Ziying, King of Qin

Biography

Family Background and Early Life

Historical sources are unclear about Ziying's parentage, and four main theories have long circulated. One holds that he was the son of an elder brother of Qin Er Shi, Hu Hai, specifically a son of Qin Shi Huang's eldest son Fusu. A second holds that he was Qin Shi Huang's younger brother. A third says he was Hu Hai's elder brother. A fourth identifies him as the son of Chengjiao, Qin Shi Huang's younger brother. The theory that Ziying was “the son of the Second Emperor's elder brother” has been the most widespread since Ban Gu of the Eastern Han and has also been adopted in modern revised editions of the Cihai and Ciyuan. Yet if Ziying was Fusu's son, it remains difficult to explain how he survived Qin Er Shi's violent purge of the imperial clan. Another view holds that Ziying was Chengjiao's son and escaped because he had no direct stake in the succession struggle against Hu Hai. This interpretation has been supported by scholars including Li Kaiyuan and Ma Feibai. Ziying's early life is unknown; the earliest recorded episode involving him dates to 210 BCE, the thirty-seventh year of Qin Shi Huang.

Two Remonstrances with Qin Er Shi

In 210 BCE, the thirty-seventh year of Qin Shi Huang, Qin Shi Huang died at Shaqiu while on tour. Zhao Gao and Li Si conspired in the Shaqiu Incident, forged an edict ordering the death of the eldest son Fusu, and imprisoned Meng Tian and Meng Yi in preparation for their execution. After Qin Er Shi, Hu Hai, took the throne, he listened to Zhao Gao's slanders and intended to kill the Meng brothers. Ziying remonstrated with him, saying that in the past King Qian of Zhao killed the worthy minister Li Mu and replaced him with Yan Ju, King Xi of Yan secretly adopted Jing Ke's plan and violated Yan's treaty with Qin, and King Jian of Qi killed loyal ministers inherited from earlier reigns and followed Hou Sheng's counsel. All three rulers, he argued, lost their states by abandoning established practice and brought disaster upon themselves. The Meng clan now consisted of Qin's senior ministers and strategists; to discard them all at once was unacceptable. Killing loyal ministers while employing men without integrity would destroy trust among officials within and divide the fighting spirit of soldiers without. Qin Er Shi refused to listen and still had Meng Tian and Meng Yi killed. Thereafter, under Zhao Gao's influence, Qin Er Shi carried out bloody purges of imperial relatives and senior officials, while Ziying survived.

In 207 BCE, the third year of Qin Er Shi, the emperor intended to kill the Left Grand Councilor Li Si. Ziying again remonstrated, warning that changing customs and laws, killing loyal ministers, and employing men without integrity would bring future calamity. Senior officials were plotting outside while the people were resentful within; General Zhang Han was commanding exhausted troops in the field without sufficient provisions, there were no reinforcements from outside, and ministers at court were competing for power. The situation, he said, was perilous. Qin Er Shi again ignored him. Li Si was eventually cut in two at the waist and his three clans exterminated. Neither of Ziying's remonstrances was accepted, but both episodes were later taken as evidence of his political judgment and courage.

Accession in Crisis and the Killing of Zhao Gao

In the eighth month of 207 BCE, the third year of Qin Er Shi, Zhao Gao had gained complete control of the court. After purging opponents through the “calling a deer a horse” episode, he sent his son-in-law Yan Le, magistrate of Xianyang, to launch the coup at Wangyi Palace and force Qin Er Shi Hu Hai to commit suicide. After Hu Hai's death, Zhao Gao took possession of the imperial seal and sought to make himself emperor, but the ministers and generals refused to support him. He therefore had no choice but to install Ziying. Zhao Gao argued that the former territories of the six states had reestablished their own regimes and Qin's territory had become small, so the title of emperor was now empty and the old royal title should be restored. Ziying was accordingly made King of Qin.

Zhao Gao ordered Ziying to fast for five days before entering the ancestral temple to pay homage and receive the imperial seal. Ziying conspired with his two sons and the eunuch Han Tan. He reasoned that Zhao Gao had killed Qin Er Shi at Wangyi Palace and, fearing retaliation from the ministers, had used a pretense of righteousness to enthrone him. Ziying had also heard that Zhao Gao had made an agreement with the Chu army and intended to destroy the Qin imperial clan before making himself king. He concluded that the requirement to fast and visit the ancestral temple was a plan to kill him. Ziying therefore pretended to be ill and refused to go, expecting Zhao Gao to come in person. After repeated summons failed, Zhao Gao did indeed visit the fasting palace. Ziying then ordered Han Tan to stab him to death, exterminated Zhao Gao's three clans, and displayed the bodies in Xianyang.

Surrender to Liu Bang and Death

In the tenth month of 207 BCE, the first year of Ziying's reign, Liu Bang's army broke through Wuguan and Yaoguan, advanced to Xianyang, and encamped at Bashang. Liu Bang sent envoys urging Ziying to surrender. By then the officials of the Qin court had largely deserted and submitted to Han. Seeing that recovery was impossible, Ziying had himself, his wife, and his sons bound with cords, dressed in white mourning clothes, rode in a carriage drawn by white horses, and carried the imperial seal, military tallies, and other insignia to surrender to Liu Bang at Zhidao. The Qin dynasty thereby came to an end. Ziying had ruled for only forty-six days.

Liu Bang's general Fan Kuai proposed killing Ziying. Liu Bang refused, saying that killing a man who had already surrendered would be inauspicious, and placed Ziying in the custody of officials. At one point Liu Bang reportedly considered making Ziying a minister responsible for governing Guanzhong. A little over a month later, Xiang Yu led his army into Xianyang, killed Ziying and members of the Qin royal family, burned the Qin palaces, and carried out a massacre in Xianyang. The wealth and texts accumulated by generations of the Qin dynasty were destroyed.

Little is recorded of Ziying's life and nothing of his early years; the earliest account of him is in the biography of Meng Tian in the Records of the Grand Historian. After the Second Emperor took the throne, Zhao Gao slandered the Meng family day and night and sought grounds against them, and the emperor imprisoned Meng Tian at Yangzhou and Meng Yi at Dai, intending to put them to death. Ziying remonstrated, citing three cases — King Qian of Zhao killing Li Mu and employing Guo Kai, King Jian of Qi killing his old ministers and employing Hou Sheng, and King Xi of Yan heeding Jing Ke's plot — in which the ruler lost his state and brought disaster on himself by changing established ways; and arguing that the Mengs were the ministers and counselors of Qin, so that to discard them at a stroke and kill loyal ministers in favor of men without principle would leave the officials unable to trust one another and the soldiers' spirit divided. The Second Emperor would not listen and had Meng Tian and Meng Yi killed.

In 207 BCE Zhao Gao, wholly in control of the government, sought the throne himself: having purged the court, he sent his son-in-law, the governor of Xianyang, Yan Le, to force the Second Emperor to death at the Wangyi Palace. Afterward he assembled the ministers to announce it and, finding neither officials nor generals behind him, had no choice but to raise Ziying — while taking care for the future, declaring that with the old six states rising one after another Qin had lost its grip on the realm, that Qin had originally been a mere principality and only the First Emperor's unification had made it an empire, and that with the six states independent and Qin's territory small it was wrong to hold an empty imperial title and better to be king as before. Ziying was accordingly to be king, not emperor, and was required to fast, visit the ancestral temple and receive the imperial seal. In calling him King of Qin, Zhao Gao was in fact preparing his own further usurpation.

After five days of fasting Ziying took counsel with his two sons and a eunuch: Zhao Gao, having killed the Second Emperor at the Wangyi Palace, feared the ministers would kill him and so had pretended to act justly in raising him; he had heard that Zhao Gao was in league with Chu, promising to destroy the Qin clan and rule Guanzhong himself; and the order to fast and visit the temple was a device to kill him there. Ziying therefore feigned illness and refused to attend to business; when Zhao Gao sent repeatedly for him without success, he came in person to the fasting palace and asked why the king would not go, whereupon Ziying killed him there and exterminated his clan to the third degree.

Ziying was King of Qin for forty-six days when Liu Bang entered the passes; he surrendered by the side of the Zhi road in a plain carriage with white horses, a cord about his neck, and Liu Bang handed him over to his officials. When Xiang Yu entered Xianyang he killed Ziying, slaughtered the city and burned the palaces, ending Qin rule utterly. Ziying's brief reign and his decisive killing of Zhao Gao are among the few initiatives taken by the Qin house itself in the dynasty's last days, and discussions of how quickly Qin fell generally treat him as the last link in that process.

Ziying's relation to the Qin imperial house is variously stated: the Records does not specify his descent, and later ages have made him either a brother of the First Emperor or a son of the Second Emperor's elder brother, hence a nephew of the First Emperor. The disagreement bears on how his accession is understood, but with the material limited no conclusion has been reached. What is certain is that Zhao Gao raised him after the Second Emperor's death not out of respect for the clan but because neither officials nor generals supported Zhao Gao himself, so that Ziying's accession was passive and his real authority slight, extending no further than the troops and officials about Xianyang.

Two acts stand out in his forty-six days: the killing of Zhao Gao and extermination of his clan, and the surrender to Liu Bang's army. The first shows that he was not a wholly powerless figurehead, able to read the situation and act in a very short time; the second is generally read as the practical choice to spare Xianyang another war, though it could not prevent Xiang Yu's slaughter of the city afterward. After entering the passes Liu Bang agreed with the elders of Qin on the "three articles of law," abolishing the harsh statutes, and these measures together with Ziying's surrender form the political turn from the fall of Qin to the rise of Han. Later discussions of Qin's fall often contrast the Second Emperor and Ziying: one reigning three years and killing his kin until the state fell, the other forty-odd days, destroying a powerful minister and ending in surrender.

Politics at the fall of Qin moved very fast. After the risings of Chen Sheng and Wu Guang the old six states were set up again one by one, Xiang Yu shattered the Qin main force at Julu, and Liu Bang advanced west through the Wu pass to reach Bashang in the winter of 207. Qin then held little more than Guanzhong, its armies destroyed at Julu, Zhang Han having surrendered to Chu, and the court just through the upheaval of Zhao Gao's regicide. Ziying took the throne in these conditions with means no longer sufficient to contend with the powers east of the passes.

His manner of surrender — a plain carriage and white horses, a cord about the neck, the imperial seals and tallies handed over — became the standard form for the surrender of a fallen ruler, later histories reusing the same phrases in similar scenes. Liu Bang accepted the surrender without killing him and was afterward made King of Han and went into Hanzhong, Ziying remaining at Xianyang; Xiang Yu, entering the passes later, killed Ziying and slaughtered the city, a contrast with Liu Bang's conduct often used in accounts of the Chu-Han struggle to explain where men's allegiance lay.

Little else is recorded of Ziying's reign. After killing Zhao Gao he sent troops to hold the Yao pass against Liu Bang, but Liu Bang, on Zhang Liang's advice, threatened with feigned forces and sent Li Yiji and Lu Jia to persuade the defending commanders, whose resolve wavered; Liu Bang then bypassed the pass, destroyed the Qin army at Lantian and reached Bashang. Ziying's surrender came after this series of defeats, when his room for choice was minimal.

Another of Ziying's measures was to try to hold the defenses of Guanzhong, but by then Qin's armies east of the passes had dissolved: Zhang Han's two hundred thousand men had surrendered to Xiang Yu after Julu and been buried alive at Xin'an, and the commanderies of Nanyang and Yingchuan were submitting or revolting, so that Qin's writ no longer reached beyond the passes. Ziying could rely only on the guards and attendants about Xianyang and hastily levied troops, and the failure of his resistance was nearly certain.

The Records is brief on what followed his surrender, saying only that Liu Bang handed him over to his officials and not that he was killed; after Xiang Yu entered the passes he killed Ziying and the princes and clansmen of Qin, ending the imperial house. After the founding of the Han, judgments of Ziying were generally tied to criticism of Qin rule: as a member of the clan he destroyed a powerful minister, yet forty-six days later became the last ruler of a fallen state, and later writers use him to show that the accumulated ills of Qin could no longer be retrieved by any single man.

Major Activities

Elimination of Zhao Gao

The central achievement of Ziying's short reign was the destruction of Zhao Gao's faction. Zhao Gao had monopolized power since the reign of Qin Er Shi, forced the deaths of senior officials including Meng Tian, Meng Yi, and Li Si, and launched the Wangyi Palace coup that killed Hu Hai. Resentment against him was deep throughout the Qin court. After taking the throne, Ziying concealed his intentions, used feigned illness to lure Zhao Gao to the fasting palace, and ordered the eunuch Han Tan to assassinate him before exterminating Zhao Gao's three clans. The act ended Zhao Gao's domination of the government and won approval among the people of Qin. Sima Qian wrote in the “Basic Annals of Qin Shi Huang” that whenever he read the Qin records and reached the point where Ziying punished Zhao Gao, he admired Ziying's decisiveness and pitied his purpose.

Surrender to Spare the Population

Knowing that the situation could no longer be reversed, Ziying chose to surrender voluntarily. When Liu Bang's army approached Xianyang, Qin's main force had already been defeated by Xiang Yu at the Battle of Julu, Guanzhong was short of troops, former aristocrats of the six states were restoring their states, and Qin rule had collapsed. Had Ziying defended the city to the death, Xianyang would have faced a destructive siege and greater casualties. By surrendering in a white carriage drawn by white horses with a cord around his neck, he avoided a larger battle for the city and objectively reduced losses among ordinary residents and their property. After entering Xianyang, Liu Bang sealed the palaces and storehouses and withdrew his army to Bashang; the peaceful surrender by Ziying was connected to this outcome.

Two Remonstrances

During Qin Er Shi's reign, Ziying twice offered remonstrance that demonstrated clear political judgment. First, he urged Qin Er Shi not to kill Meng Tian and Meng Yi, citing King Qian of Zhao's killing of Li Mu, King Xi of Yan's use of Jing Ke's plan, and King Jian of Qi's killing of loyal ministers. He warned that killing loyal ministers would cause officials at home to lose trust and soldiers abroad to lose their will to fight. Second, he urged Qin Er Shi not to execute Li Si, warning of the perilous situation in which senior officials plotted outside while the people resented the regime within. Although neither remonstrance was accepted, the episodes show that Ziying understood the crisis facing the Qin state.

Personal Relations

• Qin Shi Huang: according to one theory his uncle; according to another his granduncle; the relationship remains disputed.
• Qin Er Shi, Hu Hai: according to one theory his uncle; according to another his cousin.
• Fusu: according to one theory his father; the relationship remains disputed.
• Chengjiao: according to one theory his grandfather; the relationship remains disputed.
• Wife: name unknown.
• Sons: two sons who joined Ziying in planning Zhao Gao's assassination.
• Zhao Gao: powerful Qin minister who installed Ziying as King of Qin and was later killed in Ziying's plot.
• Liu Bang: Emperor Gaozu of Han; accepted Ziying's surrender and placed him in official custody.
• Xiang Yu: Hegemon-King of Western Chu; killed Ziying after entering Xianyang.
• Han Tan: eunuch who assisted Ziying in assassinating Zhao Gao.
• Meng Tian and Meng Yi: Qin generals on whose behalf Ziying remonstrated.
• Li Si: Qin Grand Councilor on whose behalf Ziying remonstrated.

Historical Assessment

Late Qin and Western Han

• Zhao Cheng, Zhao Gao's younger brother, described Ziying as benevolent and frugal and said that the people valued his words.
• Jia Yi argued in “The Faults of Qin” that if Ziying had possessed even the ability of an ordinary ruler and had obtained merely competent assistants, then despite disorder east of the mountains Qin territory might still have been preserved and the ancestral sacrifices might not have been extinguished.
• Sima Qian accepted Jia Yi's view in the “Basic Annals of Qin Shi Huang” in the Records of the Grand Historian, holding that Ziying lacked the ability to rescue the collapsing regime.

Eastern Han through Tang and Song

• Ban Gu took a different view in the Book of Han: Qin's decline had accumulated for so long and the realm had collapsed so completely that even a man with the abilities of the Duke of Zhou would have had no opportunity to display them, making it mistaken to blame an isolated ruler who had held power for only a day. Ban Gu also praised Ziying's punishment of Zhao Gao as decisive and sympathetic in purpose and considered that Ziying fulfilled the moral obligations of both life and death.
• The Tang scholar Sima Zhen wrote in the Shiji Suoyin that Ziying was raised up and sought to repay his ruler and father, but lacked capable assistants below and faced a mediocre ruler above; though he wished to restore the collapsing order, no one could repair it.

Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing

• The Song scholar He Qufei argued that by the time of Ziying, Qin's cause was already lost, and even assistance from a figure like Jiang Taigong could not have saved it.
• The Qing historian Cai Dongfan regarded Ziying's quiet elimination of Zhao Gao as evidence that he was not without intelligence. Cai suggested that had Qin still been salvageable and Ziying ruled for several years, promoting benefits, removing harms, and repairing decline, Qin might not have fallen so quickly. He nevertheless emphasized that the tyranny of Qin Shi Huang and Qin Er Shi was the fundamental cause of the dynasty's fall, making Ziying a victim of the disasters passed down by his forebears.

Modern Period

• Modern scholars including Li Kaiyuan and Ma Feibai have reexamined Ziying's genealogy and proposed that he was Chengjiao's son, providing a new perspective on his political position.
• Archaeologist Yuan Zhongyi has suggested that the occupant of a large “central-character-shaped” tomb west of the Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang may have been Ziying. If so, his burial near the mausoleum complex could support his identity as a member of the Qin imperial clan.