Hu Hai

Biography

Succession at Shaqiu

Hu Hai accompanied Qin Shi Huang on his final eastern tour. After the First Emperor became gravely ill, the Records of the Grand Historian states that he left a letter for Fusu ordering him to return to Xianyang to preside over the funeral, which implied that Fusu would succeed him. Zhao Gao controlled the imperial seals, documents, and information concerning the imperial carriage. He persuaded Hu Hai to contend for the throne and compelled Li Si to participate. The three then produced another edict accusing Fusu and Meng Tian and ordering them to take their own lives. This account derives principally from the Records of the Grand Historian. Later scholars have differed over the details of the edict and Hu Hai’s age, but the deaths of Fusu and Meng Tian and Hu Hai’s accession marked a turning point in late Qin politics.

Zhao Gao’s Monopoly of Power and Internal Purges

After ascending the throne, Hu Hai relied on Zhao Gao, and members of the Qin royal family and veteran officials were subjected to large-scale purges. Many princes and Imperial Princesses were executed, while Meng Yi, Feng Quji, Feng Jie, and others also died in succession. Zhao Gao used severe punishments to control the bureaucracy and cut the emperor off from outside information, making it increasingly difficult for Hu Hai to understand the actual military situation. Li Si later came into conflict with Zhao Gao over issues including opposition to further increases in taxes and labor obligations; he was falsely accused, imprisoned, and executed.

The Anti-Qin War

The burdens of conscription, frontier service, and law that had developed under Qin Shi Huang were not eased during the reign of Qin Er Shi. After Chen Sheng and Wu Guang rose in revolt over problems related to their deadline for military service, local areas responded rapidly, indicating that the empire’s local control and political cohesion had already weakened. Zhang Han initially led convict laborers from Mount Li and Qin troops to defeat several rebel armies, temporarily protecting the Guanzhong region. After Xiang Yu defeated the Qin army at the Battle of Julu, however, Zhang Han surrendered to the Chu forces because of suspicion from the court and insufficient support. Liu Bang meanwhile approached Wuguan from another direction.

Death at Wangyi Palace

As the military situation worsened, Hu Hai began to question Zhao Gao. Fearing punishment, Zhao Gao joined with his younger brother Zhao Cheng and his son-in-law Yan Le in launching a coup. Yan Le led troops into Wangyi Palace and forced Hu Hai to commit suicide. Zhao Gao then installed Zi Ying but no longer used the title of emperor. Zi Ying soon killed Zhao Gao, but he was no longer able to save the Qin Dynasty.

His Birth and the Change at Shaqiu

Hu Hai, of the Ying surname and the Zhao lineage, was the eighteenth son of the First Emperor of Qin and the second emperor of Qin, known in history as the Second Emperor. His age at accession is disputed: the Records of the Grand Historian say he took the throne at twenty-one, while the Qin Records and some scholars reckon twelve, and scholars hold the historical value of the Qin Records to be higher than that of the Records of the Grand Historian, so that the view that he was twelve at his accession is also maintained. In the tenth month of the thirty-seventh year of the First Emperor the emperor went on progress, the left chancellor Li Si attending him and the right chancellor Feng Quji keeping the capital; and his youngest son Hu Hai, loving the journey, asked leave to accompany him, which the emperor granted. On the day bingyin of the seventh month the First Emperor died at the Shaqiu platform. The letter being already sealed and in the keeping of the master of the carriage office Zhao Gao, who had charge of the tallies and seals, it had not yet been given to a messenger. The chancellor Li Si, holding that the emperor had died abroad and fearing that the princes and the realm might take the chance to make trouble, kept it secret and did not announce the mourning; and the coffin was carried in a curtained cool carriage with a favoured eunuch riding beside it, and wherever they came food was offered as usual, and the hundred officials memorialised as of old while the eunuch from within the curtained carriage approved their business. Zhao Gao with the prince Hu Hai and the chancellor Li Si plotted to break open the letter the First Emperor had sealed for the prince Fusu and to forge a decree by which Li Si, as chancellor, had received the First Emperor's testament at Shaqiu and set up the prince Hu Hai as heir apparent; and they wrote another letter to the prince Fusu and Meng Tian, recounting their crimes and ordering them to die. The letter to Fusu said that the emperor had gone through the realm praying at famous mountains and to the gods for length of years, and that Fusu with the general Meng Tian had led several tens of thousands of troops to garrison the frontier for more than ten years without advancing or winning any merit, but had instead repeatedly memorialised directly slandering what the emperor did, and, because he could not be relieved and return as heir, was daily resentful; and that Fusu as a son was unfilial and was given a sword to take his own life, while Meng Tian, dwelling abroad with Fusu and not correcting him, must have known his plan, and as a minister unfaithful was to be put to death, with his troops given to the subordinate general Wang Li. The letter was sealed with the imperial seal and sent by a retainer of Hu Hai's to Fusu at Shangjun. When the envoy came and the letter was opened, Fusu wept and went within to kill himself; and Meng Tian checked him, saying that the emperor being abroad and the heir not yet named, and himself being charged with three hundred thousand troops to hold the frontier while the prince was his overseer, this was a great charge for the realm, and that now a single envoy had come and he would kill himself at once, not knowing whether it were not a trick, and that he should ask again and die after; but the envoy pressed them, and Fusu, being a man of benevolence, told Meng Tian that when a father gave his son death how should he ask again, and killed himself at once; and Meng Tian would not die, and the envoy gave him to the officers, who imprisoned him at Yangzhou. Then they went on, passing Jingxing to Jiuyuan; and the weather being hot, the emperor's body in the curtained carriage stank, and an order was given that the attending officers should carry a shi of salted fish in the carriage to confuse the smell. From the straight road they came to Xianyang and announced the mourning, and the heir Hu Hai succeeded.

The Burial of the First Emperor and the Slaughter after His Accession

In the ninth month the First Emperor was buried at Mount Li. The First Emperor, when he first came to the throne, had cut and prepared Mount Li, and when he had united the realm more than seven hundred thousand labourers were sent there from all parts of China; the earth was pierced to the triple springs, copper was poured in and the seams filled, and the outer coffin was placed within, with palaces, towers and the ranks of the hundred officials, and rare vessels, jewels and strange stones carried in until they were full. Craftsmen were ordered to make crossbows worked by mechanism, so that any who dug near would be shot; quicksilver was made into the hundred rivers, the great rivers and seas, worked by machinery to pour into one another, with the heavenly figures above and the earthly shapes below; and the fat of the man-fish was made into torches, which it was reckoned would not go out for long. When the burial was done someone said that the craftsmen had made the mechanisms and knew all that was stored, and that the store being great and precious would surely leak out; so all were ordered to follow the dead and many died. When the great affair was finished and all was stored, the middle door of the passage was closed and the outer door let down, and all the craftsmen and those who had stored the treasures were shut within and none came out again; and trees and grass were planted on the mound so that from without it looked like a hill. After becoming emperor Hu Hai was the more cruel to his many brothers and sisters. He followed and trusted Zhao Gao and made the laws clear, and secretly plotted with Zhao Gao saying that the great ministers were not submissive, the officials were still strong and the princes would surely contend with him, and asking what was to be done; and Zhao Gao said that the late emperor's great ministers were all men of noble families famed for generations whose merit was hereditary and long transmitted, while he himself was of low and mean birth and had been raised by the emperor's favour to a high place to manage inner affairs, and that the great ministers were sullen and obeyed him only in appearance while their hearts were not submissive; and that if the emperor went abroad he should take the chance to examine the governors and commandants of the commanderies and put the guilty to death, so as to shake his majesty through the realm above and remove those he had long disliked below. The Second Emperor said it was good, and proceeded to put to death the great ministers and the princes, implicating in guilt even the lesser and nearer officers of the three offices, none of whom were left standing, and six princes were killed at Du. Zhao Gao said further that they should make the law severe and the punishments cruel, so that the guilty should be implicated with one another even to the destruction of their clans, that the great ministers should be destroyed and the flesh and blood kept at a distance, and the poor enriched and the mean honoured, all the late emperor's old ministers removed and the emperor's own trusted men placed near him; and the Second Emperor approved Zhao Gao's words and changed the laws accordingly, so that when any of the ministers or princes was guilty he was given over to Zhao Gao to be tried, and great ministers such as Meng Yi were killed, twelve princes were killed in the market of Xianyang and ten princesses torn apart at Du, their property going to the government, with those implicated beyond counting. The three brothers of the prince Jianglü were imprisoned in the inner palace and their case was judged last of all; and the Second Emperor sent an envoy to tell Jianglü that as a prince he was unfaithful and deserved death, and the officers would apply the law. Jianglü said that of the rites of the court hall he had never dared not to follow the master of ceremonies, of the place in the gallery and temple he had never dared to fail in his duty, and in receiving commands and answering he had never dared to use a wrong word, and asked in what he had been unfaithful and begged to hear his crime before dying. And the envoy said that he was not privy to the plan but only carried out the letter; and Jianglü cried to Heaven three times, saying "O Heaven, I am guiltless," and the three brothers all wept and drew their swords and killed themselves. The prince Gao, wishing to flee but fearing the destruction of his clan, memorialised that when the late emperor was well he had been given food when he entered and a carriage when he went out, that he had been given robes from the imperial store and fine horses from the middle stable, and that he ought to have followed the dead and could not, being unfilial as a son and unfaithful as a minister, and that an unfaithful man had no name to stand by in the world, and so he begged to follow the dead and be buried at the foot of Mount Li. When the memorial was presented Hu Hai was greatly pleased and showed it to Zhao Gao, asking whether this was not pressing, and Zhao Gao said that a minister should have no leisure to fear death and what plot could he make; and Hu Hai approved the memorial and gave a hundred thousand in cash for the burial. As for the brothers Meng Tian and Meng Yi, Hu Hai at first meant to use them, but Zhao Gao, fearing they would be a threat to him, slandered them to Hu Hai; and Hu Hai believed it and not only did not release Meng Tian but imprisoned Meng Yi in the jail of Dai commandery, and afterwards sent an envoy to force Meng Yi to kill himself, and then sent men to the jail at Yangzhou to force Meng Tian to kill himself. Meng Tian at first refused, pleading to see Hu Hai and ask him to withdraw the decree, and the envoy refusing, Meng Tian, seeing no hope of life, took poison and died.

His Progress through the Realm and His Harsh Laws and Heavy Levies

In the second year of his reign, early in 209 BC, Hu Hai, saying that he was young and newly on the throne and the common people not yet gathered to him, imitated his father the First Emperor and made a progress through the realm: in spring the Second Emperor went east through the commanderies and counties with Li Si attending, to Jieshi and along the sea and south to Kuaiji, and had all the stones the First Emperor had set up carved again, with the names of the attending ministers written beside them, to make plain the late emperor's achieved virtue, and returned. On the progress Zhao Gao craftily told Hu Hai that he should take the chance to establish his authority and put to death the officials who did not obey, so that he might have the highest majesty; and Hu Hai without asking right or wrong ordered again and again the killing of those who differed from him, so that the great ministers were in terror, and Zhao Gao in truth used the young Hu Hai as a tool for extending his own power. In the fourth month the Second Emperor returned to Xianyang and said that the late emperor, because the court at Xianyang was small, had built the Epang palace as his hall, and that the work being unfinished when he died the builders had been dismissed and the earth returned at Mount Li; but that now, the business of Mount Li being complete, if the Epang palace were left unfinished it would make plain the late emperor's error in undertaking it; and so he took up the Epang palace again, and soothed the four quarters of the barbarians as in the First Emperor's plan. He called out fifty thousand stalwarts to garrison Xianyang and teach them to shoot and to hunt dogs, horses and birds and beasts; and the number to be fed being great and the reckoning insufficient, he had the commanderies and counties send in beans, grain, fodder and straw, all being made to bring their own provisions, and within three hundred li of Xianyang none might eat of its grain, and the laws were applied the more harshly. The punishments of the law grew daily more cruel, and the great ministers each feared for himself and many wished to rebel; and he built again the Epang palace and made the straight road and the speed road, so that the levies grew heavier and the frontier service endless. Thereupon the garrison soldiers of Chu, Chen Sheng and Wu Guang and the rest, rose in Shandong, and the heroes set themselves up one after another as marquises and kings, rebelling against Qin, and their troops came to Hongmen and were turned back. In the seventh month of the first year of the Second Emperor the poor of the alleys were levied to garrison Yuyang; and meeting great rain so that the roads were impassable, they reckoned that they had missed the term fixed for reaching Yuyang, and by the law all should be beheaded. In their desperation Chen Sheng and Wu Guang led the garrison troops to kill the officers escorting them and raised a mutiny, with the cry of whether kings and marquises and generals and ministers were born to their state; and the mutineers made Chen Sheng general and Wu Guang commandant, took Daze township and Qi county in succession, and Chen Sheng made himself king of Chu and dwelt at Chen, sending his generals to take land; and the young men of the commanderies and counties of Shandong, wearied by the Qin officials, all killed their governors, commandants, magistrates and assistants and rose in answer to Chen She, setting themselves up as marquises and kings, joining from east to west in the name of punishing Qin, beyond counting. But the Second Emperor Hu Hai did not believe it at all and loved only to hear good words of the realm's peace: when a master of reception came from the east and told the Second Emperor of the rebels, the Second Emperor was angry and had him put in prison; and afterwards when an envoy came and the emperor asked, he answered that they were mere robbers whom the governors and commandants were hunting down and had now all taken, so that there was nothing to fear, and the emperor was pleased. Shu Suntong, knowing Hu Hai, said that what they reported of the realm's rebellion was not right at all, for the late emperor had long since pulled down the walls and melted the weapons of the realm, and with a wise lord on the throne and clear laws through the realm the state was at peace and the people well off, so who would rebel; and that Chen Sheng and the others were but a few robbers whom the local officers were hunting down eagerly, and the emperor should set his mind at rest. Hu Hai, hearing it, was delighted and praised Shu Suntong, and then asked the others, some saying Chen Sheng was a robber and some saying he was a rebel; and those who said robber were not punished while those who said rebel were punished, the charge being that of speaking what should not be spoken. And Zhao Gao, to monopolize power utterly, told Hu Hai at length, in substance, that Hu Hai was young and inexperienced and that an emperor should see less of his ministers lest he show them his weaknesses; and so the Second Emperor dwelt constantly within the forbidden palace and decided all matters with Zhao Gao, and all business great and small was decided by Zhao Gao alone.

The Death of Li Si and the Change at the Wangyi Palace

Li Si several times wished to find an occasion to remonstrate and the Second Emperor would not allow it; and the Second Emperor instead reproached Li Si, saying that he had private views and had heard them from Han Fei: that when Yao had the realm his hall was three feet high, its rafters unplaned and its thatch untrimmed, with winter deer-skin and summer hemp, coarse rice and herb soup, and that when Yu cut the Dragon gate and opened the Great Xia, dredged the nine rivers and made the nine dykes, his thighs lost their flesh and his shins their hair and his hands and feet were calloused and his face black, and he died abroad and was buried at Kuaiji; so that what was prized in having the realm was not to weary the body and toil the spirit, which was the labour of the unworthy and not the business of the wise, for the wise, having the realm, used it wholly to please themselves, which was why the realm was prized. Li Si, fearing that Hu Hai would follow Zhao Gao and that he would lose favour, wrote a piece presenting the Second Emperor with a method of ruling by autocratic power and harsh law over the people, that is, of consolidating central power by surveillance and punishment and suppressing the people's resistance and lawlessness. As for Li Si, his former ally, Zhao Gao did not spare him either, but destroyed this rival by Hu Hai's hand: he contrived that Hu Hai should be displeased with Li Si and then took the chance to accuse Li Si to Hu Hai of three crimes, first that Li Si had taken part in setting Hu Hai up but afterwards complained that he was not employed and wished to divide the land and be king with Hu Hai, second that Li Si's son Li You being governor of Sanchuan the bandits Wu Guang and the rest had gone west plundering and passed by without being stopped, and third that Li Si as chancellor had too much power, exceeding the emperor, and was yet unsatisfied, seeming to have other designs. Li Si, unable to see the Second Emperor, memorialised against Zhao Gao, saying that he had heard that when the minister doubted his lord no state was not endangered and when the wife doubted her husband no house was not endangered, and that now there was a great minister who monopolized profit and harm with the emperor, which was most inconvenient, and recounting the cases of Sicheng Zijian as minister of Song and Tian Chang as minister of Duke Jian; and the Second Emperor said that Zhao Gao was a eunuch of old who did not give rein to his will in peace nor change his heart in peril, who had cultivated goodness and come to his place by loyalty and kept it by good faith, and that he himself thought him worthy and asked why Li Si doubted him. Zhao Gao, knowing the struggle with Li Si to be to the death, wove further charges, and Hu Hai had Li Si arrested and given to Zhao Gao for trial; and Zhao Gao used every cruelty to force Li Si to confess, and Li Si, unable to bear the torture, confessed under duress. In the seventh month of the second year of the Second Emperor Li Si was sentenced to the five punishments and cut in two at the waist in the market of Xianyang; and coming out of prison with his second son, Li Si turned to him and said that he wished to lead the yellow dog out of the eastern gate of Shangcai with him to chase the cunning hare, and asked whether that could ever be again, and father and son wept together and his kindred to the third degree were exterminated. Li Si being dead, the Second Emperor made Zhao Gao chancellor of the centre, and all matters great and small were decided by him. Zhao Gao, though holding power, feared that the ministers might join against him and, to test their true attitude, contrived the affair that has stunk through history, of pointing at a deer and calling it a horse: on the day jihai of the eighth month Zhao Gao brought a deer and presented it to the Second Emperor, saying it was a horse; and the Second Emperor laughed and asked whether the chancellor were mistaken in calling a deer a horse, and asked those about him, and some were silent and some said horse to flatter Zhao Gao, and those who said deer Zhao Gao secretly had punished by law, and thereafter the ministers all feared Zhao Gao. After this matter was over Hu Hai thought himself afflicted with a malady of confusion, and called the grand diviner to cast for him, and the diviner said that he had not fasted properly in his sacrifices, and so Hu Hai went into the Shanglin park to fast, hunting and shooting daily; and a passer-by entering the park, the Second Emperor shot him dead himself. Zhao Gao, learning of it, made more of it: he first had his son-in-law, the magistrate of Xianyang, Yan Le, memorialise that someone unknown had killed a man and thrown the body into the park, and then told Hu Hai in seeming earnestness that an emperor being the Son of Heaven, to shoot a guiltless man without cause would bring on him the punishment of Heaven, that is of the emperor's father, and that the ghosts and spirits would be commanded to send calamity; and Hu Hai was much afraid, and Zhao Gao took the chance to bid him go to another travelling palace to avoid it for a time, and Hu Hai went obediently to dwell in the Wangyi palace, while Zhao Gao in the court was as good as emperor. Only then did Hu Hai suddenly understand that what Zhao Gao had said of the realm's peace was a lie; and he dreamed that a white tiger bit the left trace-horse of his carriage and he killed it, and being ill at ease he asked the interpreter of dreams, who divined that the spirit of the Jing river was working harm. So the Second Emperor fasted in the Wangyi palace, wishing to sacrifice to the spirit of the Jing and to sink four white horses in it, and sent men to reproach Zhao Gao with the rebels drawing ever nearer. Zhao Gao, in fear, plotted secretly with his son-in-law, the magistrate of Xianyang Yan Le, and his brother Zhao Cheng, saying that the emperor did not heed remonstrance and that now the situation was critical and he wished to shift the guilt onto their house; and that he meant to change the emperor and set up the prince Ying, who was benevolent and frugal and whose words the people all upheld. So he had the chief of the palace attendants as his man within and falsely proclaimed a great bandit, ordering Yan Le to call out the officers and troops to hunt him, and he seized Yan Le's mother and lodged her in Zhao Gao's house as a hostage. Yan Le with more than a thousand officers and men came to the gate of the Wangyi palace, bound the master of reception of the guard and demanded through which way the robbers had entered and why they had not been stopped; and the master of reception said that the guard posts about the palace were all closely held and how dared robbers enter the palace; and Yan Le beheaded him and took the officers straight in, shooting as they went, so that the palace attendants and eunuchs were greatly frightened and some fled and some fought, and those who fought were killed, several tens of them. The chief of the palace attendants and Yan Le entered together and shot at the Second Emperor's curtained seat; and the Second Emperor in anger called those about him, and all of them were in confusion and dared not fight, except one eunuch who attended him and dared not leave. The Second Emperor went into the inner palace and asked him why he had not told him earlier that it had come to this; and the eunuch said that he had not dared to speak and so had kept his life, for if he had spoken they would all have been killed long since. Yan Le came forward and numbered the Second Emperor's crimes, saying that he was arrogant and self-indulgent and killed without the Way, and that the realm had all turned against him, and bidding him settle his own account. The Second Emperor said he wished to have one commandery and be a king, and Yan Le would not allow it; he said he wished to be a marquis of ten thousand households, and again he would not allow it; and he said he was willing with his wife and children to become a common man like the other princes; and Yan Le said that he had received the command of the chancellor to punish him for the realm's sake, and that however much he spoke he dared not report it. And he waved his soldiers forward, and the Second Emperor killed himself. He was buried with the rites of a common man, his tomb in the Yichun garden south of Du.

Major Activities

Altered Succession and a Crisis of Political Legitimacy

Fusu’s forced suicide meant that the transfer of power after Qin Shi Huang’s death rested on palace intrigue and violent purges. Whatever the extent of Hu Hai’s own initiative in the affair, his imperial position remained dependent on Zhao Gao, making it difficult for him to establish an independent basis of rule.

Continuation of High-Pressure Policies

The regime under Qin Er Shi did not promptly reduce the burdens of construction, military service, or punishment. Instead, the purge of officials and restriction of information weakened its ability to respond to crisis. The causes of the anti-Qin war did not originate solely in Hu Hai’s three-year reign, but his policies caused existing tensions to erupt more intensely.

A Symbolic Figure in the Fall of Qin

Traditional histories often portray Hu Hai as an incompetent and cruel ruler of a collapsing dynasty who was manipulated by Zhao Gao. This judgment reflects his political responsibility but also belongs to a historiographical tradition that explained dynastic rise and fall through the personal morality of rulers. The collapse of the Qin Dynasty also involved structural factors, including the governing costs after unification, commandery-and-county administration, systems of levies and labor service, and regional resistance.

Zhao Gao's Devices for Monopolizing Power

After his accession Hu Hai trusted Zhao Gao exceedingly, handed the government wholly to him and even dwelt in the palace without seeing the ministers, with Zhao Gao as the channel between the ministers and himself. All the actions of Hu Hai's life were carried out under Zhao Gao's direction; he looked on Zhao Gao as his only reliance after the First Emperor's death, giving him almost a son's trust in a father, and this absolute dependence let Zhao Gao monopolize power. Zhao Gao's methods were three. The first was to establish authority by severe law and cruel punishment, advising the Second Emperor to make the law severe and the punishments cruel and to have the guilty implicated with one another even to the destruction of their clans, destroying the great ministers and keeping flesh and blood at a distance, removing all the late emperor's old ministers and replacing them with his own trusted men. The second was to cut the Second Emperor off from the outer court, saying that the late emperor had held the realm long so that the ministers dared not do wrong, but that the emperor, young in years and newly on the throne, should not decide affairs in the hall with the ministers, for if a matter went wrong it would show them his weakness, and that the Son of Heaven being called the One Man, he ought not to be heard. And so the Second Emperor dwelt constantly in the forbidden palace and decided all matters with Zhao Gao. The third was to test the ministers by pointing at a deer and calling it a horse, presenting the deer to the Second Emperor as a horse, and secretly punishing those who said deer, so that thereafter all feared Zhao Gao. Besides this Zhao Gao's son-in-law Yan Le was magistrate of the capital Xianyang and his brother Zhao Cheng and others held key posts, and the other key offices of the court were filled with Zhao Gao's party; and Hu Hai, caring only for his own pleasure, was wholly unprepared against these plots and died at last by Zhao Gao's hand.

The Suppression of the Rebellion and the Surrender of Zhang Han

Hu Hai at first did not know the true state of the realm, and only when Chen Sheng's army drew near the capital Xianyang did he take alarm and follow the advice of the master of the lesser treasury, Zhang Han, to have him lead the released convicts of Mount Li to battle against the enemy. In the winter of the second year of the Second Emperor the generals Zhou Zhang and the rest sent by Chen She came west to Xi with several hundred thousand troops, and the Second Emperor was much frightened and asked his ministers what was to be done; and Zhang Han said that the robbers had come and were strong, that to call out the nearer counties would be too late, but that the convicts at Mount Li were many and he begged that they be pardoned and given weapons to strike them. So the Second Emperor proclaimed a general amnesty and sent Zhang Han, who broke Zhou Zhang's army and drove it off and killed Zhou Zhang at Caoyang; and the Second Emperor sent further the chief secretary Sima Xin and Dong Yi to assist Zhang Han against the robbers, and they killed Chen Sheng at Chengfu, broke Xiang Liang at Dingtao and destroyed Wei Jiu at Linji, and the famous generals of the Chu rebels being dead Zhang Han crossed the river northward and attacked the king of Zhao, Xie, and others at Julu. These convicts, long at heavy labour and strong of body, newly released and high in spirit, under the brave general Zhang Han won many victories at first. But when Xiang Yu broke the cauldrons and sank the boats and fought Zhang Han to a decision, Zhang Han was beaten, and asking Hu Hai for relief troops he was met by Zhao Gao's suspicion and refusal to send them, so that at the end of his resources Zhang Han surrendered to Xiang Yu: Zhang Han sent to see Xiang Yu wishing to make terms, and Xiang Yu summoned his officers and said that grain was short and he wished to accept, and they all said it was good, and Xiang Yu made an appointment with him south of the Huan river at Yinxu; and the league being made, Zhang Han came to Xiang Yu and wept, telling him of Zhao Gao, and Xiang Yu made Zhang Han king of Yong and put him in the Chu army, sending the chief secretary Xin as commander-in-chief to lead the Qin troops as the van. Only then did Hu Hai suddenly understand that what Zhao Gao had told him of the realm's peace was a lie and that the realm was now so disordered as to be on the verge of destruction, and in his talk he was much displeased with Zhao Gao; and Zhao Gao, who had long had the mind to usurp, struck first. For Zhao Gao had many times said that the robbers east of the pass could do nothing, and afterwards Xiang Yu took the Qin general Wang Li and the rest at Julu and came on, and the armies of Zhang Han and the others were beaten again and again and memorialised asking for reinforcements, while Yan, Zhao, Qi, Chu, Han and Wei all made themselves kings, and from the Hangu pass eastward almost all turned from the Qin officials to answer the princes, who all led their troops west; and the duke of Pei with several tens of thousands of men had slaughtered the men of the Wu pass and sent men to make secret contact with Zhao Gao, and Zhao Gao, fearing the Second Emperor's anger and the punishment falling on himself, pleaded illness and did not attend the court.

His Tomb and Afterlife

Hu Hai has no separate biography, his record being divided by Sima Qian between the sixth volume of the Records of the Grand Historian, the basic annals of the First Emperor, and the eighty-seventh volume, the life of Li Si. His tomb mound is round, twenty-five metres across at the base and six metres high, with a wall of grey brick about it; north of the mound stands a stone of the forty-first year of Qianlong of the Qing written by Bi Yuan, governor of Shaanxi, reading the tomb of the Second Emperor of Qin, and on its back is carved Zhou Xinming's Discourse on Night Service, which has nothing to do with Hu Hai; and there are two stone beasts, a metre high and three quarters of a metre long. By the archaeological survey of the tomb by the Xi'an archaeologists in 2009 it was found to be a long sloping passage tomb of brick vaulted with many chambers, and by its form it should be a tomb of the Han. In the ninth month of 2010 the Qujiang Qin Second Emperor Tomb Site Park was built about the tomb garden in Xi'an, divided into an exhibition area and a site area. In the eighth month of 1956 the tomb was proclaimed by the Shaanxi provincial people's committee as a protected site of the first group of Shaanxi province; and in the fourth month of 1992 the Shaanxi provincial people's government proclaimed that its protected area should be the mound for the key zone, the ground within the tomb wall for the general zone, and a belt extending fifty metres about the mound as the construction control zone. Besides this, as to Hu Hai's accession there is also an excavated document saying that he came to the throne by the First Emperor's testament, including a wooden tablet of a decree of the Second Emperor found at the Tuzishan site in Yiyang, Hunan, and the Book of Zhao Zheng; but the former being the Second Emperor's own account its reliability has been questioned.

Personal Relations

• Qin Shi Huang: father and founder of the Qin Dynasty.
• Fusu: elder brother and the original central figure in the succession; forced to commit suicide by a forged edict.
• Zhao Gao: teacher and close attendant who helped Hu Hai ascend the throne, later monopolized power, and eventually launched the coup against him.
• Li Si: Qin Grand Councilor who took part in the succession arrangement at Shaqiu and was later framed and executed by Zhao Gao.
• Meng Tian and Meng Yi: senior Qin officials who were persecuted and killed after Hu Hai’s accession.
• Zhang Han: major Qin commander in the dynasty’s final years; later surrendered to Xiang Yu under military and political pressure.
• Zi Ying: King of Qin who succeeded after Hu Hai’s death.

Historical Assessment

Sima Qian treated the decisions made by Hu Hai, Zhao Gao, and Li Si at Shaqiu as a key cause of the fall of Qin. Later stories such as “calling a deer a horse” further reinforced the image of political inversion under Qin Er Shi. Modern scholarship, while recognizing Hu Hai’s responsibility as the supreme ruler, also emphasizes that the crisis of the Qin system had already emerged late in Qin Shi Huang’s reign and that the collapse of the empire cannot be attributed entirely to the personality of a young emperor.