Word: shihuangdi
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...other festivals have been cited as inspirations, including the east Asian festival of the burning of the scholars on the new moon of the fourth lunar month (the equivalent of April 1 in the western calendar). The holiday began to evolve (or devolve) 2,200 years ago after Qin Shihuangdi, the unifier of China, infamously set fire to books and gazettes that he disagreed with; today it is celebrated by "sacrificing" jokey messages to the gods, setting slips of paper aflame like incense in hopes that the amused divinities will rain down good fortune...
...dynasty) since slaves were considered valuable property and used mostly for light or clerical duties. One to six convict laborers, on the other hand, died each day at a typical large imperial worksite, building roads, opulent palaces and tombs, including the most famous of all: the mausoleum of Qin Shihuangdi, the first Qin Emperor, who, in 221 B.C., unified China. Their lives were so cheap that a single convict graveyard near the mausoleum sprawled over 22 acres (nine hectares...
...Free craftsmen, not convicts, sculpted the celebrated terracotta warriors and horses guarding Qin Shihuangdi's vast underground necropolis. But as Barbieri-Low debunks, they were not the master artists they are sometimes trumpeted to be. Many were just journeymen, working on component parts upon which they inscribed their names not as Monet-like signatures but as part of quality-control procedures. The names worked as premodern barcodes. Shoddy platters, censers, stone carvings and so on could be traced back to the workshop that produced them, and the artisans could be punished accordingly. The inscriptions also worked as brands, and forgeries...
...girdled by four miles of wall, lies under a 150-ft-high tumulus where excavation has yet to start. It may or may not be as rewarding as the dig for the warriors, who can thank grave robbers for their remarkable preservation. Only four years after the death of Shihuangdi, marauders made off with all the bronze weapons the soldiers carried, and set fire to the wooden roof that covered the long rows of the terra cotta army. The roof collapsed and buried the soldiers alive, as it were, much as Vesuvius' lava covered the citizens of Pompeii...
...standardized weights and measures, and installed a common currency and written language. He began the construction of his tomb even before he had consolidated his conquests. The work took 36 years. According to a historian writing about a hundred years after Shihuangdi's death in 210 B.C., some 700,000 conscripts worked on the burial chamber, which they "filled with [models of] palaces, towers, and the hundred officials, as well as precious utensils and marvelous rarities. Artisans were ordered to install mechanically triggered crossbows set to shoot any intruder. With quicksilver, the various waterways of the empire, the Yangtze...