Qin Shi Huangdi: The Emperor

10/15/12 • 13 min

There are two Chinese leaders whose final resting place is thronged by tourists - Mao Zedong and Qin Shi Huang, the emperor of terracotta soldier fame.

But they also have another thing in common - Qin taught Mao a lesson in how to persecute intellectuals.

Chairman Mao Zedong has been dead for nearly 40 years but his body is still preserved in a mausoleum in Tiananmen Square.

The square is the symbolic heart of Chinese politics - red flags and lanterns flank the portrait of Mao on Tiananmen Gate where he proclaimed the People's Republic in 1949. But the red emperor owed the idea of this vast country to an empire builder who lived 2,000 years earlier.

Claiming the title of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang kick-started nearly 2,000 years of imperial rule, unifying China through economic and political reforms, and also via the construction of a massive nationwide road system.

But this was all at the expense of thousands of lives - and to maintain power he outlawed many books and buried scholars alive.

So, over 2,000 years later does history remember him as a hero or villain?

Presenter: Carrie Gracie Producer: Neal Razzell.

There are two Chinese leaders whose final resting place is thronged by tourists - Mao Zedong and Qin Shi Huang, the emperor of terracotta soldier fame.

But they also have another thing in common - Qin taught Mao a lesson in how to persecute intellectuals.

Chairman Mao Zedong has been dead for nearly 40 years but his body is still preserved in a mausoleum in Tiananmen Square.

But this was all at the expense of thousands of lives - and to maintain power he outlawed many books and buried scholars alive.

So, over 2,000 years later does history remember him as a hero or villain?

Presenter: Carrie Gracie Producer: Neal Razzell.

Previous Episode

The Soong Sisters - The Consorts

On one bank of the Huangpu river in Shanghai stands a forest of steel and glass skyscrapers, but on the other - colonial splendour. A century ago, foreigners unpacked a whole new fascinating way of life on the docks here.

From Western ships came bicycles, engine parts and young Chinese with a vision of modernity - adventurers like Charlie Soong who had been out to see the world and had come back.

Charlie had sons, and in any earlier generation he'd have ignored his daughters but he had been educated by American Methodists and he believed in Christian virtue, democracy and the dignity of women.

From this waterfront, he sent his daughters to America to get a grounding in all three.

As Shanghai boomed, their horizons expanded. And in 1914 the eldest, Ailing, made a strategic match with a young man, H H Kung. Money was no object. He and his bride would become China's richest couple.

Qingling, the second sister, married a very different kind of politician - Sun Yatsen, the revolutionary leader of China, who had become President of China after the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1912.

As Sun was an older man and already married, Qingling's parents objected - so she jumped out of a window and eloped with him.

All three sisters were very much in the public eye, and in the news magazines almost as often as film stars - but life wasn't just a round of photo opportunities and jazz.

Qingling's husband Sun Yatsen died in 1925 and his movement split into warring camps.His successor, Chiang Kaishek, was a no-nonsense military man - some would say a fascist. Qingling was horrified by his tactics. And doubly horrified when she discovered her younger sister Meiling was planning to marry him.

Presenter: Carrie Gracie Producer: Neal Razzell.

Next Episode

Liu Bei - The Warlord

Early in the 3rd Century, China's mighty Han empire collapsed. From the wreckage emerged three kingdoms and competing warlords with an eye on the throne.

Centuries later their struggle was turned into China's favourite warfare epic - a story that underlines the historical fragility of the empire, and still provides an object lesson in good management.

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is for China roughly what Homer is for Europeans, a swashbuckling adventure story, with lots of blood, excitement and craftiness on the battlefield.

Chinese boys live and breathe the story, with its hundreds of characters in cloaks and long robes and multiple sub-plots, spanning a century of convulsion before the empire was reunited.

"It is a general truism of this world that anything long divided will surely unite, and anything long united will surely divide."

These are the opening words of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The action begins just as the Han empire is about to break up.

The government is struggling to suppress a rebellion by peasants called the Yellow Turbans. It is forced to do what it hates to do: outsource troop recruitment - and that gives an opportunist called Liu Bei his big break.

Presenter: Carrie Gracie Producer: Neal Razzell.