vigorous innovator. Moreover, he appears to have been uneducated and not
of pure Chinese race. Moved by the combined motives of vanity and
radicalism, he issued an edict decreeing that--

All official histories, except the memoirs of Tsin (his own
family), shall be burned; except the persons who have the office
of literati of the great learning, those who in the Empire permit
themselves to hide the Shi-King, the Shu-King (Confucian
classics), or the discourses of the hundred schools, must all go
before the local civil and military authorities so that they may
be burned. Those who shall dare to discuss among themselves the
Shi-King and the Shu-King shall be put to death and their corpses
exposed in a public place; those who shall make use of antiquity
to belittle modern times shall be put to death with their
relations.... Thirty days after the publication of this edict,
those who have not burned their books shall be branded and sent
to forced labour. The books which shall not be proscribed are
those of medicine and pharmacy, of divination ..., of agriculture
and of arboriculture. As for those who desire to study the laws
and ordinances, let them take the officials as masters. (Cordier,
op. cit. i. p. 203.)

It will be seen that the First Emperor was something of a Bolshevik. The
Chinese literati, naturally, have blackened his memory. On the other
hand, modern Chinese reformers, who have experienced the opposition of
old-fashioned scholars, have a certain sympathy with his attempt to
destroy the innate conservatism of his subjects. Thus Li Ung Bing[6]
says:--

No radical change can take place in China without encountering