The Boy Who Inherits

A Chancellor Grieves Quietly

The Hedong governor Wang Ji was caught corresponding with foreign lords and executed in the marketplace. Wang Ji had been Fan Ju's patron — the man who smuggled the future chancellor of Qin out of Wei a decade earlier. Now he had betrayed Qin from his governor's seat.

Worse: Zheng Anping — Fan Ju's other recommended officer — had defected to Zhao two years before, taking twenty thousand troops with him. Fan Ju had personally vouched for both of them. Under Qin law, the man who recommended a traitor shared the traitor's punishment.

Fan Ju attended court every day and grew visibly thinner. The king, watching him, sighed publicly. Fan Ju asked the reason. The king answered:

Bai Qi is dead. Zheng Anping and Wang Ji have betrayed me. I have no good general inside, and many enemies outside. I am worried.

Fan Ju understood. His own life was now leverage in the king's hands — to be used not as punishment but as performance, a reminder of obligation he could not refuse. He resigned the chancellorship and retired before the king's worry could become an order.

A man named Cai Ze — a refugee from Yan who had spent years studying physiognomy — heard of Fan Ju's predicament and engineered an audience. He recited to the chancellor the list of statesmen who had built empires for their kings and then died on their kings' orders: Shang Yang of Qin, Wu Qi of Chu, Wen Zhong of Yue. Each accumulated more glory than his king could tolerate. Each was executed by the king he had built up.

He let the implication land. Fan Ju resigned formally. Cai Ze inherited the chancellor's seal.

General Mu attacked Wei and took the city of Wu. The king of Han came to court at Xianyang in person. Wei surrendered to Qin's directives without resistance.

The Qin king performed the ancestral sacrifice to Shang Di at Yong — the Qin royal precinct. The chronicle records it in one line. It is the first time a Qin king has performed the Son-of-Heaven's ritual at his own royal precinct rather than in the Zhou capital. The next half-step is implicit and untaken.

The Lord of Wey came to court at Wei. Wei seized him and killed him. His brother was installed as the next Wey lord — Lord Yuan — Wei's son-in-law. The tiny state of Wey, having survived the Spring and Autumn period and most of the Warring States, was now openly a Wei puppet.

The King of Fifty-Six Years Dies

In the ninth month of autumn, King Zhaoxiang of Qin died. He had reigned fifty-six years — the longest reign in the Warring States. He had come to the throne as a teenager under his mother's regency, ruled as a figurehead for forty years, taken the wheel after Fan Ju's 266 BC speech, presided over Changping, presided over the destruction of Zhou, and outlived three crown princes. He had buried his mother, his uncle, his deadliest general, and his closest chancellor.

His son Zhu succeeded him as King Xiaowen. The new king elevated his concubine Lady Tang to Empress Dowager status and confirmed his own son Zichu (formerly Yi Ren) as Crown Prince.

The Zhao court, recognizing the new alignment, sent Zichu's wife and son back from Handan — they had been held there since the boy was born. The boy was now nine years old. His name was Zheng.

The king of Han put on mourning robes and attended the funeral in person.

A Reign of Three Days

In the tenth month of winter, on the jihai day, King Xiaowen took the throne. On the third day, on the xinchou day, he died.

The chronicle records this in two clauses. There is no commentary, no explanation. He had been Crown Prince for fifteen years. He had been king for three days.

His son Zichu took the throne as King Zhuangxiang of Qin. The young king elevated Lady Huayang to Empress Dowager Huayang and Lady Xia to Empress Dowager Xia — his two mothers, biological and adoptive. The merchant who had once put him on this path was waiting.

The Merchant Becomes Chancellor

Lu Buwei was made Chancellor of Qin and given the title Marquis Wenxin, with the income of one hundred thousand households around Luoyang as his personal fief. The investment he had made in a poor hostage prince in Handan ten years earlier had paid in the largest currency the age could offer.

General Mu Ao (蒙驁) attacked the rump Eastern Zhou court — the last fragment of the ancient royal house, separate from the Western Zhou that had surrendered in 256 BC. The Eastern Zhou ruler was deposed but allowed to keep his ritual sacrifices. The territory was absorbed into Qin.

Mu Ao continued east and took the cities of Chenggao and Xingyang from Han. Qin established Sanchuan Commandery out of the captured territories — sitting directly on the old Zhou heartland, the symbolic center of the Chinese world.

In the fourth month of summer, there was a solar eclipse. Mu Ao attacked Zhao and took the cities of Yuyu (the city Zhao She had defended in 270 BC) and thirty-six others. Wang Geli — the deputy Qin commander — broke off and took two further Zhao cities.

A King Dies Young, a Boy Inherits

Mu Ao attacked the upland Han territory and finally took the cities of Shangdang. Qin established Taiyuan Commandery.

A five-state vertical alliance — Wei, Zhao, Han, Chu, Yan — under Lord Xinling's command attacked Qin's eastern advance. They drove Mu Ao back to the Hangu Pass. It was the last successful vertical-alliance campaign in the Warring States.

Qin responded with sabotage. They sent ten thousand units of gold to courtiers in Wei with manufactured letters: Lord Xinling has done great things abroad — every state listens to him. He aims to make himself king of Wei. The Wei king, who had never forgiven his brother for stealing the tally a decade earlier, recalled Lord Xinling and stripped him of command.

Lord Xinling never accepted another official appointment. He spent his last four years drinking heavily and consorting with women — a deliberate self-destruction to advertise his uselessness as a political threat. He died in this same year.

In the fifth month, King Zhuangxiang of Qin died after a reign of only three years. He was thirty-four years old. His son Zheng, age thirteen, inherited the throne.

For the first time in Chinese history, a child sat on the Qin throne. Lu Buwei, the merchant who had placed the child's father on this throne, became regent. The boy called him "Second Father" (仲父).

Mu Ao stabilized the eastern front. The chronicle entry is short. The boy on the throne is reading, listening, watching. He will not speak in his own voice in this volume for nine more years.

The general Biao Gong attacked the Wei city of Juan and took thirty thousand heads. The body counts are continuing, year over year. Han, Zhao, and Wei are now contracting visibly on every map.

The Zhao general Lian Po — last seen at Changping eighteen years ago, now in his late seventies — was at odds with the new Zhao king and fled to Wei after a campaign dispute. He had been the only Zhao commander Qin actually feared. Wei accepted him but did not give him a command. He spent his last years in Daliang waiting for a recall that never came.

A great famine. The chronicle marks it in two characters: 大饑.

In spring, Mu Ao attacked Wei and took the cities of Yang and Yougui. In the third month, the campaign ended. Lord Xinling — Wei's last protector — died this year. The chronicle records his death in one line.

Mu Ao attacked Wei and took the cities of Suanzao, Yan, Xu, Changping, Yongqiu, Shanyang, and twenty others. Qin established Dong Commandery out of these former Wei lands. The eastern coast of the Yellow River, once Wei's heartland, was now Qin administrative territory.

The Last Vertical Alliance

Chu, Zhao, Wei, Han, and Yan combined in another vertical alliance to attack Qin. The Chu king was named alliance leader; Lord Chunshen commanded. They took the small city of Shouling and reached the Hangu Pass.

The Qin army came out. The five-state army was routed.

The Chu king blamed Lord Chunshen. Lord Chunshen, who had run Chu for twenty-five years, was now distrusted. Three years from this, he would be murdered in a Chu palace coup. The era of the four great patrons of advisors — Mengchang, Pingyuan, Xinling, Chunshen — was effectively over.

A man from Guanjin named Ju Xin — a former Zhao officer who had been transferred to Wei — was given high command of the Yan army afterward. He was sent to attack Zhao the next year and was killed in a battle outside Handan. The Yan king Xi continued the war and lost more cities. The pattern of small states fighting each other while Qin took larger bites continued.

The Qin king attacked Wei and took Ji. The two-character entry is reaching its rhythm. Each year, one or two cities.

Wei surrendered the city of Ye to Zhao to buy a temporary alliance. The trade did neither state any lasting good.

The Lao Ai Rebellion

This is the longest entry in the volume — over a thousand characters — and the pivot of the young king's reign.

The boy Zheng was now twenty-two. He was preparing for the formal capping ceremony at the ancestral temple of Yong — the rite at which a Qin king ceased to be a minor and assumed personal rule.

But the Qin court of the past nine years had been run by two people: Lu Buwei as chancellor-regent, and a man named Lao Ai (嫪毐) — a fake eunuch whom Lu Buwei had smuggled into the Empress Dowager's harem years earlier when his own affair with her became too dangerous. Lao Ai had become her lover and her political agent. She had borne him two sons. He had been elevated to Lord Changxin and given two fiefs at Shanyang and Taiyuan, with his own household of thousands.

Lao Ai had now spent years building his own faction inside the palace. When the king reached his capping age, Lao Ai would lose his patron. He decided to strike first.

He forged the king's seal and the Empress Dowager's seal and raised an army from his fief — palace guards, his own household forces, and bandits he had cultivated. He marched on Yong, where the king was performing the capping rite.

The young king, informed in advance by a court informant, was ready. He ordered his commanders Lord Changping and Lord Changwen to put down the rebellion. They engaged Lao Ai's army outside Xianyang, killed several hundred of his men, and routed the rebellion in a single afternoon.

Lao Ai fled. The king issued a manhunt: one million in cash for the live capture; five hundred thousand for the head. He was caught within days.

The judgment was thorough:

• Lao Ai was torn apart between five chariots (the che lie punishment — pulling the body in five directions until it separated).
• His entire clan — three generations — was executed.
• His two sons by the Empress Dowager were taken from her and smothered in sacks in her presence.
• The Empress Dowager herself was placed under house arrest in a side palace called Yongyang.
• More than twenty of Lao Ai's ministerial supporters had their heads displayed in the marketplace.
• Four thousand of his household guests were stripped of rank and deported to Shu.

The Empress Dowager Huayang remained free; the surviving senior figure was the original Empress Dowager, the king's biological mother, and she was the one in the side palace.

Then, three months later, the king did something more dangerous than the rebellion itself. He banished his mother permanently. He issued an edict: anyone who speaks on behalf of the Queen Mother will be executed.

Twenty-seven officials spoke on her behalf. Twenty-seven officials were executed and their corpses stacked at the palace gate as a public warning.

A traveling scholar named Mao Jiao of Qi arrived in Xianyang and requested an audience. The doorkeeper warned him about the previous twenty-seven. Mao Jiao said: Tell the king the scholar Mao Jiao of Qi has come to add to the count. With me, it will be twenty-eight.

The king summoned him in a fury and ordered the cauldron prepared. Mao Jiao bowed and said:

Your Majesty, I have heard that a man who has lived long and well does not avoid death; a king who is to inherit ten thousand years does not avoid criticism. Death does not deflect death; words do not deflect words. Will Your Majesty hear me?

The king nodded.

Mao Jiao said:

You are a king reaching for the empire. You wish to be Son of Heaven. The world will become Your Majesty's family. But what does the world see? They see you torturing your mother. They see you killing the men who ask you to be kind to her. They see you stacking corpses at your own gate. The man whose own mother is locked in a side palace — what father will he be to the empire?

This is not a reproach. This is information for Your Majesty. If you continue, the world will not accept you. The Vertical Alliance will find its second wind, fed by your cruelty. If you correct it, the world will praise your filial heart and your willingness to repent. The reform is small; the gain is the world.

If Your Majesty wishes, I am ready for the cauldron.

The king stepped down from the throne, took Mao Jiao's hand personally, and said:

Get up. I will do as you say.

He brought the Empress Dowager back to the main palace. He restored Mao Jiao's rank and made him a senior advisor. The corpses at the gate were buried with honor. The king's image was, with one act of public correction, restored.

In the tenth month, Marquis Wenxin — Lu Buwei — was dismissed as Chancellor and sent to live on his fief.

The two-line entry covers the largest political earthquake of the volume. Lu Buwei had been Lao Ai's original patron — Lao Ai existed in the Empress Dowager's bed because Lu Buwei had put him there to free himself from the affair he had grown afraid to maintain. Lu Buwei had survived the immediate aftermath of the rebellion. But the king had needed time to ease him out without provoking another disturbance.

Lu Buwei retired to Luoyang. He kept his title, his fief, his ten thousand household income. He was, for the moment, untouchable.

Zhao invaded Yan and took the cities of Li and Yangcheng. Their army had not yet returned when the Qin generals Wang Jian (王翦), Huan Yi (桓齮), and Yang Duanhe (楊端和) struck Zhao from the rear. They attacked Ye and took nine cities. Wang Jian attacked Yuyu and Liaoyang; Huan Yi took Ye and Anyang.

The Qin generals who would conduct the final conquests are now in command.

The Merchant Drinks Poison

The king sent a letter to Lu Buwei at his Luoyang fief. The text was short and direct:

What service have you rendered Qin? Qin has enfeoffed you in Henan with ten thousand households. What blood relation have you with Qin? You are addressed as "Uncle." You shall move with your family to Shu.

Lu Buwei understood. The exile order to Shu — the remote southwest — was the order to die. He would not survive the journey. He took poison and died on his fief. He was buried quietly. The king issued a follow-up edict:

From this day forward, anyone who manages state affairs improperly, in the manner of Lao Ai or Bu Wei, shall have his clan name struck from the register. Mark this.

The merchant who had bought a prince was finished. The boy he had placed on the throne, now twenty-five, was teaching his court what loyalty to its origins was worth: nothing.

Huan Yi attacked Zhao and defeated their general Hu Qu at Pingyang. One hundred thousand heads taken. Hu Qu killed. In the tenth month of winter, Huan Yi attacked again.

Li Mu Defeats Qin

Huan Yi pressed the campaign and took Yian, Pingyang, and Wucheng from Zhao. The Zhao king, desperate, summoned home from the northern frontier the general who had been holding the steppe border for twenty years: Li Mu.

Li Mu had spent two decades guarding Zhao's northern frontier against the Xiongnu, using a deliberately defensive doctrine — withdrawing his troops, refusing engagement, letting the nomads grow contemptuous, then breaking them in a single coordinated counterattack. He was the one Zhao general who had never lost an engagement he chose to fight.

Now he was given supreme command in the south against Qin.

He met Huan Yi at Yi'an and at Fei — the same terrain. He fought a defensive holding action until Huan Yi's army was exhausted and overextended, then attacked with cavalry from concealed reserves. Huan Yi's army was destroyed. Huan Yi himself fled back to Qin alone.

The Zhao king made Li Mu Lord Wu'an — the title once held by Bai Qi. Zhao had its general. For one year, Qin was checked.

The Qin king mobilized a massive army in two columns — one to attack Ye, one to attack Taiyuan. They took Langmeng and Panwu. They met Li Mu again at Panwu and were defeated again.

For two years running, Qin's eastern advance was stalled by one Zhao general.

Han, recognizing that its border was now indefensible, surrendered the Nanyang region to Qin without a fight. In the ninth month, the Qin king sent troops to take possession.

It was a final inventory. Han had nothing left.

The First State Falls

The interior administrator Teng (內史騰) extinguished Han. He captured King An of Han and absorbed the territory as Yingchuan Commandery.

The first of the six remaining states had fallen. The single line in the chronicle marks the end of two and a half centuries of independent Han.

The Last Defense

Wang Jian assembled the army of Qin's upland territories and marched on Zhao through the Jingxing Pass. Qiang Hui commanded a second column; Yang Duanhe a third — bringing the river-region troops from Henei.

Li Mu and the Zhao deputy commander Sima Shang met them.

The Qin army could not break Li Mu's lines.

So Qin used the technique that had taken Lian Po out of the equation at Changping twenty years earlier. The Qin court sent vast quantities of gold to Guo Kai (郭開) — a favorite minister of the Zhao king who had also been the man who slandered Lian Po into exile eighteen years before. Guo Kai whispered to the Zhao king: Li Mu and Sima Shang are conspiring to defect. They want to betray Zhao to Qin.

The young Zhao king — a weak ruler the chronicle calls Qian — believed it. He sent generals Zhao Cong and the Qi general Yan Ju to take command of the army and arrest Li Mu.

Li Mu refused to surrender his command. He was assassinated on the king's orders. Sima Shang was dismissed.

The general who had won every battle he chose to fight was killed by the king he was protecting, on the basis of a rumor purchased with Qin gold.

Zhao Falls

In the tenth month, Wang Jian took Handan. He captured King Qian of Zhao.

The Qin king came in person to the conquered Zhao capital — the city where his own father had been a hostage, where his own mother had lived in poverty, where Lu Buwei had bought his future. The king walked the streets of Handan and personally identified every family that had once mistreated his mother's household. He had every member of those families executed.

The chronicle records this without further comment. The king who, eight years earlier, had been talked out of permanently exiling his own mother — by Mao Jiao, in the lesson that closed Volume 6's central act — was now, having taken the city she had grown up in, burying everyone she had once hated.

He returned to Xianyang through Taiyuan and Shang Commandery — surveying his new northern frontiers.

In the same year: Prince Jia of Zhao — the elder brother of the captured king — fled north with his household and several hundred surviving Zhao officials. They reached the city of Dai in the far north and proclaimed Jia King of Dai. They allied with Yan against the inevitable Qin advance. A rump Zhao would persist for a few more years on the steppe edge — the way the Eastern Zhou had persisted for ten years after the Western Zhou fell.

The Yan king and Crown Prince Dan watched all of this from the city of Ji and understood that they were next.

A young man named Jing Ke was being introduced to Crown Prince Dan around this time — the assassin who would, two years from now, walk into the Qin court carrying a map and a poisoned dagger.

But that is Volume 7.

Here ends Volume 6. Three Qin kings have died in five years. A boy of thirteen has grown into a king of twenty-five who tears apart his stepfathers, smothers his half-brothers, and walks the streets of his mother's old neighborhood killing the people who once hated her. Han has fallen. Zhao has fallen. The merchant who bought the dynasty has been buried under his own fief.

Five states remain. Wei has surrendered everything but Daliang. Yan watches. Chu still has weight. The two small holdouts — Wey and Dai — are bookkeeping. In Volume 7, the king who is becoming the First Emperor finishes the bookkeeping, and the age of one king begins in full.