The Reformer and the Ambush
A new king on the Zhou throne. Nobody noticed.
In the same year, Qi attacked Wei and took the city of Guanjin. Zhao raided Qi and took Changcheng. The opening line of the volume is a small reminder: when a Son of Heaven dies in this age, the chronicler's first paragraph is not the funeral. It is the wars that didn't pause for it.
No event recorded.
Wei and Han met at Zhaiyang to settle a dispute. Then Qin appeared on the western edge of Wei's territory and beat both states' armies at Luoyang. The conference had been a gentlemen's negotiation. Qin had not been invited to be a gentleman.
Wei attacked Song. The chronicle says nothing more. In a year this quiet, even a small invasion gets the whole entry.
Duke Xian of Qin beat the combined armies of the three Jins at Shimen. The chronicle does not list a casualty count. Sources outside the chronicle put it at 60,000 men. Qin had spent two generations being treated as a backwoods state. The three Jins would now spend two generations regretting that posture.
No event recorded.
Wei beat the Han and Zhao armies at Hui. Qin and Wei fought at Shaoliang. The Duke of Wey died, succeeded by his son Su. The Duke of Yan died, succeeded by his son Wen.
And, almost as an afterthought in the chronicle's last line: Duke Xian of Qin died, succeeded by his son, posthumously titled Duke Xiao. The man who would hire Shang Yang had just inherited a kingdom that knew how to win battles but not yet how to win an age.
The Edict That Brought a Reformer
Duke Xiao of Qin, twenty-one years old, issued a recruitment edict to the world. Its text is preserved verbatim in the chronicle. Stripped down:
Our ancestor Duke Mu spread our borders a thousand li. The Son of Heaven called him hegemon. Then we lost our way. The states east of the mountains laugh at us. There is nothing more shameful for a son. If any guest minister or any subject of Qin can produce a strategy that makes Qin strong again, I will share with him both office and territory.
A junior official in Wei read it. He had been overlooked at the Wei court because he was too smart and too low-born and too obviously a man with a system. His name was Gongsun Yang — later Shang Yang. He gathered his notes on the Legalist masters, hired a horse, and rode west.
The age would not be the same age when he arrived as when he departed.
Recruit by writing the job description for the person you cannot yet name.
Duke Xiao did not know Shang Yang existed. He wrote an edict that could only be answered by someone like Shang Yang. Whom you attract is determined by what you ask for in public, not whom you know in private.
No event recorded.
The Pole and the Reward
Shang Yang wanted to overhaul Qin's laws. The court hated the idea. The old aristocrats argued that the people would be disturbed by change.
He answered them in front of the duke:
The common people cannot be consulted on what to begin. They can only be consulted on what to enjoy. Those who debate the highest virtue do not agree with the world. Those who accomplish great work do not consult with the multitude.
The duke approved every reform. Shang Yang then faced a smaller problem and a larger one. The smaller problem: nobody believed his laws would be enforced. The larger problem: in this age, most laws were not enforced — pronouncing them was a ritual, not a commitment.
So before he published the new code, he set a wooden pole, three zhang high, in the marketplace at the south gate of the capital. He posted a notice: Whoever moves this pole to the north gate gets ten gold pieces.
Nobody moved it. It was too obviously a trick.
He raised the offer to fifty gold pieces.
A man stepped out of the crowd, picked up the pole, and walked it to the north gate. Shang Yang paid him fifty gold pieces on the spot, in the marketplace, in front of everyone.
Then he published the laws.
A small promise kept publicly is the foundation of every large promise to come.
Marquis Wen of Wei rode out to a hunt he was canceling, in Volume 1, to keep his word. Shang Yang paid fifty gold pieces for fifty seconds of work, to keep his. The two men disagreed on every other principle of government. They agreed on this one. So have all rulers worth obeying.
The Marquis of Han died. His son Zhao succeeded.
Qin beat the Han army at Xishan. Shang Yang's reforms were one year old. The army was already a different machine.
Two diplomatic conferences in the same year. Wei and Han met at Hao. Zhao, Qi, and Song met at Pingluo. The states that had once been the three Jins were now negotiating in different rooms with different partners. The brotherhood of theft was over.
No event recorded.
The Treasures Debate
King Wei of Qi rode out to the borderlands to hunt with Marquis Hui of Wei — soon to be King Hui. Two of the most powerful men in the age, on horseback, in light armor, performing diplomacy with bows.
Marquis Hui asked: Does Qi have any treasures?
King Wei: No.
Marquis Hui smiled. My state is small. But I own ten pearls each one inch across — pearls so bright that a single one will light a chariot for twelve carriages ahead and twelve behind. How can a great state like Qi have no treasures?
King Wei answered:
My standards differ from yours. I have a minister named Tan-zi who guards Nancheng. While he watches that border, the state of Chu does not dare raid me, and the twelve counties of the Si river region all come to my court in respect. I have a minister named Pan-zi who guards Gaotang. While he holds it, the people of Zhao do not dare fish in our river. I have an officer named Qian-fu who guards Xuzhou. While he commands there, seven thousand families on the northern frontier choose to live as my people instead of fleeing to the wilderness. I have a minister named Zhong-shou who hunts down thieves on my roads. While he serves, no traveler in Qi need lock his door at night.
These are my treasures, and they light not twelve chariots but a thousand miles.
Marquis Hui rode home in silence.
Sidebar: King Wei Boils His Flatterers
From the Shiji and Zhanguo Ce — not from Zizhi Tongjian — but the same king, the same court, this same period.
When King Wei first took the throne, every official told him every governor was excellent. After three years of universal praise, he sent his own agents to two governors and observed.
The governor of Jimo had been universally slandered at court. King Wei went to inspect Jimo himself. He found cleared fields, full granaries, courts without backlog, and a populace that had not heard the slander campaign because it had been too busy farming.
The governor of E had been universally praised at court. King Wei went to inspect E. He found weed-choked fields, empty granaries, a populace that had been bullied for a generation, and recent border losses to Zhao that nobody had reported up.
He returned to court. He summoned the governor of Jimo, gave him an estate of ten thousand households, and announced that this man had clearly survived a coordinated slander campaign without retaliating, which was the highest virtue.
He summoned the governor of E. Then he summoned every official who had praised the governor of E. He boiled them — the governor and the courtiers who had been paid to flatter him — in a great cauldron in the courtyard.
After that day, no minister of Qi told the king what the king wanted to hear. The court fell silent for years, because everyone was learning the new rules. When it found its voice again, it was the most clear-eyed administrative court of the age.
A king who tolerates flattery is not soft. He is paying his enemies' wages with his own treasury.
The cost of flattery is not measured in compliments. It is measured in the governors of Jimo whose work goes unrewarded and the governors of E whose failures go unfixed, year after year, until your borders are gone and you are still being told you are wise.
Back in the chronicle: Duke Xiao of Qin and Marquis Hui of Wei held a peace conference at Duping. The Duke of Lu died, succeeded by his son Mao.
Qin beat a Wei army at Yuanli. Marquis Hui of Wei attacked Zhao and laid siege to Handan. Chu sent Jing She to relieve Zhao.
The chronicle's plain line conceals the most consequential military setup of the age. Marquis Hui's general at Handan was Pang Juan, the most feared commander Wei had produced in a generation. The man Pang Juan was about to be ambushed by, twelve months from now, was the classmate he had crippled and exiled twenty years earlier.
Sun Bin Saves Zhao Without Going to Zhao
King Wei of Qi sent Tian Ji to relieve Handan. Tian Ji's strategist, a kneeless cripple in a covered carriage, was Sun Bin.
Years earlier, Sun Bin had studied military theory under the same master as Pang Juan. Pang Juan had risen first. Pang Juan, learning that his old classmate was the better strategist, had Sun Bin summoned to Wei, then framed him on a fabricated charge, then sentenced him to bin — the cutting off of his kneecaps — and to having his face tattooed with a criminal's mark. Sun Bin survived because a Qi envoy smuggled him out of Wei, hidden in a wagon. He arrived in Qi unable to walk, his face a brand of disgrace, his name no longer his own.
Now Pang Juan was at Handan, deep in Zhao territory, with his army strung along a four-hundred-mile supply line.
Tian Ji wanted to march straight to Handan and engage him there. Sun Bin shook his head.
A man untying a knot does not punch the knot. A man breaking up a fight does not throw a fist into the middle. Strike the empty, avoid the full. Confuse, then control.
He pointed not at Handan but at Daliang, Wei's capital — left unguarded while Pang Juan was away.
Tian Ji turned the army west and marched on Daliang.
Pang Juan, hearing his own capital was about to fall, abandoned the siege of Handan and force-marched home. His army arrived at the village of Guiling exhausted, strung out, and with no idea where the Qi army was. The Qi army was waiting.
Pang Juan's force was annihilated. He himself escaped, barely. Wei's military supremacy — the supremacy Marquis Wen had built and Wu Qi had honed — had just been cracked by a man Pang Juan had personally crippled.
Pang Juan now had thirteen years to think about it.
The shortest distance between you and your enemy is rarely the route to him.
Sun Bin did not need to defeat Pang Juan in Zhao. He needed to put Pang Juan somewhere Pang Juan could not be defended — back home, exhausted, with his pants down. The strategic question is never where is the enemy; it is where will the enemy be tomorrow if I act today.
In the same year: Han attacked the rump state of the Eastern Zhou and took Lingguan and Linqiu. Chu's Zhao Xixu became chancellor; Jiang Yi told him a sharp little parable about a man's beloved dog who urinated in a well, and asked the chancellor to reflect on which courtiers were doing the equivalent in his master's household.
Qin's da liang zao — the highest military rank — invaded Wei. The other states encircled Wei at Xiangling. Wei was now being chewed from two sides. The state that had bestrode the age was learning what being a victim felt like.
Shang Yang personally led an army to surround Wei's city of Guyang and forced its surrender. Wei returned Handan to Zhao to free up troops. Chinese politics had become a circle of states each holding hostages from each other, each negotiating to give them back in exchange for a chance to live another year.
In Han, Marquis Zhao appointed Shen Buhai as chancellor. Shen Buhai was a low-born functionary from the conquered state of Zheng who had studied the Yellow Emperor / Laozi tradition mixed with Legalism. He once asked Marquis Zhao to give an official posting to his own elder cousin. Marquis Zhao refused. Shen Buhai was furious — until Marquis Zhao explained:
You taught me to govern by laws and titles. If I make an exception now for your cousin, I am breaking your own teaching for your sake. Which would you prefer — that I betray your principle, or that I disappoint your family?
Shen Buhai apologized. He had just been administered, in public, by the man he was teaching to administer.
The teacher who can be administered by the student has built a real student.
Marquis Zhao did not just learn Legalism from Shen Buhai. He used Legalism on Shen Buhai. Power that has been internalized can be turned on its source — and the source, if the source is wise, will smile and bow.
Shang Yang built the new Qin capital at Xianyang — twin towers, broad palaces, a straight grid. He moved the court there from the old capital at Yueyang. Qin was now visibly a different state.
Qin and Wei met for talks at Tong. The Marquis of Zhao died. His succession went to court — a son named Xie fought the rightful heir; Xie lost and fled to Han.
No event recorded.
Shang Yang overhauled Qin's tax code and put the new system into effect.
The chronicle gives this single line. What it omits: this is the move that monetizes the entire reform program. Until tax reform, Shang Yang's laws had been about discipline. After tax reform, they were about funding — the army, the roads, the granaries. The state that paid fifty gold pieces for a man who moved a pole could now pay an entire field army for a year, every year, without bankrupting itself.
A Zhao prince named Fan attempted a coup in Handan. He failed and was killed in the fighting. The chronicler records it in a single line, the way one records bad weather.
Qi executed one of its officers, named Mou. The Duke of Lu died and was succeeded by his son. The state of Wey — once a midsized power — formally demoted itself, dropping its rank from "duke" to "marquis" and accepting subordinate status to the three Jins.
States in this age either grew or shrank. The middle was no longer a place anyone could afford to live.
No event recorded.
No event recorded.
The Zhou king formally bestowed the title of Hegemon (ba) on Qin. The title meant nothing in real power terms — Qin already had the power. But the formality is its own statement. The Son of Heaven was now publicly recognizing what every state already knew. The man who had handed the key away in 403 BC was now handing the title away too, this time to the state that would, eventually, take the rest of the kingdom from his descendants.
No event recorded.
The Battle of Maling
Pang Juan had spent thirteen years planning revenge for Guiling. Wei attacked Han. Han, predictably, asked Qi for help.
King Wei of Qi convened his ministers. Should we save Han early or late?
Chancellor Cheng said: Don't save them at all. Tian Ji said: Save them now, before Han collapses, or the next state Wei attacks will be us.
Sun Bin said: Save them late. If we move now, we fight Wei when Wei is strong and Han is fresh. If we wait until Wei has been bled by Han, we will fight a tired Wei. And we will fight them on our schedule, not theirs.
King Wei sent secret envoys to Han promising that help was coming, but did not move his army. Han, believing reinforcements were imminent, fought five battles against Wei without surrender. By the time Han was on its knees, Pang Juan's army was exhausted. Then Qi mobilized.
Tian Ji marched directly toward Daliang — the same trick from Guiling. Pang Juan, now wiser, recognized the pattern, abandoned Han, and moved to intercept.
But Sun Bin had counted on Pang Juan being wiser this time.
He ordered the Qi army to leave behind the cookfires of one hundred thousand soldiers on the first night. The next night: fifty thousand. The next night: thirty thousand.
Pang Juan, tracking the campsite remains, sent his report to himself: I knew it. The men of Qi are cowards. Half of them have already deserted.
He left his slow infantry behind and pushed forward with light cavalry, racing to catch the fleeing Qi army.
The Qi army was waiting for him at Maling, in a narrow defile. Sun Bin had stripped the bark off a great tree and inscribed on the white wood: Pang Juan dies under this tree.
Pang Juan arrived at dusk. He saw the writing. He held a torch up to read it.
The torch was the signal Sun Bin's archers had been waiting for. Ten thousand crossbows fired from both sides of the defile.
Pang Juan, shot through, said: So I have made the cripple's reputation. Then he cut his own throat.
Wei's army was annihilated. Wei's heir, Crown Prince Shen, was captured. The strongest state of three generations was now broken in the field.
Old wounds are weapons stored at room temperature.
Pang Juan crippled Sun Bin in his early thirties. Sun Bin destroyed Pang Juan in his early fifties. The thirteen years between Guiling and Maling were not a passive interval. They were the marinade. A man who has wronged you and forgotten is not safer for having forgotten — he is only less prepared.
The chronicle's last line for the year: Chancellor Zou Ji of Qi hated Tian Ji, and slandered him. Tian Ji's victory had made him too dangerous to keep. Sun Bin's general — the man without whom Maling would not have happened — was about to be exiled from the state he had just saved. There is a pattern here that no successful general in this volume escapes.
The Letter to an Old Friend
Shang Yang went to Duke Xiao with a strategic argument:
Qin and Wei are like a man with a tumor on his stomach. Either Wei swallows Qin, or Qin swallows Wei. There is no third option. Wei is now weak from the wars with Qi. We will never have a better chance.
Duke Xiao agreed. Shang Yang led the Qin army.
His Wei counterpart was Gongzi Ang — once Shang Yang's friend and colleague when they were both young officials in Wei. The two armies camped in sight of each other.
Shang Yang sent Gongzi Ang a letter:
I cherish our old friendship. We are now generals on opposite sides, but I cannot bear to fight you in earnest. Let us meet, drink together, and negotiate a peace that lets both armies go home. Old friends should not destroy each other.
Gongzi Ang, who remembered the young man Shang Yang had been, agreed. He rode into the Qin camp with a small escort to drink wine.
Shang Yang's soldiers seized him at the cup. The Wei army, leaderless, broke. Wei lost the western marches in a single afternoon.
Marquis Hui of Wei sued for peace, surrendering all the territory west of the Yellow River. Shang Yang returned to Xianyang in triumph. Duke Xiao gave him fifteen towns in Shang and Yu, from which he took the formal name Lord of Shang — the name by which we still call him.
In the same year, Qi and Zhao attacked Wei. The Duke of Chu died, succeeded by his son.
No event recorded.
The Death of Shang Yang
Duke Xiao of Qin died. His son took the throne as King Hui of Qin.
The new king's first act was to listen to the petitions that had been silenced for twenty years. The faction around Gongzi Qian — a senior prince whose nose Shang Yang had once cut off as punishment for opposing the reforms — accused Shang Yang of plotting rebellion. Royal officers were sent to arrest him.
Shang Yang fled toward Wei. He stopped at an inn near the border for the night and asked for a room. The innkeeper checked the new ID papers Shang Yang himself had designed under the reforms.
Without the proper travel pass, by the law of Lord Shang, I cannot let you stay. If I do, both of us will be executed.
Shang Yang wept. So have I been entrapped by my own laws.
He pressed on into Wei. Wei refused him asylum: You betrayed Gongzi Ang in 340. We do not forget. They turned him back at the border and sent him home.
He returned to his fief in Shang. He raised a small force from his estate and tried to rebel against Qin. He was defeated and killed in the field. King Hui ordered his body torn apart by chariots and his clan exterminated to three generations.
The chronicle adds a final note. In the early years of his chancellorship, Shang Yang was overseeing a mass execution by the Wei River. He sentenced so many men in a single morning that the river ran red with the blood of the condemned. He had built his system on this kind of zeal. The system, in the end, was zealous enough to execute its own builder.
The system you build to discipline your enemies will be inherited by your heirs.
Shang Yang's heirs were the men who arrested him. His laws had given them the language, the procedures, and the legitimacy to take him down — exactly as he had used them to take down others. There is no reform so disciplined that it stays loyal to its author.
No event recorded.
Mencius and the King
The earth-altar at the great Qiu shrine of Song collapsed — an omen of the first order in the old religion, ignored by the chronicler in the line after.
A scholar from the small state of Zou named Meng Ke — known to history as Mencius — arrived at the court of King Hui of Wei (now styling himself King of Liang).
The king greeted him. Old man, you have come a thousand li. What benefit will you bring to my state?
Mencius answered:
Your Majesty, why must you speak of benefit? There is humaneness, and there is righteousness. That is enough.
If a king asks "what benefit to my state?", his ministers will ask "what benefit to my house?", and the common people will ask "what benefit to me?" Each rank pursuing its own benefit, the state is brought to ruin. In a state of ten thousand chariots, the man who murders the king will come from a house of a thousand chariots. In a state of a thousand chariots, from a house of a hundred. The proportion is not small. To put benefit ahead of righteousness is to teach men to seize without satisfaction. There has never been a humane man who abandoned his parents, nor a righteous man who put his ruler last. Your Majesty: speak only of humaneness and righteousness. Why must you speak of benefit?
The king listened. He did not hire Mencius. He had hired Pang Juan, and Pang Juan had brought him losses. He had nearly hired the man who became Shang Yang, and instead let Shang Yang go to Qin. Now he was hearing Mencius and would let Mencius go too.
Wei was about to spend a generation losing the men it could have had. The losses would not be measured in territory. They would be measured in choices Wei could no longer make.
A leader who asks 'what's the upside?' has already taught the answer to everyone below him.
King Hui asked the wrong question and got, in his lifetime, the right answer in the form of a chronicle that records his losses one by one. The question a leader asks aloud is the question every employee will adopt as their own. Choose the question more carefully than you choose the strategy.
Qin attacked Han and took Yiyang. Han had been the smallest of the three Jins from the start. It would be the first to fall, three generations later. The crack widened in this year.
The kings of Qi and Wei met at Xuzhou and recognized each other as kings — wang — putting themselves on equal rank with the Son of Heaven. Marquis Hui of Wei was now King Hui. King Wei of Qi remained King Wei.
The Zhou king was no longer the only king. He was now the smallest king in a kingdom of kings.
The same year: Marquis Zhao of Han built a tall ceremonial gate. A scholar named Qu Yi-jiu told him: Your Majesty will not pass through that gate. The marquis asked why. Qu Yi-jiu answered: Because it is the wrong time to be building. When men of state should be repairing breaches, you are decorating entrances. Marquis Zhao laughed. He died two years later, before the gate was finished.
The Yue king Wuqiang attacked Qi.
Su Qin Ties the Knot
Chu attacked Qi and besieged Xuzhou. Han's tall gate was completed; Marquis Zhao died on cue, before passing through it.
And then, in the longest single-year entry of the volume, a man from Luoyang arrived in the courts of six states.
Su Qin had failed first in Qin, where King Hui of Qin had refused his services after Shang Yang's death soured the new king on outside advisors. Su Qin then went to Zhao. The chancellor of Zhao at the time refused him too. Su Qin then went to Yan. The Duke of Yan, after some hesitation, gave him a chariot, horses, and travel money — and a single instruction: Try to talk Zhao into joining a coalition against Qin.
The Duke of Yan was the first ruler in the age to fund Su Qin's idea. The idea, in its developed form, was this:
Qin can break any one state in the eastern alliance, but it cannot break six states standing together. Qin's strength is in division. The eastern states' weakness is in not having looked at a map together for fifty years.
Su Qin went to Zhao first, then to Han, then to Wei, then to Qi, then to Chu. To each king he made the same argument with different details. The chronicler preserves the speeches.
To King Xuanhui of Han: Han fields half a million troops. Han's bows shoot eight hundred yards. Han's crossbow soldiers can fire continuously without rest. With these forces, why do you bow to Qin? Bowing to Qin will not save you; it will only buy you another year, after which Qin asks for more. He who joins the vertical alliance keeps his land. He who joins the horizontal compact loses it piece by piece, year by year.
To King Hui of Wei: Your Majesty's territory is a thousand li, the houses are dense, the fields are overflowing — but you serve Qin. The dignity of a state is not its size, it is its sovereignty. A small state that serves no one is a state. A great state that bows is a province in waiting.
To King Wei of Qi: Qi is a state behind four passes. Two thousand li of land, half a million troops, granaries like mountains. Three armies, the best of the five-family levies. Why does Qi look west toward Qin? Qi has nothing to fear from anyone, unless Qi forgets itself.
To King Wei of Chu: Chu is the strongest state under Heaven. Six thousand li of land, a million troops, a thousand chariots, ten thousand horses. If Chu joins the vertical alliance, Qin will not move. If Chu joins the horizontal compact, every other state will follow Chu's lead — and Chu will have led them all into bondage.
Each king signed.
Su Qin became Director of the Vertical Alliance — the man simultaneously chancellor of six states. He carried six chancellor's seals on his belt. When he passed through Luoyang on his way home to visit his family, the Zhou king himself swept the road for his arrival. The brother who had once mocked Su Qin for being a poor scholar now served him kneeling.
For the next fifteen years — until Zhang Yi would unravel the whole arrangement on Qin's behalf — Qin's armies could not move east of the passes. One man with a system had locked an empire out of half a continent.
The state that cannot be defeated alone is the state that has not yet faced a coalition.
Qin's strategy had always been to fight one neighbor at a time and beat each at home. Su Qin's only insight was that the neighbors had not yet figured out they did not need to fight one at a time. Sometimes the great move is not technical. Sometimes it is the meeting that the room had never had before.
The chronicler closes the year: King Wei of Qi died. He had ruled for thirty-six years. The man whose ministers had been called his treasures, who had boiled his flatterers, who had funded Sun Bin and broken Wei twice, was gone. His son took the throne as King Xuan of Qi — and his first act was to discover that Chancellor Zou Ji had been slandering Tian Ji for years. Tian Ji was recalled, and Zou Ji's faction was demoted.
The Duke of Yan died. The Duke of Wey died.
King Hui of Qin sent Xishou — a Qin general — to deceive Qi and Wei into joining a Qin-led attack on Zhao, splitting Su Qin's vertical alliance.
This was the move Su Qin had warned about. The horizontal compact (lianheng) had begun. Qin could not yet break the vertical alliance by force. But it could pry it apart at the seams. Wei surrendered the territory of Yinjin to Qin in exchange for peace, renaming the area Huayin. Qi attacked Yan, took ten cities, then returned them. The trust that had bound the six states was now visibly fraying.
No event recorded.
Qin attacked Wei and besieged the cities of Jiao and Quwo. The vertical alliance, in theory, should have responded. It did not. The seams Su Qin had stitched were under tension and beginning to give.
Qin attacked Wei, crossed the Yellow River, and took Fenyin and Pishi. The Duke of Chu died, succeeded by his son King Huai of Chu — a name that will recur for the next twenty-five years, mostly as a punchline. In Song, a younger brother named Yan attacked his ruling brother Tichneg; Ticheng fled to Qi, and Yan declared himself ruler of Song. Another small dynasty cycle.
Qin's prince Hua and Zhang Yi led an army that surrounded Wei's city of Puyang and took it.
This is Zhang Yi's first appearance in the chronicle in his own name. He was the man who would, in the next volume, undo Su Qin's vertical alliance one persuasion at a time. He had studied under the same master as Su Qin. The two of them had been classmates. The Warring States produced these pairs over and over: Sun Bin and Pang Juan, Su Qin and Zhang Yi, Shang Yang and Gongzi Ang. The closest friendships in the age were rehearsals for its sharpest betrayals.
Qin formally annexed the Yiqu state — a frontier kingdom of the Rong people on Qin's western border — turning it into a Qin county and reducing its king to a minister. The frontier had been domesticated. Qin now had no one at its back to worry about. It could face east and concentrate.
In the same year: Qin returned Jiao and Quwo to Wei, as part of an evolving carrot-and-stick rhythm. Take, return, take again, demand more for the second return. It was the same trick a generation of Qin diplomats would use on the eastern states, until the eastern states ran out of cities to be taken from.
The Marquis of Zhao died. In the fourth month of the following year, on the wuwu day, Qin formally proclaimed itself a king — wang — for the first time. The chronicler folds the next year's news into this entry. Qin was now a king, on equal rank with the Son of Heaven and with King Wei of Qi and King Hui of Wei. The remaining states all followed within five years.
The Duke of Wey died. His son took the throne as Lord Sijun.
No event recorded in this volume; see prior year for Qin's self-proclamation.
Zhang Yi personally led the Qin army against Wei and took the city of Shan.
In Yan, Su Qin had been having a private affair with the dowager — the late Duke Wen's wife — and the new Duke knew it. Su Qin, fearing for his life, told the Duke:
If I stay in Yan, Yan does not gain weight. If I go to Qi, Yan does — because I will work in Qi as Yan's secret asset.
The Duke agreed and sent him on his way. Su Qin's vertical alliance had been, all along, a system that paid him personally regardless of which state he was technically serving. He was now leaving the system to operate it from a more lucrative chair.
Qin's Zhang Yi met with the chancellors of Qi and Chu at Niesang. The horizontal compact was coalescing. Within the same year, Han and Yan both proclaimed themselves kingdoms.
Only one ruler in the age refused: King Wuling of Zhao. He said: Without the substance, how dare I take the title? Let my people simply call me lord. In a season when every ruler was inflating his own rank, the ruler of Zhao deflated his. It would turn out to be the right move; King Wuling, two volumes from now, would be the only ruler of the age to successfully reform his army on the model of the steppe nomads, conquer territory north of the Yellow River, and die secure in his innovations.
No event recorded.
End of a Reign — and a Sidebar Worth Keeping
King Xian of Zhou died. His son took the throne as King Shenjing, opening Volume 3.
The Duke of Yan died, succeeded by his son Kuai — a man whose decisions, two volumes from now, will produce one of the great farces of the age.
The Qi king awarded Tian Ying the fief of Xue. Tian Ying — the Lord Jingguo — wanted to fortify Xue with walls. A guest argued against it:
Have you not heard of the great fish of the sea? No net can hold him; no hook can pull him; but if he sloshes himself out of the water, even ants can pin him down. Qi is your sea. Stay in your sea.
Lord Jingguo abandoned the wall project.
He had forty sons. The youngest was born to a low-status concubine and named Wen — the future Lord Mengchang, one of the four great patrons of advisors in the late Warring States.
Lord Mengchang once visited the king of Chu, who gifted him an ivory bed. The transport official Dengtu Zhi was assigned to escort it — but the bed was so valuable he was terrified that even one scratch would bankrupt his whole family if he were held responsible. He came secretly to a senior retainer of Mengchang and offered a personal jade pendant if the retainer could persuade Mengchang to refuse the gift. The retainer presented the case to Mengchang. Mengchang refused the bed.
He then asked the retainer: How did you have the courage to bring this to me?
The retainer answered: Whenever I see a corrupt motive in someone else, I check it against my own. I know how I would feel if I were Dengtu Zhi. So I spoke for him.
Mengchang ordered the answer engraved on a wooden tablet at the gate of his estate, with these words: Whoever can magnify my name, prevent my errors, or enrich my house with private gifts kept clean — let him enter.
Here ends Volume 2. In Volume 3, Zhang Yi begins his great unraveling of Su Qin's vertical alliance, one persuasion at a time. The age that began with the Partition of Jin in Volume 1 is now firmly in its middle phase. The reformers have come and gone. The strategists have arrived. The age of the talkers is just beginning.
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