Li Si's downfall. Li Si repeatedly memorialized the emperor urging an end to burdensome labor service and lighter taxation, but Qin Er Shi did not listen. In 208 BCE, the second year of Qin Er Shi, Zhao Gao accused Li Si and his sons of colluding with Chen Sheng and Wu Guang. Li Si was forced to confess, cut in half at the marketplace of Xianyang, and his three kinship groups were exterminated.
His Early Years, His Study under Xun Qing, and His Going West to Qin
Li Si, whose courtesy name was Tonggu, was a man of Shangcai in Chu. As a young man he was a minor clerk of the commandery, and seeing the rats in the privy of the clerks' quarters and those in the granary living in utterly different conditions, he sighed that circumstance affects a man as it does these rats: by the Records of the Historian, he saw the rats in the privy eating filth and constantly startled by men and dogs, and going into the granary saw the rats there eating stored grain and living under a great roof without the worry of men and dogs, and so sighed that whether a man be worthy or worthless was like the rats, and lay in where he placed himself. He then studied the art of ruling under Xun Qing; and when his studies were done, judging that the king of Chu was not worth serving and that the six states were all too weak to give a man a work to do, he wished to go west to Qin. Taking leave of Xun Qing he said that he had heard that when the time comes one must not be slack, that now while the ten thousand chariots were contending the wanderers had the conduct of affairs, and that to sit in a low place and make no plan was to be like a beast that looks at flesh, or a man's face that can only just walk upright; that the greatest shame was to be low and the greatest grief to be poor, and that to remain long in a low and hard place, decrying the world and hating profit while pretending to be without ambition, was not the true feeling of a scholar; and so he would go west to persuade the king of Qin. By Wei Xu's Inkstore of the Tang he had "learned the forms of seal script from Xun Qing in his youth" and afterwards "changed the great seal of the imperial workshops into the small seal," so that "the famous mountains and the seals of today come from his brush." Reaching Qin, he happened to find King Zhuangxiang dead, and so sought to be a retainer of the chancellor, the marquis of Wenxin, Lü Buwei, who thought him able and made him a gentleman of the household.
His Persuasion of the King of Qin, His Dividing of the Six States, and the Memorial against Expelling the Foreigners
Li Si thus obtained a hearing with the king of Qin, telling him that the common man misses the moment while he who achieves great work takes the flaw in things and then bears with it; that when Duke Mu of Qin was hegemon he did not after all go east and annex the six states because the feudal lords were still many and the virtue of Zhou not yet decayed; that since Duke Xiao the house of Zhou had sunk and the lords had swallowed one another until east of the passes there were six states, and that Qin had ridden its victories over the lords for six generations; that now the lords obeyed Qin as commanderies and counties obey a court, and that with Qin so strong and the king so worthy it was as easy as sweeping dust from a stove to destroy the lords, complete the imperial work and unify the realm, a moment such as ten thousand generations would not see again; and that if they were slack now and did not press it, the lords would grow strong again, league together, and though one had the wisdom of the Yellow Emperor he could not annex them. The king of Qin took his plan and secretly sent agents with gold, jade and treasures to persuade the lords: those of name who could be bought with wealth were bound by rich gifts, and those who would not were stabbed with sharp swords; and these devices of dividing lord from minister being carried out, the king sent good generals after them, made Li Si a senior secretary and soon a guest minister. Afterwards, when the Korean Zheng Guo came to Qin under the name of making an irrigation canal and his espionage was discovered, the king's kin and the great ministers all told the king that those who came from the lords to serve Qin for the most part spoke for their own lords and sowed discord in Qin, and asked that all the foreign retainers be expelled; and Li Si being among those to be expelled, he presented his Memorial against Expelling the Foreigners, citing Duke Mu of Qin's taking You Yu from the Rong in the west, Baili Xi from Wan in the east, meeting Jian Shu in Song and bringing in Pi Bao and Gongsun Zhi from Jin, whereby he annexed twenty states and became hegemon of the western Rong; Duke Xiao's use of Shang Yang's law, whereby customs changed, the people prospered and the state grew strong, and Chu and Wei were beaten with a thousand li of land taken; King Hui's use of Zhang Yi's plan, whereby the land of the three rivers was taken, Ba and Shu annexed in the west, Shangjun taken in the north and Hanzhong in the south, and the six states' league was broken so that they turned west to serve Qin; and King Zhao's gaining of Fan Ju, whereby the ducal house was strengthened and private doors closed. These four rulers, he said, owed their achievements to their foreign retainers; and had they turned the foreigners away and kept the scholars at a distance, the state would have had no substance of wealth and Qin no name for strength. The king of Qin then repealed the order of expulsion, restored Li Si to office and in the end used his counsels, so that he rose to be commandant of justice. After the repeal Li Si took the occasion to advise the king to attack Korea first to overawe the other states, and the king sent him to force Korea to submit; and he memorialized, threatening the breaking of relations and the sending of troops against Korea, urging the king of Korea to see the situation and restore good relations with Qin, pressing him to decide. The king of Han being much troubled, he consulted Han Fei on how to weaken Qin; and the king of Qin, having read Han Fei's memorial, thought Korea could not be attacked at once, but Li Si memorialized against it, holding that Korea should first be weakened and the other lords annexed in turn; and the king of Qin took Li Si's plan and kept Han Fei in Qin.
His Slander of Han Fei
Li Si envied Han Fei and disparaged him before the king of Qin, saying that Han Fei was a prince of the royal house of Han and that since the king meant to annex the states Han Fei would in the end help Han and not Qin, which was only human; and that if the king did not employ him and he stayed long in Qin and were then sent back, it would be to leave the root of trouble, so that it were better to find a charge against him and put him to death by law. The king of Qin thought it reasonable and had the judicial officers try Han Fei; and Li Si sent Han Fei poison and bade him take his own life, Han Fei wishing to state the rights and wrongs to the king in person but unable to obtain audience; and afterwards the king repenting sent to pardon him, but Han Fei was already dead. Another account holds that Li Si had always meant to keep Han Fei in Qin to be used after the destruction of Han, but that because Han Fei's writings analysed the art of the ruler and of government too thoroughly the king of Qin feared his talent, and that with Han Fei's three proposals disadvantageous to Qin and Yao Jia's slander the king had him imprisoned and tortured; that Li Si sincerely wished to save him and presented his last work to the king, but that the king was resolved to destroy him and turned against Han Fei the very arts set out in his own book, laying the blame on Li Si, so that Li Si had no choice but to put poison in his food and bring about his sudden death.
The Imperial Title, the Institution of Commanderies and Counties, and the Unification of the Systems
When Qin had just annexed the realm the king ordered his ministers to deliberate on a change of the imperial title, holding that the six states being pacified, without a change of name his merit could not be celebrated and handed down; and the ministers memorialized that as the laws and ordinances all issued from the sovereign alone, such a thing had not been since high antiquity and the five emperors could not compare with it, and having judged the "grand emperor" the most honourable offered that style to him, with his commands to be called "rescript," his ordinances "edict," and the Son of Heaven to call himself "We"; and the king took the advice, calling himself the First Emperor and wishing that his heirs should be the Second, Third and so on to ten thousand generations. On the question of enfeoffment the chancellor Wang Wan and others asked that the emperor's sons be made princes in the newly taken lands of Yan, Qi and Chu, holding it favourable to the security of Qin rule; but Li Si, commandant of justice, held that the Zhou had enfeoffed very many sons of the same surname, yet as generations passed their blood thinned and they attacked one another like enemies and the lords warred with no one able to stop them; whereas now the four seas being united by the emperor's martial power, all was made into commanderies and counties, and princes and meritorious ministers were richly rewarded from the state's taxes, so that the situation was easily controlled and no man had two minds, which was the way to settle the state, and that enfeoffment was not proper. The First Emperor said that all men suffered from unending war because there were feudal lords, that by the blessing of his ancestors he had but now pacified the realm, and that to create fiefs again would be to make enemies for himself, so that peace would be hard indeed; and the commandant of justice's advice was right. So enfeoffment was abolished and commanderies and counties instituted. From Li Si's entry into the service of Qin to the unification of the realm was more than twenty years; and the First Emperor made him chancellor and "levelled the walls of the commanderies and counties, melted down the weapons to show they would not be used again, so that Qin had not a foot of enfeoffed land, set up no son or brother as prince, and made no meritorious minister a lord, that the realm might have no more trouble of war." His eldest son Li You was governor of Sanchuan, his sons all married princesses of Qin and his daughters all married princes of the Qin house. In unifying the systems the First Emperor made the unification of writing his urgent task and ordered the chancellor Li Si and others to put the scripts in order: Li Si, on the basis of the Qin script and with reference to those of the six states, produced the small seal script, and from the simpler forms current among the people arranged the clerical script; and both forms were promoted throughout the realm, the small seal being the standard script of Qin and the clerical the script of daily use, imperial edicts and official documents being as a rule written in small seal and unofficial documents copied in clerical. In weights and measures, the states being very inconsistent and their units so unlike that conversion was most difficult, the emperor ordered them unified, and by his inscription "where the standards of weight and measure are not one, and where there is doubt, all shall be made one," that is, in the twenty-sixth year of the First Emperor, 221, the emperor ordered the chancellor that all points of inconsistency and doubt in the standards should be clearly unified; and Li Si, in the memorial from prison setting out his services, mentions "the leveling of the peck and the bushel and the regulating of measures," showing that he too did his part in the unification. There was also the unifying of the gauge of carts and the building of the imperial highways: one running east to the old lands of Yan and Qi, one south to Wu and Chu, and one to strengthen control of the north.
His Argument on the Xiongnu, the Proposal to Burn the Books, and the Affairs of the Last Years
The First Emperor did not take Li Si's advice that the Xiongnu should not be attacked, but sent Meng Tian against them and opened a thousand li of land; and Qin called out the able-bodied men of the realm to garrison the north of the river for more than ten years, with countless dead and wounded and no advance northward, the people worn out with transport and the state's strength drained. On the attack Li Si had said that to send light troops deep into Xiongnu country would cut off the grain, while to carry much grain would make the train too heavy to move and would be useless besides; that even to gain the Xiongnu's land would be no profit, and their people could not be made to guard one's own, while to defeat them meant killing them, which was not what a sovereign who is father and mother to his people should do, so that to wear out the central land and make the attack on the Xiongnu a pleasure was no good policy. On the burning of the books, Chunyu Yue having said that flatterers like Zhou Qingchen only deepened the faults of government and were no loyal ministers, and that enfeoffing sons and meritorious ministers to support one another would prevent usurping ministers, the emperor referred the two men's arguments to his ministers; and Li Si held that the affairs of the three dynasties were not worth following, and that whereas formerly the lords had stood side by side and drawn wandering scholars by rich treatment, now the realm was settled and the laws issued from the emperor alone, so that the people at home should apply themselves to farming and work and the scholars should learn the laws and avoid what was forbidden, and yet the scholars of the day, not learning the laws of the present but the institutions of antiquity, used them to censure the government of the day and mislead the people. He went on that in antiquity the realm was divided and no one could give a single command, so that the lords stood side by side and all exalted the ancients to the harm of the present, veiling the truth of things with empty words, each man praising the doctrine he preferred and using it to censure the institutions the emperor had made; and that now the emperor having annexed the realm and distinguished black from white and exalted him alone, the private teachers censured the state's laws together, and hearing an order issued discussed it by the learning each had, blaming it in their hearts at court and talking of it in the lanes outside, praising their lord to win a name, expressing dissent to raise themselves and leading crowds to spread rumours; and that if such things were not forbidden the sovereign's majesty would fall above and factions would form below. He therefore asked that the Odes, the Documents and the writings of the hundred schools be burned, only the books of medicine, divination and planting being kept, and that those who had not burned their books within thirty days of the order should be branded on the face and made wall-builders. The First Emperor ordered the burning, and many of the ancient texts of the pre-Qin period were destroyed, to the great loss of Chinese culture; yet on the other hand the emperor had some of the forbidden books stored in the imperial library at Xianyang, so that some precious texts survived. Afterwards the emperor again clarified the law, fixed the statutes, unified writing and built throughout the land, and the next year went out on tour and drove back the surrounding peoples, in all of which Li Si had no small part. It is also recorded that in the thirty-fifth year of the First Emperor, 212, he ascended a certain place and the chancellor, learning of it, afterwards reduced his equipage, at which the emperor in anger said that it must have been a eunuch who leaked his words, and having ordered an inquiry at which none confessed, he decreed that all who had been present be arrested and killed; and from that time no one knew where the First Emperor went.
The Change at Shaqiu
The First Emperor's fifth and last progress ended with his death at Shaqiu and the accession of Huhai. In the seventh month of the thirty-seventh year, 210, when the progress reached Shaqiu the emperor fell gravely ill, and detesting any talk of death he left no one daring to speak of what should follow; and on his deathbed he ordered his eldest son Fusu to return at once to Xianyang to conduct the mourning and bury him. The edict was sealed and stamped with the imperial seal but still lay with the chief of the chariot office, Zhao Gao. The chancellor Li Si, holding that the emperor had died abroad and that the imperial princes and the realm might fall into disorder, resolved to keep the death secret: they laid the body in a ventilated and cool carriage, with a trusted eunuch of the late emperor riding inside, food being offered at the proper hours, and the hundred officials reporting business as usual while the eunuch answered in the emperor's name from within the carriage. The progress went on, and in the great heat the body began to putrefy and stink, so that Li Si and the rest ordered the attendants' carriages to carry each a picul of salted fish to cover the smell; and so the news of the emperor's death was known only to Huhai, Li Si, Zhao Gao and a few attendants. Zhao Gao had formerly taught Huhai documents and the law of prison cases, and being close to him he seized the chance to withhold the emperor's edict to Fusu and to persuade Huhai, setting out that the emperor had died without an edict enfeoffing his sons, so that only the eldest would return and take the throne while Huhai had not a foot of land, and urging him to seize it. Huhai at first declined on grounds of unrighteousness, unfiliality and incapacity, but being pressed with precedents he consented. Zhao Gao then went to persuade the chancellor Li Si, sounding him at once with the thought that the choice of the crown prince lay in one word from the two of them, which Li Si sternly refused; and Zhao Gao compared Li Si with Meng Tian in five respects, showing that Li Si was inferior to him in every one, so that if Fusu came to the throne Meng Tian would be employed and Li Si's chancellorship would be lost, while praising Huhai's conduct and hinting that only by setting him up could they preserve their own places. Li Si at first answered that a loyal minister feared not death and kept to his duty, and citing the disorders caused in history by setting aside the elder for the younger said that he could not join in the plot; but Zhao Gao, using both soft and hard means, urging that to follow the changes of the times was the way of the wise and threatening him with ruin for his descendants, Li Si after the argument and a bitter inward struggle looked up to heaven, sighed, and with tears accepted Zhao Gao's arrangement. So Zhao Gao, Huhai and Li Si plotted together, forging an edict of the First Emperor to the chancellor Li Si and setting up Huhai as heir; and they falsified the edict to Fusu in severe terms, reproaching him and Meng Tian with having led troops for years without merit and having repeatedly memorialized against the government, being unfilial to their father and disloyal to their sovereign, and granting them swords to kill themselves. When the envoy with the forged edict reached Shangjun, Fusu, hearing it, wept and went into an inner room to kill himself; and Meng Tian, thinking something amiss, urged him to verify the truth before dying, but Fusu, pressed by the envoy, held that a father's command could not be disobeyed and killed himself at once, while Meng Tian refusing to die was handed over by the envoy to the officers.
His Flattery, His Ruin under the Second Emperor, and His Imprisonment
The Second Emperor made music his amusement, and when the chancellor Li Si remonstrated, Zhao Gao held that from the court down to the people, if men were to meet with joy and part with affection, no music but this could convey the harmonious and joyful feeling or spread abroad the grace bestowed from above, and that these too were the fashions of their several ages with which a king chooses his music; and Huhai agreed with Zhao Gao. Wishing to display his power and overawe the realm by a progress, and thinking himself young on the throne with the people not yet attached to him, so that not to imitate his father would look weak, Huhai went east among the commanderies and counties in the spring of 209 with Li Si in attendance. They followed the route of the First Emperor's progresses and cut the names of the attendant ministers beside the stones the First Emperor had set up, to display the former emperor's merit; and Huhai decreed that the inscriptions were all the First Emperor's work and that if he simply inherited the title without displaying the First Emperor's name later ages could not know his merit and virtue, whereupon the chancellor Li Si and the rest asked leave to cut the edict on the stones, which was granted. On the way back from the progress Huhai and Zhao Gao took secret counsel how to secure their power and take their pleasure at will, and Zhao Gao holding that the imperial princes and the great ministers with Meng Tian's brother Meng Yi still commanding troops abroad were a danger, advised harsh measures: severe laws, the destruction of clans, the removal of the late emperor's old ministers and the estrangement of the imperial kinsmen, together with the promotion of the lowly and the planting of his own creatures. Huhai took his plan, changed the law and gave Zhao Gao charge of trials, so that Meng Yi and other ministers were killed, many princes and princesses done to death and their property confiscated, with countless implicated; and the ministers were shocked and terrified, Li Si and the rest not daring to remonstrate and the high officers seeking only to save themselves. In the fourth month of 209 Huhai returned to Xianyang and, continuing the First Emperor's policies, undertook great building, exacted heavy taxes and made the laws and punishments ever more severe; and when Li You as governor of Sanchuan failed to stop the rebels who rose and raided westward at will, and Zhang Han had beaten the Chu army, the envoys the Second Emperor sent to inquire into Sanchuan came one after another and reproached Li Si for holding one of the three chief offices while the rebels ran wild. Li Si, afraid and valuing his place, did not know what to do, and so flattered the Second Emperor's mind to win indulgence, memorializing that a wise sovereign should decide alone and make the realm serve his own desires; at which Huhai was delighted and pressed the inquisition still harder, counting harsh tax-gatherers as able officials and heavy killers as loyal ministers, so that the roads were lined with the punished and the markets were heaped daily with corpses. Zhao Gao, fearing his rivals' revenge, advised Huhai to avoid exposing his weaknesses before the ministers and beguiled him into seclusion. To monopolize power he then contrived Li Si's ruin: pretending to urge Li Si to remonstrate against the building of the Epang palace, he chose the times when Huhai was feasting and had Li Si come to remonstrate then; and after being disturbed several times Huhai was furious, thinking that Li Si never came in his leisure but chose the hours of pleasure to raise business, and thus slighted him. Zhao Gao seized the chance to accuse Li Si of having shared in the plot at Shaqiu and yet, when Huhai took the throne, of having gained no increase of rank, hinting that Li Si meant to carve out a kingdom for himself; and he further accused Li Si's son Li You, as governor of Sanchuan, of letting the Chu bandits of Chen Sheng pass through, with letters between them, and said that Li Si abroad was more powerful than the emperor. When the rebels multiplied and the court kept calling out the troops of Guanzhong to the east, and the three ministers could neither stop the banditry nor escape the charge of undoing the late emperor's work, Huhai cited Han Fei to refute them, insisting that a sovereign should give his desires free rein, and had Feng Quji, Li Si and Feng Jie all thrown into prison, Feng Quji and Feng Jie killing themselves because they would not let a general and chancellor be shamed. Zhao Gao had charge of the case and Li Si was arrested and imprisoned; and there Li Si, looking up to heaven, lamented that the Second Emperor was a benighted sovereign and that he himself was doomed to die wrongfully like the loyal ministers of old: he reproached him with killing his brothers, destroying the loyal and good while employing the wicked, building the Epang palace and exacting cruel taxes, and though he had done his utmost to remonstrate had not been heard, foreseeing that with half the realm in revolt and the emperor still deluded and trusting Zhao Gao the rebels would enter Xianyang and the court fall. The Second Emperor ordered Zhao Gao to pursue the charge of treason against Li Si and his son, arresting all his clan and retainers; and under severe torture Li Si was beaten more than a thousand times and at last, unable to bear the pain, was forced to confess, though he kept one hope and, relying on his services, memorialized from prison setting out the seven "crimes" by which he had helped Qin settle the realm — helping to annex the six states, opening territory, honouring the great ministers, establishing the ancestral temple, unifying weights and measures, building the imperial highways and lightening punishments and taxes — ironically holding these merits enough to deserve death, in truth hoping the Second Emperor would wake. But Zhao Gao withheld the memorial and sent his own retainers disguised as officials to interrogate him in turn, so that whenever Li Si told the truth he was beaten, and in the end when the Second Emperor truly sent men to verify the case Li Si dared not retract his confession and confessed again; and Zhao Gao submitted the sentence to the emperor, who was delighted and said that but for Lord Zhao he would have been betrayed by the chancellor. Li Si's son Li You having fallen in battle at the front, Zhao Gao made up besides a whole body of charges of his sharing in treason. Li Si was brought out of prison and bound with his middle son for the execution ground, and turning to him said that he wished to lead the yellow dog with him once more out of the east gate of Shangcai to chase the swift hares, and asked whether that could ever be; and father and son wept at one another, and he was cut in two at the waist in the market of Xianyang and his clan destroyed to the third degree.
His Feast-side Sigh, the Inscriptions, and What Survives of Him
Li Si once gave a feast at his house, and the great ministers and men of name all came to congratulate him, the horses and carriages outside his gate numbered in the thousands; and he sighed deeply, saying that he had heard Xun Qing say that things were forbidden to grow too great, that he was a commoner of Shangcai, a black-haired man of the lanes, and the emperor, not knowing his want of capacity, had raised him to this, so that no minister held a place above his, and his wealth and honour were at the utmost — but that when things reach the extreme they decline, and he did not know where he would come to rest. The First Emperor went on five progresses through the commanderies of the realm, and in four of them, from the twenty-eighth year, 219, to the thirty-seventh, 210, he had Li Si cut stones to record his merit, seven in all: some trace history and set out the long wars caused by enfeoffment and hail the unification as ending the root of disorder for a thousand ages and bringing the people lasting peace and profit; some hail the unification, the establishment of law and the correction of customs that gave the realm peace; some set out the achievements of unification in detail and stress the breadth of the realm; two of them are much alike, condemning the cruelty of the six states and proclaiming the justice of Qin's unification with a picture of the peace that followed; one, besides praising the merit, lays stress on the dismantling of the six states' defences, the opening of waterways and the removal of barriers of ground; one, the last stone of the First Emperor's age, particularly insists on the correction of customs by strict ritual law and sets out the vast extent of the realm; another declares that all the stones were the work of the First Emperor so that later ages should not confuse them, thus displaying the continuation of the late emperor's merit; another proclaims that the emperor has annexed the realm and that lords and people are at peace, and orders the chancellors Wei Zhuang and Wang Wan to unify the standards of weight and measure; and another declares that the system of weights and measures was founded by the First Emperor and inherited by the Second, to display the former emperor's accomplished virtue. Li Si's literary and scribal attainments have been pursued by later ages: his pieces are tightly argued and one in force of style, flowing like a great river; and his calligraphy, judged to have attained the spirit in the small seal and the marvellous in the great seal, is called the ancestor of the art. His tomb is at the southeast corner of Lisilou village in Shangcai county, Henan, a tall earthen mound with stone steps about it and a stele before it inscribed "the tomb of Li Si, chancellor of Qin," declared a key cultural relic of the province in 2000. His former dwellings are two: one on the north side of the east-west road within the east gate of the old city, in modern Henan, some five thousand square metres; and the other at Lisilou, five kilometres southwest of Shangcai town, his country house, where after his death his youngest son was sheltered by kinsmen and friends and escaped, hiding at Lisilou; and to this day the people of Lisilou are all surnamed Li and say they are his descendants, the place shaded by pines and cypresses and full of flowers and trees, and not far west of the tomb are the Li Si horse-racing ridge and the Li Si horse-watering ravine, where it is said he used to gallop in his youth and water his horse in the ravine. Li Si came of common people and, though he held a clerkship of the granaries in Chu, used to grow vegetables in his own courtyard and take part in the work, and a well from which he watered his vegetables survives at his old home. After his execution at Xianyang Zhao Gao came to Shangcai to seize his property and had the ground of his former dwelling dug over three feet deep, in places more than a fathom, so that in time it became a reedy pond, which later men, to remember him, called the Li Si pit. On 11 May 2018 a Li Si cultural exhibition hall was opened on the Li Si pedestrian street in Shangcai county, its murals setting out from his judging of cases and his chasing of hares at the east gate through his seeing of the rats, his study at Lanling, his going west to Qin, his counsel in the Qin court, his memorial against expelling the foreigners, his institution of commanderies and counties, his unification of writing, coinage, weights, measures and the gauge of carts, and his framing of the statutes, in order to show his conduct and achievements at the several stages of his life.