We know King Chao Cheng of the small but militant northwestern state of Ch'in unified the Warring States by means of war and bribery, establishing the empire Westerners call China (from "Ch'in) in 221 B.C., bestowing upon himself the imperial name Shih Huang Ti (Zhuangdi) or "First Sovereign Emperor." Although this Son of Heaven descended to Earth by the usual means of dragon foam, he was nevertheless conditioned by the natural law of Heaven and Earth. He "made" imperial China, but the Yellow Country made him, just as the poet ("maker") fashions his poem but not the Truth it reveals by means of his heritage. King Cheng could name himself the First Sovereign Emperor only if he was truly an emperor over all the civilized states. And he could not throw several thousand years of history overboard and still rule effectively for long; rather than try to start from scratch, he wisely used tradition to his own advantage.
Seeking the best model for his new empire, the king consulted with his political ministers, learned scholars, and natural practitioners. No doubt he was presented with a concoction of historical facts brewed in legend and myth along with prescriptions for his own imperial regimen. It is not easy for us to reconstruct the legendary and mythological underpinnings of the First Sovereign Emperor's empire two thousand years after the facts of his time, which were, in turn, rooted in the preceding ages including the Stone Age. And he did not make our task any easier when he ordered many of the old books burned after dissenting scholars used them as authority to object to his chosen scheme; he intended to have what we have today, a government monopoly on public education; official copies of the banned works were kept in the imperial library for examination and interpretation by qualified professors, but the archives were later burned by the rebels. King Cheng's approach to empire was a synthesis of many doctrines; but eclectic dogma is bound to be opposed by one or another of the schools it borrows from; once again the contradictions proceed, including that of the dogmatic skeptic who claims the contradictions demonstrate there is no such thing as Truth except, perhaps, the Way, however that may be. Our Legalist Son of Heaven knew very well what the Way is on Earth: his way. Evidence to the contrary was destroyed; the restoration of that evidence by those scholars who naturally hated him is suspect; therefore we are left to speculate on scant remains.
The remnants are riddles for which various solutions are offered. Amongst them we find ancient lists of the most distinguished or popular emperors who supposedly ruled long before King Cheng was born in 259 B.C. Several of the most remote emperors are composite, semi-divine characters clothed in contradictory legends and myths. The Greek mythographer Euhemerus, who flourished about the same time as King Cheng, believed the gods of myths were once real men and women. His point was well taken. If we are attentive we will notice legends being fabricated the very moment a person dies - flattering obituaries for the most notable personages are prefabricated. Deceased persons become better or worse posthumously than they were while living. We love life and fear death, hence we do what we can to keep at least the memories alive to make life more meaningful for the living. As death draws nigh, we might even grow fond of the bad times and find ourselves investing our own money and tears in elaborate rituals for persons we happened to dislike but were supposed to love or to fear and honor for our own good.
Legends do make an important person seem greater after death; he or she may be "worshiped" as a god or goddess - or at least AS IF he were a god and she were a goddess. We "worship" the past because we do not want it to die, for that would imply our own death. Despite their ambivalent relation, the differences between father and son are resolved by death: both are to be reconciled one day, thus the Son of God says he loves us in the name of the Father: "I go to prepare a place for you... I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am, there you may be also... Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me."
If ancestors were not "worshiped", if generational memories were no longer formally celebrated, civilization itself would perish. For instance, the practice of "filial piety" is certainly more civilized behavior than patricide; no doubt some undeserving fathers died imposing filial piety, but still humans are predisposed to love their progenitors everywhere. However that may be, reverence for ancestors is humankind's common heritage. It was most carefully cultivated in China from the earliest times, and some of the most important personages achieved godly status in legends and myths, therefore we can euhemerize.
Euhemerize as we may, we will not always find historical persons behind legends and myths. Whenever a mythical hero or legendary emperor was wanting, one was invented and elaborated over the centuries to fit the current needs for a collective father. King Cheng wanted to consolidate his gains and make the most of them. The disorders of the Warring States period he brought to and end had given rise to the free thinking of China's golden age of philosophy, to the 'Hundred Schools.' Necessity is indeed the mother of invention, and, quite naturally, ideas for new orders were planted in grounds ploughed by war. Some plants flourished and flowered as systems, such as the combined Yin-Yang School and Five Elements (Powers) School. But this five-petalled flower symmetrically smiling at Heaven had its roots in the Yellow Earth. Heaven was still round, Earth was still square, the Son of Heaven still rode the square chariot with the round umbrella. The revolution wanted was a revolution away from disorder and anarchy towards order and hierarchy. The new philosophy was not substantially new after all, for what was wanted was not an uncertain future but a Restoration, a return to the mythical Golden Age.
Of course the more skeptical Taoists were content with life in the sticks; they recommended going with the flow instead of fighting it, but it was a natural flow, and, as we might have noticed despite its irregularities, nature has its order. Nearly all the thinkers of the day yearned for the semblance if not the reality of a Great Peace, including shamanistic wizards and relgious Taoists who came up with some intriguing spatio-temporal schemes for restoring a harmonious heavenly order to Earth. Now agrarian emperors from time immemorial have appreciated the social value of symbolic sketches and related conduct symmetrically organized according to time and place - everything has it place in season. The shamanistic Taoists dusted off the legendary emperors and created a few besides, deifying them and relating them to historical epochs and to the cardinal directions; incidentally, the "wizards" did not pull their diagrams out of an empty hat: they were part of a great synthetic scheme purposed to bring China out of chaos into harmony.
Of course the staunch Confucians thought the exagerations about emperors were absurd if not dangerous; they continued to rely on intuited human virtue for the proper ordering of society. One of Confucius' students once pressed him with questions about the legendary emperors; Confucius would give no more than a thumbnail sketch along with a stern warning not to get emperors and dynasties mixed up or to go to foolish extremes speculating about them. He would have shaken his head at the new lists made up several centuries later for Shih Huang Ti's Ch'in Dynasty and for the emperors of the succeeding Han Dynasty. Of course the historians have done their level best to sort everything out, but today we have students adamantly swearing by different names of emperors who have overlapping characteristics as well as different rankings on lists of Three or Four or Five of this sort of emperor or that sort of emperor and so on and so forth. At least there is something for everybody - still one wonders whether it might be better to just remember three virtues and act accordingly.
I am presently working on the most obscure list of all, my 'Three Primordial Emperors'. I call these "emperors" "primordial" because I believe they represent the triunal cosmic source of empire. Some Chinese scholars refer to the "san huang", or three emperors, often translated as the "Three August Ones." I allude to them as mine because of my preposterous speculations about them, which would no doubt be scoffed at by Confucians as useless, and ridiculed by anyone who understands the Chinese language; then again, perhaps not - we shall see.
Before King Chao Cheng chose his imperial name, his consultants offered for his consideration the Three Primordial Emperors:
T'ien Huang (Heavenly Emperor)
Ti Huang (Terrestial Emperor)
T'ai Huang (Great Emperor)
T'ai Huang was urged on him as the best one of all - the ancient historian Ssu-ma, who was closest to the original sources, does not say why. As we can see from King Cheng's imperial name, "Shih Huang Ti", King Cheng chose Ti Huang instead.
The Three Primordial Emperors may have been historical personages... old documents refer to "the Three Tombs"... hmm... but Ssu-ma found no mention of the Three Primordial Emperors in the extant imperial archives, so he fell silent just as any good Confucian historian should do when he has no facts to go on. Therefore I am happily left to speculate with the other speculators. I claim the Three Primordial Emperors are a familial triune such as those found in other ancient civilizations. My "Chinese" Trinity is familiar: Heaven (Father); Earth (Mother); and their Relation (Son) - the Son is their portion of the future Way. I believe King Chao Cheng was attracted to the Mother personage, Ti Huang, for several good reasons.
"Huang" sounded one way means "almighty; great; august; the ruler; the sovereign." The pictograph is the Sun rising over the king (wang) who upstandingly relates Heaven and Earth. Philologists say the rising Sun above the symbol for king is actually derived from a similar symbol, that of the rising Moon, meaning "self."
"Huang" sounded another way means "the color of the Earth; Yellow; the Imperial color since A.D. 581." The pictogram looks like a man walking who has a cultivated field for a body and the midday Sun for his head.
Now what does "Ti" mean? Sounded one way, it means "emperor." The pictogram is of the emperor in his robe, wearing a fancy hat.
On the other hand, "Ti" means "the earth; "the soil; one of the Three Forces." The pictogram has the component "t'u" also meaning "earth; soil; Earth as one of the Five Elements." The other component is "shih", meaning "a generation of 30 years; an age; the world."
Therefore I infer King Cheng considered himself as a Sun King and Yellow Man rising over Yellow Country near the Yellow River. His homeland of Ch'in is especially yellow by virtue of the carpet of greyish yellow soil (loess) covering the region. Another emperor, one who allegedly lived more than two thousand years before King Cheng, also bears the imperial name: "Huang Ti" (2698-2599); he is commonly known as the "Yellow Emperor"; canonized, he is sometimes called the "Great God Yellow." His principle temple is in Sian (Xian), close to King Cheng's ancient capital. We save the illustrious Yellow Emperor for another chapter.
Now when King Cheng took to heart the title "Huang Ti", he did not choose the color Yellow or the element Earth for his dynasty; he chose Black and Water; and we shall address the reason therefor in yet another chapter of our success story. Let us close this chapter with a final note concerning the novel selection of Chao Cheng's title.
It was customary in King Cheng's day to endow a dynastic ruler with an official imperial name after his death. The ancient Shang Dynasty customarily attached "ti" to notable ancestors' names. The term or name "Shang Ti" evolved as a sort of collective or Highest Ti. Whether or not Shang Ti was merely a symbol for an imaginary national ancestor or was a monotheistic or polytheistic entity is controversial. In any event, "Ti" was often employed to designate emperors or sons of Heaven (T'ien). The Chou Dynasty (1030-221) which followed the Shang Dynasty (?1520-1030) used the term "wang" (king) in the posthumous names of its rulers. As for King Cheng's Ch'in Dynasty (221-206), he decided to differ from the posthumous practice of entitlement; he introduced the novelty of selecting his own imperial name and the names of his heirs rather than submit to the undependable judgement of posterity: he chose Shih Huang Ti, reverting to the old "Ti" for the last term of his title - two previous Ch'in kings of Ch'in had presumptuously tried on the title "Ti" but sheepishly revoked it - only the king with a united empire was entitled to the almighty title. Hence King Cheng was the First (Shih) Sovereign (Huang) Emperor (Ti) of the Ch'in Dynasty. His heirs were to be called "Second Sovereign Emperor, Third Sovereign Emperor, and so forth on down the line for a thousand years. There was in fact a Second Sovereign Emperor for a short while (209-207 B.C.), but never a Third: the empire had been so reduced by misrule and rebellion that the last Ch'in (207-206) had to call himself a king (wang) again: Ch'in Wang..
---To Be Continued Next Chapter---
Dictionary:
Giles, Herbert A., Chinese-English Dictionary, London: Bernard Quaritch, 1912