Burning of books and burying of scholars
Qin dynasty purge of heterodoxy (213–212 BCE)
Burning of books and burying of scholars
The burning of books and burying of scholars were purported acts of intellectual suppression by the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang starting in 213 BCE. That year the emperor ordered destruction of books that praised the defeated pre-imperial states. The following year he is said to have ordered 460 scholars buried alive for withholding forbidden books. The events were alleged to have destroyed philosophical treatises of the Hundred Schools of Thought, with the goal of strengthening the official Qin governing philosophy of Legalism. Modern historians doubt the details of the story, which first appeared more than a century later in the Han dynasty official Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian. As a court scholar, Sima had every reason to denigrate the earlier emperor to flatter his own, but later Confucians did not question the story. According to the historian Ulrich Neininger, their message was, "If you take our life, Heaven will take the life of your dynasty." Modern scholars agree...
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