28 replies to this topic

[fcharton]

On this forum and elsewhere, the number 700 000 seems to be appearing a lot when referring to things built by Qin Shihuang. I think I have seen it as the number of people :

1- used to build E Pang palace
2- used to build the Qin Mausoleum (sometime saying that they were all staughtered)
3- used to build the Great Wall
4- buried inside the Great Wall

Now, in all cases, the number seems huge (think of the logistics needed to sustain such a work force, or to kill them, or compare it with the probable population of China at the time, knowing that quite a few other convicts were used to keep the borders, or were basically killed). And, even in the case of the Great Wall (the largest of these constructions), one should remember that Qin Shihuang did not really build it, but connected and reinforced previously existing fortifications.

For what I know, the only reference to this figure is found in Sima Qian (chapter 6), who states that 700 000 convicts were sent to build E Pang palace (a large figure if you think of the size of the building), and that some of them were diverted to participate in the construction of Qin Shihuang's tomb. (Again Sima Qian seems to be the only source available, though I would be delighted to be proven wrong on this...)

Now, some chinese texts use large numbers to give an idea of "many" (three or five are often used by Sima Qian to mean "several"), but for what I know, for large figures, they would say 10 000, or maybe a 100 000, not a "precise" number as 700 000.

Besides, the actual 700 000 is quoted in many modern books as the actual figure.

Is there something special with this number? Do you know of other references to it? Why does it seem to be considered serious enough to be used in present day texts?

Francois

[DaMo]

On this forum and elsewhere, the number 700 000 seems to be appearing a lot when referring to things built by Qin Shihuang. I think I have seen it as the number of people :

...

3- used to build the Great Wall
4- buried inside the Great Wall

This particular transition can happen due to accumulative distortion. A message is passed by word of mouth through a lot of people, and it progressively changes into something else.

For example, Chinese civilization is generally considered to be 4000/5000 odd years old. But some overenthusiastic types quote this as dating to 4000/5000 BC.

Or like how 4000 Israelis were estimated to be within the vicinity of the Pentagon and in Manhattan around the Twin Towers on Sept 11th 2001, and this was reproduced in numerous Arab/Islamic/Anti-Semitic media sources as a claim that 4000 Jews (or even 4000 Israelis) were missing from work at the WTC that day. That's a lot of Israelis for a the workforce of a couple of buildings.

[Sephodwyrm]

The great wall took 300000.
And casualty of building the great wall could not have exceeded 300000, since these men were mobilized to face the peasant and feudal king rebels in the reign of Emperor Ershi.

The number that built the maosoleum and E Pang should be 700000 together.

[fcharton]

The great wall took 300000.
And casualty of building the great wall could not have exceeded 300000, since these men were mobilized to face the peasant and feudal king rebels in the reign of Emperor Ershi.

The number that built the maosoleum and E Pang should be 700000 together.

So, summing them up, I get a million people. And this does not represent all the convicts in the kingdom...

Now, what is the population of China at the time? The only estimate I have found puts it around 20 millions, which, I believe, is a high estimate (it was around 100 millions iirc in the beginning of the 18th century, and the empire of the Qing was much larger and densely populated...).

Out of the 20 millions, you have about 10 millions men, discount the boys and old people, you'll probably be around 5 or 6 millions... That would mean that more than 15% of the population consisted of convicts, devoted to these two tasks (and there were other convicts guarding the borders, opening roads, etc...)

These numbers just don't seem right...

Francois

[Kenneth]

No, the numbers dont always seem right. I do not doubt the battles of East ZHou were immense even on world standards but the routinely enormous armies do beggar belief.
The Persian empire was a true world empire even beyond that of Rome, and yet in the decisive battle the figures are at 250,000 men in arms. Fertility of China etc. and all the other stuff aside (and the fact that even doubting these numbers offends some people) for independent states in Zhou to raise armies exceeding this and not neglect infrastucture to the point of collapse leads me to take the pre-Han figures with a grain of salt.
After the unification of China to muster armies even smaller than this could be an immense burden..granted that distance was a factor in the wars against Xiongnu...but Qin Empire & major Han expeditions are actually smaller than some of the East Zhou single states battles casualties!
CJ Peers makes a point the armies # should not always be taken literally because it was on paper shown that 70,000 men might be equiped and then named 'The hundred thousand' as a matter of course. Peers is far from authorative but he isnt simply wrong on all Chinese history. I think there might be basis to this but I will need to post his quote tonight & it may mean something to you (Fcharton)...if you have read the same account as him perhaps.
The Qin massacre of 250,000 men in one incident may or may not be true. I suspect not. Qinshihuang's history is written by Han confuscians so whether it is logistically capable to do that (and authors have commented that NO mass graves to suggest such events have been found) when Nazi Germany would struggle to do that in a week using industrial specialisation. Nazi germany managed tens of thousands a week. To kill 250,000 (who dont stand around once the bodies are piled 20 feet deep) seems rather a challenge when it involves putting them to the sword individually...not to mention a hygiene hazard afterwards!
Just as a good historian might wonder if the ancient Western historians get the precise numbers in ancient battles right then there is nothing wrong with taking such numbers as given to impress people with proportions & scale and signifigance...but not simply always correct in themselves.
To me it is academic to debate numbers, the 'ancient end result' is what counts. Who won. What was built. How long did it take. What did it achieve. etc.

[Sephodwyrm]

Actually, the convicts were mobilized to supplement the forced laborers already working on the grand projects. And in order to achieve so the laws were made more stringent and the Lian Zuo further expanded to other family segments to create more convicts.

[fcharton]

Just as a good historian might wonder if the ancient Western historians get the precise numbers in ancient battles right then there is nothing wrong with taking such numbers as given to impress people with proportions & scale and signifigance...but not simply always correct in themselves.
To me it is academic to debate numbers, the 'ancient end result' is what counts. Who won. What was built. How long did it take. What did it achieve. etc.

Kenneth,

On the "feasibility" part, I believe mustering very large armies was not only very hard (such a large force would be very difficult to move, deploy and even feed) but dangerous from a practical point. In the West, for what I know, until the 18th/19th century the main cause of death in an army during a war was diseases (not battles), and diseases spread all the more easily as the army was large, and stayed in the same place for a while. As such, when building up for a military venture, there was a trade off between having a large army (so that sufficient numbers, once reduced by diseases, arrived to the front), and not having a too big one, which would have to move more slowly, and be more subject to attrition). I suppose the same could be said for ancient china.

In the specific case of building a palace, mausoleum of fortification, the situation is even worse, as the workers stayed in the same place... Too many of them stacked together would have been impossible to manage.

On the numbers themselves, I got interested because I found them both in Sima Qian and in serious modern writings on the era. Now, Sima Qian is usually pretty straight with facts and figures, and carefully avoids any unrealistic or mythical stories in his accounts (sometime going as far as commenting on his sources). In this context, I would personally be tempted to think that in the Shi Ji, 700 000, 500 000 and all such large numbers were just a litterary figure, which should be translated as "a very large number" or some similar periphrase (I would like this to be true, actually, because thinking of such figures as a deliberate lie would cast doubt on other factual accounts from the Shi Ji...)

What bugged me was that these figures were also quoted by modern writers. From travel guides, to general history books, to the internet (and yes CHF), the 700 000 figure is everywhere. This is all the more troubling as we do not have nowadays the political agenda of the early Han emperors (Qin's legacy is clear and impressive by itself). Hence my question on the sources...

Francois

[Bao Pu]

Hi François

Cheng-Siang Chen, in his Encyclopedia Britannica article, says that in the early Chun Qiu period, there were over 13 million people living in “China” and by the beginning of the Common Era (C.E.) there were almost 60 million.

I agree with Kenneth and yourself that those huge numbers found in the stories should not be taken too seriously. People like to impress others with huge numbers and more ancient dates for things. People are amusing, oui?

[Kenneth]

This from "Ancient Chinese Armies; 1500-200bc" which is only let down by lack of references in some areas, but is otherwise helpful book on occasions.

"States...conscript every man availible and many of the armies are huge by pre-modern standards.. Ch'in forces of up to 600,000 are mentioned, and although this must be an exaggeration, 'Sun Tzu's Art of War' considers armies of 100,00 commonplace and accompanies these figures with a detailed analysis of costs which suggests they are more than a geuss. In fact careful estimates of an enemies strength carried out in temples had largely replaced the use of oracles by the 4th century, so at least roughly accurate figures were availible.
Chan-Kuo T'se' contains a discussion on this question in which armies of only 30,000, which were usual in earlier times, are dismissed as inadequate for 3rd century conditions.
Such multitudes could not be adequetely supplied overland in the absence of proper roads and although water transport was used where possible the 'Sun Tzu' recommends feeding them by foraging in enemy territory {This wouldnt work against a ruthless adversary who destroy food and lodgings in the path of advance} and it is not suprising that famine and disease make their appearance....Sun Tzu.."an army which does not suffer from one hundred diseases is said to be certain or victory"

I cant at the moment find the exact quote about an army of, say, 70,000 being named as 100,000. It may actaully have been Yang Hongs book as I read it around the same time. When I locate it I will post it too. Calling 70,000 a larger number would have its uses. It would encourage the soldiers and at the same time may confuse the enemy who hear of a formation approaching by local agents. There are examples both in Chinese history and biblical stories of armies using camp fires or torches at night to give an impression of a larger force than they field and forcing a retreat of the enemy despite numerical inferiority.

Yeah, hygiene (and supply) is crucial. Generalship is as much about logistics. Hence my reference to 'hygiene' in the massacre of (actually 450,000 by one account) Chao soldiers. Whew. What a smell. No death camp furnaces then. Yet no mass graves have been found. Even massacres like Katyn or in the Balkans or under Saddam dont stay secret long and graves of thousands turn up. No Chinese locals seem to have noted the location where the soldiers were buried however. Hmm. Suspicious.
The Han armies and Qin expeditions over 100,000 plus sound OK. Armies of labourers in excess of this sure would be stinky and difficult. 700,000 is close to 3 times the size of Tang dynasty capital at Xian. Kind of problematic.
A look at the modern evidence for sizes of pharoahs work forces and such might provide insight into projects. The Qin emperors tomb, grand as it is, does not compare in terms of physical labour to megalithic projects. We are talking soil and rammed earth. The biggest aspect of the Qin tomb project would be the terracota warriors. This is more like a skilled artisans role, perhaps overseeing convicts teams. Even around Jingdi's tomb there were found iron shackles and collars showing some criminals were worked there. Whether the kilns and workshops at the Qin tomb are large enough to require to justify (or hold) even a fraction of 700,000 seems unlikely. Too many cooks spoil the broth, eh?
Lets look to Eygpt for comparison (google search, ahoy). The other lost wonders of the ancient word seem to be about skilled & talented overseers in the accounts of construction.
Perhaps the projects of Qin, thought to have bought down the regime, are simply given the (as Francois said) 'very large number' that demonstrates their folly.
The Han 'downsizing' of tomb projects are notable as a result of this...but still 1/3 of yearly Han revenue was spent on Imperial tombs. They may not have conscipted so many away from their families, but only the ceramics were scaled down...& the tomb mound of Qin is actually only medium sized amongst Han tombs. Some are really enormous. The Han tombs were also filled with impractical amounts of precious things. Wudi had so many there wasn't room for all. Gold, bronze and jade objects are found in the periphery around his tomb in modern times and even in Song the tomb was far from exhausted by robbers.
700,000 is a way of portraying Qin cruelty..but just how much energy was expended vis-a-vis Han & Qin is somehow obscured by such numbers.
Best to look at the archaeological evidence. I have books with pictures of workers graveyards around such tombs but they are typically in Chinese and getting them translated is something that entirely slipped my mind untill now.
There are only so many hours in a day.

[Kenneth]

Just checking a few books & paraphrased from 'China's buried kingdoms' which is archaeologically focused;
....Names marked inconspicuosly on the Qin warriors specify the name of 85 master artisans, each who are assumed to have teams of 10 to 12 assistants. According to historical texts the workers were not potters by trade but forced labourers or convicts. The accomodate lack of skills ...most workshops broke the process down into steps...only a few needed the touch of an artisan.

It says ancient texts give 700,000 for the tomb project, while for instance 300,000 built a 500 mile highway under General Meng Tian. Again these are called 'convicts', as Seph aludes to, legalism may have become a pre-text to gain more human fuel for the Imperial projects. The book shows uncomfortable iron collars that have been found around the Qin tomb too.

I will get some of the books I got in Xian looked at for anything useful. Their pictures are quite grisly ;of shallow graves crammed together in a workers cemetary. An educated geuss at the # of workers might have been entertained by Chinese archaeologists based on the tomb area finds. Here's some of the graves. The Cabridge Illustraed History of China had other graves, and little ceramic slabs had details about the grave occupant imprinted in some. A few coins thrown into some of the graves is about as lavish as it got. A part of the text is shown here, so some Chinese readers may beat me to it...

[vp98]

I sawe in a China made documentary, it has stated that the state of Qin is basically geared to support the military. The society by large is classified into 3 major sections - farmers to supply the food, artisans, to make weapons and build/repair defenses and soldiers. So other country consider Qin to be a barbaric state, and the lifestyle so undesirable.

Because of the way the society is structured, Qin was able to support up to 1 million soldiers with a population of not more than 12-15million. This pave way for Qin to conquer China.

So we cannot use our modern understanding to estimate the numbers and gauge if they accurate and possible by our modern day perspective.

While it is true that the ancient do blow up their numbers as a form to glorify themselves. We should not dismiss it as outright rubbish.

[fcharton]

I sawe in a China made documentary, it has stated that the state of Qin is basically geared to support the military. The society by large is classified into 3 major sections - farmers to supply the food, artisans, to make weapons and build/repair defenses and soldiers. So other country consider Qin to be a barbaric state, and the lifestyle so undesirable.

Because of the way the society is structured, Qin was able to support up to 1 million soldiers with a population of not more than 12-15million. This pave way for Qin to conquer China.

So we cannot use our modern understanding to estimate the numbers and gauge if they accurate and possible by our modern day perspective.

While it is true that the ancient do blow up their numbers as a form to glorify themselves. We should not dismiss it as outright rubbish.

I did not want to sound like I discarded it as outright rubbish, sorry if I did.

On the size of armies, I believe that the point is not whether Qin could muster an army of 1 million men (I assume you speak of the imperial period, Qin as a kingdom was much less populated, and certainly could not and, and besides need not, assemble such a force), but, rather, on how such a large force could be used. Armies have to be fed, moved, deployed, equipped, and in the context of the third century BC (no modern agriculture, probably low crop yields, no modern industry or means of transportation, and above all no modern medicine), I do believe that such a large force could just not be used efficiently.

My original point was different : the 700 000 figure appears as a number of construction workers (whom Sima Qian tells us were convicts) assigned to a specific site (mausoleum, E Pang palace, great wall). In this case, several problems arise : was such a large number of workers needed? how could it be sustained (fed, and prevented to be decimated by epidemics)? As others, I believe the answer to both questions is no. However, I was intrigued by the fact that ancient texts, when they want to describe a large number, would say 10 000, or 100 000, or even 1 000 000, but that 700 000 was a precise figure...

Francois

[Kenneth]

Nobody is dismissing it as rubbish but questioning the viability & logic to such a large work force. There is nothing unreasonable about this. What is unreasonable is to be sentimental and unquestioning of history just because the story is grand.
I hadn't yet reported back on some of the translation of texts on the Qin tomb. The graves above are small in number. These are attendant graves to the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, and are speculated as the remains of his children who were killed in the succession by his weak willed son, and at the suggestion of Li Shi & the other eunich antogonist whose name I forget.
The bodies in the graves are partially dismembered and chopped up.
When I see more details about actual workers graves I will add it.
The same text gave the usual figures for the workforce, and said 2 million people total were labouring on projects for Qin. It is possible...say for example the building of a highway or the wall where they may be seperated into teams and work on sections towards each other...but the actual people needed to build the tomb (note; not the contents) is not so great. Even the figures given for #master artisans and #people in teams below them to make the terracota warriors was estimated by academics above to be more like hundreds.
If between them they only made 3 terracota warriors a day then over a few years they could fill the largest pit with thousands of warriors, yet the work was still incomplete at the time if Shi Huang Di's death after more than a decade....kind of odd.
What were the other 600,000 odd people doing for those years? The tomb itself is not enormous as I already said.
Finely constructed objects and well administrated teams would make more sense than so many people working within a dozen square miles of tomb and fouling the land.
I still await evidence of mass workers graves. It is worth keeping an open mind on the mystique of Qin Shi Huangs mania. If 300,000 people built the biggest highway in China at that time then 700,000 people on his personal tomb project is certainly a way to emphasise how monstrous he may have been.

[fcharton]

I hadn't yet reported back on some of the translation of texts on the Qin tomb. The graves above are small in number. These are attendant graves to the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, and are speculated as the remains of his children who were killed in the succession by his weak willed son, and at the suggestion of Li Shi & the other eunich antogonist whose name I forget.

Thinking of Zhao Gao?

On the tombs, this explanation looks better : these seem to be individual tombs, and I don't see forced laborers in such a large project (even if they were not 700 000, there had to be quite a few of them...), being individually buried (just think of the size of the cemetary at the end of the project...)

The same text gave the usual figures for the workforce, and said 2 million people total were labouring on projects for Qin.

This looks like a lot to me... I suppose it could be possible to get a raw estimate of the available labour force available. Just to launch the debate, here are a few calculations (this is pure guess, guys, don' t hesitate to throw numbers at me...), an update of the previous one...

Bao Pu gives a chinese population at 60 millions in the beginning of the Common Era. Let us start from this (I think it is a bit high, but anyway). This is 200 prosperous years after Qin, on a slightly larger China. Besides, people living in regions far away from the capital probably escaped a lot of its rule. Say the population was around 30-40 millions in the Qin dynasty.

Discard the women, that is 15-20 million men, discard the boys and old men. In modern france, people under 14 represent about 20% of the population, it should have been much more in Qin time, as life expectancy was much shorter, say 35-40%...), which leaves about 10 millions men able for service (and the same number of women). I think this is a pretty high estimate, because it assumes that men from all part of china were available...

At this point, I lack data. Basically, as the farmers certainly represented the largest fraction of the population, having an estimate of the ratio peasant/total population would probably provide a decent idea of the available worker+military force available (I assume, as you seem to do) that the number of artisans was pretty small...

In any case, 2 millions labourers working on Qin projects would represent some 20% of the available male workforce. These clearly could not all be convicts (one person out of five!).

On top of this, you have to add to this the army, police, guards... possibly more than 500 000, for a total of 25% of the male adults... At first glance, this 2 000 000 figure seems very large, although it depends on what it meant by Qin projects (in a totalitarian regime, everybody, is working for the state...)

Francois

Edited by fcharton, 06 October 2005 - 06:15 PM.

[Borjigin Ayurbarwada]

Archeological data now recovered shows An Fang palace was probably never close to finish. There was no sign of burning as recorded in shiji by xiangyu.


"Now, what is the population of China at the time? The only estimate I have found puts it around 20 millions, which, I believe, is a high estimate (it was around 100 millions iirc in the beginning of the 18th century, and the empire of the Qing was much larger and densely populated...)."




estimates from modern analyzation of Chinese georaphic statistics

500b.c.: 27 million
300b.c.: 32 million
200 b.c. 18 million
1 A.D. : 65 million


The Qin population is probably around 25 million from the conquest wars before and Chu Han war after.