(Crossposted here). While visiting Atlanta, we visited an exhibit that's a selection of some of the thousand statues found in 1974 in Ch'in's grave, which inspired me to write this.
On the one hand, he had fewer citizens available to kill, and we have no idea what his casualty rate was, though we do know he had the same appetite for continued mass bloodshed as his more recent 20th-century compatriots Stalin, Hitler, and Mao whom we have good data for. On the other hand, one reason we don't know may well involve an extra special evil deed; see the end.
Some standard Evil Emperor evil: He killed plenty of people on the march to conquer the first big agglomeration of China seen. He was arrogant - of course he named the newly unified land after guess who. He killed lots of people on the first Great Wall project, roadbuilding projects, and an unbelievably huge tomb. He so irritated his contemporaries that his dynasty only outlasted him a measly 4 years.
How has he outperformed his more recent forebears? Well, he was much more effective at censorship, having held a nice book bbq of most of the scrolls extant in his newly conquered big kingdom. And, he's still probably still killing people, unlike those wimps Attila, Genghis, Mao and Stalin.
He solved the graverobbing problem that disturbed the rests of so many of his peers the evil way, of course, by making it a very deadly place. No doubt, working on that project had to've been deadly in of itself. The result full of deadly traps. And, for good measure, he poisoned the ground in much of it. It took over two millenia for the grave to be reached, and Chinese archaeologists can still only reach the outer part, the 1,000 statues; no doubt it's still killing graverobbers. If he kept records of his killings, they'd be in the inner part, the palace where the ground's poisoned.
On the one hand, he had fewer citizens available to kill, and we have no idea what his casualty rate was, though we do know he had the same appetite for continued mass bloodshed as his more recent 20th-century compatriots Stalin, Hitler, and Mao whom we have good data for. On the other hand, one reason we don't know may well involve an extra special evil deed; see the end.
Some standard Evil Emperor evil: He killed plenty of people on the march to conquer the first big agglomeration of China seen. He was arrogant - of course he named the newly unified land after guess who. He killed lots of people on the first Great Wall project, roadbuilding projects, and an unbelievably huge tomb. He so irritated his contemporaries that his dynasty only outlasted him a measly 4 years.
How has he outperformed his more recent forebears? Well, he was much more effective at censorship, having held a nice book bbq of most of the scrolls extant in his newly conquered big kingdom. And, he's still probably still killing people, unlike those wimps Attila, Genghis, Mao and Stalin.
He solved the graverobbing problem that disturbed the rests of so many of his peers the evil way, of course, by making it a very deadly place. No doubt, working on that project had to've been deadly in of itself. The result full of deadly traps. And, for good measure, he poisoned the ground in much of it. It took over two millenia for the grave to be reached, and Chinese archaeologists can still only reach the outer part, the 1,000 statues; no doubt it's still killing graverobbers. If he kept records of his killings, they'd be in the inner part, the palace where the ground's poisoned.
