Terminological Considerations

I begin with an examination of the different verbs used in received historical texts and excavated documents that indicate coerced movement of populations, for these fall into fairly distinct categories that help us to understand the nature of different types of coerced migration and resettlement. Some have very pejorative or punitive connotations and are used to indicate the forcible movement of indigenous peoples, war captives, or convicted persons. Others are more neutral in their connotations and are used to indicate enticed or compensated relocations of wealthy nobles or ordinary peasants, although there certainly was some coercion involved with these groups as well.

The verb zhú 逐 “to drive out” has a sense of driving herds of animals or expelling something unwanted. It is seen in historical texts in reference to driving out indigenous peoples (usually horse breeders or pastoralists) from their traditional lands, so that agriculturalists can “properly” utilize the land. For example, in the Zuo Tradition (Zuozhuan 左傳) text (Lord Xiang, fourteenth year [559 BCE]), Juzhi 駒支, a chieftain of the Rong 戎 agro-pastoralists and horse breeders, who had shared territory with the Qin state and often intermarried with their lineage, describes how the Qin drove them out of their lands in previous years.

When those being driven out were not barbarians (who were viewed as akin to beasts), the verb chū 出 “to force to go out” or “to expel” is sometimes applied instead, as in the following example in the Records of the Grand Scribe (Shi ji 史記) of Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145–86 BCE):

Probably the most common verb seen in historical and administrative texts to indicate resettlement it xǐ 徙 “to move” or “to relocate.” In the vast majority of instances, this verb is used to indicate semi-voluntary or at least compensated relocation, in which the relocating households are given a form of compensation to offset the hardship of the move or to take into account how difficult it would be to start producing crops (i.e. tax grain) immediately in the new territory. The basic connotation of the word xǐ is neutral and not punitive, though the relocated persons may not have felt so neutral about the arbitrary decision of their ruler to make them pack up and move. In some cases, the people are offered multi-year tax breaks, being freed from labor service obligations or excused poll taxes or agricultural taxes for a certain number of years after the move.

For example, in 212 BCE, the “Basic Annals of the First Emperor of Qin” in the Records of the Grand Scribe records:

In the first relocation, 30,000 households (approx. 150,000 people) were moved from other unrecorded locations to populate Li Town, which was an artificially created town situated near the First Emperor's necropolis at Mount Li, near present-day Xi'an. It is believed that the populations of such “tomb towns,” common throughout the following Western Han period as well, were not only employed practically, in maintaining the necropolis and in raising food for use in sacrifice, but were also employed symbolically to represent a populous district over which the deceased emperor could rule in spirit.Footnote ¹⁰ The second relocation, moving about 250,000 people to Yunyang 雲陽, 160 km northwest of the capital of Xianyang 咸陽, was to fortify the population of an area that was the starting point of the great trunk road that the Qin had just constructed called the Direct Road (zhídào 直道), which traveled 736 kilometers from Yunyang, at the far northwestern edge of the Capital Area, north to Jiuyuan 九原 (near Baotou, present-day Inner Mongolia).Footnote ¹¹

The verb qiān 遷, which I translate in documents as “to exile” or “to banish,” is used to indicate relocation as a punitive action or as a legal punishment stipulated for some infraction of the statutes and ordinances. It is also the verb used to indicate the forced resettlement of those amnestied for crimes, commuted from their sentences, or manumitted from slavery for the purpose of colonization.Footnote ¹²

For example, the “Basic Annals of Qin” in the Records of the Grand Scribe states:

In this example, as part of a multi-year campaign to annihilate the powerful southern state of Chu, the king of Qin's generals attacked key Chu-held areas and either killed or drove out the existing populations, then replaced them with convicted criminals from Qin labor camps. It is interesting to note that even after amnesty, the taint of penal servitude still required the use of the punitive verb qiān 遷 to indicate the relocation of these persons, and not the verb xǐ 徙, used for the movement of ordinary peasants. It is also unclear if the convicts could volunteer for these amnesty relocations or if they were just chosen at random by government officials.

Banishment was also a tool frequently used to get rid of lower-level retainers of disgraced or convicted political leaders. Like the banished retainers of Lao Ai 嫪毐 and Lü Buwei 呂不韋 after their fall from power, most political exiles were sent to the backwater Qin colonial outposts of Shu 蜀 (present-day Sichuan) or Hanzhong 漢中 (southwestern Shaanxi). There is also a model transcript in the Models for Sealing and Physical Examinations (Fengzhen shi 封診式) text from Shuihudi tomb no. 11 in which a father requests that his son have his feet fettered and be banished to Shu.Footnote ¹⁴ For that case to be chosen as a model suggests that it was a typical punishment meted out to those declared to be lacking in filial piety. Additional crimes in the Qin laws that were punished with banishment include village officials and members of the mutual-responsibility “group of five” making fraudulent claims regarding the ages of youths, the disabled, and those reaching old age and making deceitful entries in the household registers, thus depriving the state of valuable labor and tax resources, as well as local county officials selling goods belonging to the state for their personal profit.Footnote ¹⁵

The verb shí 實 (literally, “to fill up” or “to make solid”) is used in texts to describe either repopulating a city or territory made desolate by war or the driving out of the original population, or to describe filling a land that is empty by Qin standards (i.e. only populated with sparse indigenous groups) with proper farmers from the Qin territories. I choose to translate it as “to consolidate.” For example, in the early fourth-century-CE commentary by Chen Zan 臣瓚 on the Records of the Grand Scribe, it is stated:

This example points out that after driving out the indigenous, nomadic pastoralists from their traditional grazing grounds in the Ordos loop of the Yellow River, both the Qin and Han governments had a difficult time consolidating the area with agriculturalists, who apparently abandoned the area when farming there proved unproductive or dangerous.

Debating the Numbers

Some consideration must be given to the scale and accuracy of the numbers related to the coerced migrations and resettlements presented in the historical texts. As seen in the Records of the Grand Scribe, these are frequently given as enormous round numbers like 400,000 individuals or 120,000 households relocated. While these numbers are not completely outside the realm of possibility, given the estimated population of China at the time of around twenty-five to thirty million people, they are likely to have been exaggerated or distorted for ideological or other purposes. This is further complicated by the ambiguity of the Chinese graph, wàn 萬, used in all such records, which can either mean 10,000 specifically, or just a generally large and imprecise number (i.e. “myriad”).

Assyriologists like Bustenay Oded have confronted this same problem related to the size of Neo-Assyrian deportations. According to the surviving Assyrian royal inscriptions, 1,210,928 conquered persons were said to have been deported by Assyria, just during the reigns of six of the later monarchs. If these numbers were extrapolated to the other reigns for which we have mention of deportations (but no numbers), it would total nearly four and a half million people over three centuries, which would constitute a sizeable percentage of the total estimated Near Eastern population outside Assyria proper. In his study of the mass deportations, Oded clearly argues that the numbers reported in the royal inscriptions must be taken as historical “facts,” since those numbers are precisely what the text has recorded. However, the relationship between these facts and what really happened is open for debate. Royal inscriptions are ritual documents as well as tools of ideology and propaganda, and enormous numbers would have the effect of projecting awesome power and invincibility to both men and the gods. Thus, the historian “can never be certain whether this picture reflects or distorts (to a certain degree) historical reality.”Footnote ¹⁷

Fortunately, in the Assyrian case, scholars have access to numerous administrative and legal texts which also refer to the movement and provisioning of deportees, at least at the local level. These provide a certain check on the royal inscriptions, for while they do confirm that the deportations actually did occur, the numbers mentioned are usually on a smaller scale. Unfortunately, we have only a handful of administrative texts from the Qin period which refer to the coerced movement of populations that could provide a similar check. In addition, even administrative texts, such as the intermediate census records from the Han site of Yinwan, can also contain inflated numbers which have been manipulated for reasons of ideology, or due to simple corruption.Footnote ¹⁸

It has long been recognized that the enormous number of enemies reported by Sima Qian as having been killed during the Qin conquests, such as the supposed 400,000 Zhao soldiers slaughtered at the battle of Changping 長平 (262–260 BCE) are unrealistic.Footnote ¹⁹ The Qin annals from which Sima Qian likely copied these numbers should also be viewed as ideological statements and not raw accounting figures produced by bureaucrats. As with the exaggerated numbers given by Herodotus for the army and navy of Xerxes that invaded Greece in 480 BCE (2,317,610 men), it might be best to divide by a factor of five or ten to come up with more realistic estimates.Footnote ²⁰

Early Qin Deportations and Territorial Consolidation

Scholars of Chinese history are familiar with the large-scale relocations carried out by the First Emperor of Qin after 221 BCE, but forcible relocation and compelled colonization were a part of Qin policy since at least the seventh century BCE. Regardless of the debate as to the ultimate origins of the Qin as a people or a ruling group,Footnote ²¹ in their eventual heartland in eastern Gansu and western Shaanxi, the Qin were sandwiched in between the powerful Zhou kingdom to the east, which ruled much of northern China through an elaborate “feudal” system, and the Rong 戎 groups to the west.Footnote ²² The name Rong is a loose ethnonym used by Sima Qian and other early historians to refer to the various tribes of ethnic non-Chinese living in the foothills and highlands, in parts of what are now Shaanxi, Shanxi, Hebei, and Shandong. The etymology of the name just means “warlike ones,” and we have no clear idea what they called themselves or how many different political and clan groups the term represents. Based on textual descriptions and archaeology, the Rong peoples ranged in subsistence strategies from pastoralism, to agro-pastoralism, to full agriculture.Footnote ²³ Archaeologist Zhao Huacheng 趙化成 has identified the Siwa 寺洼 archaeological culture found along the Xihan River valley in Gansu as a group of the Western Rong.Footnote ²⁴ The burial grounds attributed to their chieftains at Majiayuan 馬家塬 point to a warrior culture based on horse breeding and chariot driving.Footnote ²⁵ In many ways, early Qin material culture shared several traits with the Rong to the west, while overlaying some elements imported from the high culture of the Zhou to the east. One realizes how much the Qin and the Rong shared in common, when one considers that the Qin first rose to prominence at the Zhou court through their expertise at horse breeding and chariot driving, cementing their position as horse experts for the Zhou kings.

When the Western Zhou royal house collapsed in 771 BCE, and moved to the east under pressure of Quan Rong incursions, the Qin protected the Zhou retreat and then basically stepped into the power vacuum left in Shaanxi after the Zhou left. Following 771 BCE, when the Zhou king was now in the east in his new capital near present-day Luoyang, Henan, the Qin began to take on imperial aspirations, and their culture became more and more assimilated to Zhou Chinese culture. After his ascension in the east, the Zhou king enfeoffed the Qin ruler as a feudal lord (gōng 公 “Duke”), on par with others in the realm. Though they had long interacted and intermarried with the Rong to the west, the Qin now started to make sharper distinctions between themselves and the Rong, and over the next several centuries, made a concerted effort to force the Rong out of their indigenous lands so that the Qin could open them up for agriculture. The Records of the Grand Scribe of Sima Qian records major attacks on the Rong by the Qin dukes between 714 BCE and 272 BCE, when King Zhaoxiang of Qin drove out the last major Rong tribe and built the first Qin Great Wall to keep out further incursions from the west, freeing up his military to focus their attention on conquering the major “Chinese” states to the East.

• 714 BCE: Duke Xian of Qin attacks the Po Rong 亳戎 (near preset-day Xi'an).

• 697 BCE: Duke Wu of Qin attacks the Pengxi Rong 彭戲戎 (100 km east of Xi'an).

• 688 BCE: Duke Wu attacks the Gui Rong 邽戎 and Ji Rong 冀戎 (both near present-day Tianshui in Gansu), and turns their territory into Qin counties.

• 659 BCE: Duke Mu of Qin conquers the Maojin Rong 茅津戎.

• 623 BCE: Duke Mu of Qin launches major attack on the Rong and takes 1,000,000 square li of territory, conquering eight (or twelve) major tribes.

• 361 BCE: Duke Xiao of Qin kills the king of the Huan Rong 獂戎 (southeast of present-day Longxi County, Gansu).

• 315 BCE: King Huiwen of Qin attacks the Yiqu Rong 義渠戎 and takes 25 walled cities, making them Qin counties.

• 272 BCE: King Zhaoxiang of Qin destroys the Yiqu Rong tribe and establishes Longxi, Beidi, and Shang Commanderies, and builds a wall to keep out the barbarians.Footnote ²⁶

As Qin expanded to the west and northwest, they eradicated, pushed out, and replaced the indigenous Rong people, whom the Qin increasingly saw as “barbarians,” despite their cultural similarities and shared ancestry with the Qin. I have already translated the one passage above from the Zuo Tradition, dated 559 BCE, which explains that the Qin were covetous of Rong lands and therefore drove them out (“Formerly, the men of Qin, relying on their numbers, and covetous of territory, drove out us, the various Rong tribes”). Another entry in the Zuo Tradition describes these early forced resettlements of the Rong people, specifically, an incident that transpired under Duke Mu of Qin.

Therefore, we see that the Qin policy of removals of locals and forced relocations dates back to the very beginning of Qin history in the eighth century BCE, and first involved a consolidation of the territory in Western Shaanxi and Eastern Gansu that would become their traditional heartland, through the systematic extermination and relocation of the indigenous agro-pastoralist Rong people.

Colonial Expansion into Sichuan

The first great expansion of the Qin state, and its first true colonial endeavor, involved the invasion and annexation of the Sichuan Basin at the end of the fourth century BCE. Sichuan was difficult to access from the Qin domains, requiring traversal of the Qinling Mountains, but once this land was secured, it gave Qin a territorial and resource advantage even greater than the Roman annexation of Egypt in 30 BCE. The Sichuan area had been ruled for centuries by the kings of Shu and Ba, who maintained close ties with the large state of Chu to the east. Sichuan was a crucial conquest for Qin imperial aspirations for several reasons. First, it was located at the headwaters of the Yangzi River, allowing the Qin to float armadas downstream in their attacks on Chu. Second, it was a relatively empty (at least in Qin terms) agricultural basin with tremendous potential for productivity. Third, it harbored an incredibly rich array of natural resources, including brine wells for salt, cinnabar mines for producing mercury and vermillion, and some of the richest iron resources in mainland East Asia. Finally, it was a gateway to the lands to the far southwest, which appear to have been an important source of non-Chinese slaves and gold. The Qin conquered the independent kingdom of Shu in 316 BCE in a fairly swift campaign, and two years later they established Shu Commandery, building the city of Chengdu as the capital. Many scholars now date the beginning of the Qin empire from the conquest of Sichuan in 316 BCE.

Numerous Qin officials were sent to administer the area. The grave of one of these lower-level officials was discovered in tomb no. 50 at the Haojiaping 郝家坪 site in northern Sichuan. This tomb also contained the oldest known Qin legal statute (dated 309 BCE), an agricultural statute that regulated the size and maintenance of standard Qin rectangular agricultural fields.Footnote ²⁸ For the next century and beyond, Qin rulers would send colonists to Shu, and deport criminals and wealthy families there, in a very concerted effort to colonize this bountiful but isolated area.

The first forced colonization to Shu is recorded in the fourth century CE regional history text called Treatise on the Countries South of Mount Hua (Huayang guozhi 華陽國志), but confirmed by many other texts.

This text narrates the aftermath of the Qin conquest of Shu, which began in 316 BCE with the destruction of the Kingdom of Shu by the Qin general Sima Cuo. While King Huiwen of Qin (r. 338–311 BCE) did enfeoff a surviving son of the former Shu king in some territory there, the bulk of Sichuan was divided into two new centrally-administered commanderies, Shu (in the west) and Ba (in the east), administered by a Governor. The text then mentions a Rong Bo 戎伯, who must have been a local powerful figure of the Rong group, discussed above. To counteract his influence in the area, the Qin king relocated 10,000 households (approx. 50,000 people) to consolidate (shí) the area. This was a fairly significant movement of people for the fourth century BCE, and it would be followed by many more in the next century. Shu became the great dumping ground for political casualties, like the retainers of Lai Ai in 238 BCE (4,000 households) and for those banished for crimes like filial impiety. The former Prime Minister Lü Buwei committed suicide when King Zheng of Qin threatened to send him and his family to Shu in 235 BCE. During the final decades of the unification of China in the late third century BCE, many more households from the conquered territories would be relocated to Shu, including the households of rich iron industrialists (see below). By the beginning of the first century CE, during the Han Dynasty, the capital of Shu would be one of the most populous cities in the empire (or in the world), with more than 300,000 registered residents.

The Conquest of the Six States

The so-called Qin unification of China was not a sudden event, ushered in by the First Emperor, King Zheng of Qin. His culminating annexation of the six states during his reign, ending with the annexation of the polity of Qi in 221 BCE, was built on a century of military conquests by his Qin forbearers. Aided by ruthless professional generals like Bai Qi 白起, fueled by booming agricultural and industrial production, catalyzed by the resources and people of the new colonial territories, and facilitated by the extraordinarily long reigns of its third century monarchs, the Qin military machine became a juggernaut during the century from 331–221 BCE, and “rolled up the world like a mat.” The greatest territorial advances occurred under King Huiwen of Qin, during whose long reign the Sichuan Basin and large portions of the polity of Wei were annexed, and under the long-lived King Zhaoxiang (r. 306–251 BCE) of Qin, during whose fifty-six-year reign the capital of Chu was conquered (278 BCE), the Yiqu Rong tribe was destroyed (272 BCE), an entire army of Zhao was slaughtered at Changping (260 BCE), and the Zhou dynasty was extinguished (256 BCE).

Scholars debate whether Qin had a vision of “manifest destiny” as early as King Zhaoxiang's reign and already envisioned a universal empire, rather than just focusing on the current battle and the next opponent. Based on the account of Sima Qian, the modern historian Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (1893–1980) believed that the Qin did indeed have a deliberate policy that governed their military strategy and annexation policy in the third century BCE.Footnote ³⁰ That strategy, articulated by King Zhaoxiang's advisor Fan Ju 范雎 (also written as Fan Sui 范睢) (d. 255 BCE), was to focus the campaigns on neighboring states (like Han and Wei) whose territories were adjacent to Qin, rather than venture far to fight opponents deep in alien territory (like Qi). The policy was summed up by the five-character phrase yuǎnjiāo ér jìngōng 遠交而近攻 “conduct diplomacy with those far away, but attack those who are close by.” Once victory was accomplished over a rival state, the adjacent territory could be annexed by the Qin, with the old residents evicted or slaughtered and Qin colonists sent to replace them. The administrative map would then be redrawn, with the new territory consolidated as Qin counties and commanderies. Cleansed of non-Qin elements, these new swaths of territory became part of the loyal Qin heartland, not hostile annexed territory, and piece-by-piece grew the empire until its force was irresistible.

The first manifestation of a detectable Qin policy of population replacement as part of their strategy for conquest of the major states to the east occurs in a notation for 286 BCE (already quoted above):

Here, at the beginning of the third century BCE, we already see both of the principal types of Qin relocations, the “enticed” or at least compensated type of relocation (the text uses the word mù 募 “to muster” “to recruit”), where colonists are given compensation in awards of rank (which are good for tax breaks and legal protection from mutilating punishments), and the more coercive form in which convicted persons are released from criminal sentences and then “banished” (qiān) to a new area as colonists. The historical record does not say how many people were involved in this particular relocation, or whether Qin just replaced the people of the town of An, or whether the whole countryside of the Henei region was replaced with Qin colonists. This relocation in 286 BCE might not be the very first of this type either, but the notations on conquests from the previous four decades are not quite as explicit on whether Qin colonists were part of the annexations.Footnote ³² Regardless, this record gives us a complete picture of the Qin policy, which was probably an overt policy of conquest. First, attack close-by lands bordering on Qin territory, kill some or all of the male military personnel, expel the remaining residents from the lands (sending them out as refugees, probably to be repatriated to their diminished home state), then relocate Qin peasants and amnestied criminals to replace them.

Recently excavated texts provide a more colorful context for these practices and show us some of the grim realities of Qin total war. In 1975, archeologists discovered a large Qin cemetery at Shuihudi 睡虎地, in Yunmeng County, Hubei, dated to several decades after the Qin annexation of the area from the state of Chu. Many of the tombs belonged to Qin colonial officials, but also to locals who were serving the Qin administration in the area. Tomb no. 4 contained a male burial, accompanied by two personal letters, written on wooden boards. The cemetery was located outside what appears to have been the city of Anlu 安陆 during the Qin. The town of Anlu had formerly been part of the kingdom of Chu, but it had been conquered and annexed by the Qin around 278 BCE. From the context of the letters, it is apparent that the occupant of the tomb was a man named Zhong 衷. The letters were written to him by two of his brothers (by the same mother) Heifu 黑夫 and Jing 驚, who were serving in the Qin army in its campaigns of 224–223 BCE in the territory of Huaiyang, against the forces of the kingdom of Chu, then in its last throes. Zhong must have been buried shortly after he received these letters. Here is a passage from the damaged letter on board no. 6 from the tomb at Shuihudi:

In the letter, Jing writes to his brother, Zhong, of the dangerous situation in the newly conquered Qin territories in the south. The former Chu cities are all abandoned, either because the people fled as refugees, or because they were exterminated by the Qin. The Qin then ordered that amnestied criminals be sent as colonists to consolidate (shí) the empty cities. At the end of the letter, he warns his brother not to travel to the New Territories, because the land is full of robbers.

Another recently excavated official Qin document, which was tossed down a well at the end of the dynasty, reveals a different Qin approach to the “empty” Chu cities left in the wake of the conquest. Here is a portion of that document:

Here, we see that soon after the unification of China in the summer of 221 BCE, the Qin were systematically dismantling some of the abandoned Chu cities and stripping them of valuable materials like the ceramic roof tiles and loading them onto boats. These tiles could be easily transported and used on newly constructed Qin administrative buildings.

The Empire under Qin Shihuangdi (221–210 BCE)

When King Zheng of Qin completed his brutal annexation of the other six states of China in 221 BCE and proclaimed himself Shihuangdi 始皇帝 (First August Thearch), the forced resettlement of households became a central feature of his regime. Despite the fact that there was de facto internal peace and disarmament, large-scale coerced relocations and colonization continued to be carried out. Based on a tally of the records of relocation and colonization in the Records of the Grand Scribe, and on later references to Qin mass deportations and relocations in Han texts, I would estimate that between 221 and 210 BCE, the First Emperor of Qin might have relocated between 10 and 25 percent of the total population of his empire, estimated to number around 25–30 million people.Footnote ³⁵ But not all of these coerced resettlements were the same in nature, scope, or motivation.

First, immediately upon proclamation of the empire in 221 BCE, the First Emperor is said to have relocated 120,000 powerful and wealthy (háofù 豪富) households from the former eastern states to his capital of Xianyang in the far west.Footnote ³⁶ Other texts give us further information on these deportations. Those households who were moved to the capital were not just wealthy merchant families or regular gentry, they were the key noble lineages of the six rival states that the Qin had defeated.Footnote ³⁷ By moving them to the capital, the Qin were accomplishing several things. Assuming that they were allowed to keep at least some of their wealth, their presence in the rather underpopulated and culturally backward Qin capital would adorn the place and lend it the metropolitan and cosmopolitan air it lacked. Of course, having those former nobles close at hand would also make them easier to control and monitor. If left in their former environs, they would have been under constant suspicion of revolt in an attempt to restore the old order. Obviously, since the Qin abolished most noble titles, except for those given to men with the highest military merit, the actual nobilities of these old families would have been stripped and they would have to compete for merit along with other commoners and soldiers under the Qin system. Derk Bodde suggests that the First Emperor housed these former royal and noble families of the six states in the replica palaces he built at Xianyang and would have provided them with government stipends to replace their former revenue, but I find both of these suppositions highly doubtful.Footnote ³⁸ Bodde rightly casts some doubt on the highly suspicious round figure of 120,000 households in the relocation, which would constitute 600,000 persons or more.Footnote ³⁹

The “Biographies of the Money Makers” (Huozhi liezhuan 貨殖列傳) chapter in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Scribe describes a very different fate for several wealthy industrialists and their families. Rather than being relocated to the capital of Xianyang, these men, all of whom were wealthy iron industrialists from places like Zhao and Wei, were banished to the furthest reaches of the empire, to the less developed area of Nanyang (in present-day Henan) and especially to the isolated and barbarous province of Shu (present-day Sichuan), the location of the first Qin colonial conquest mentioned above. Here are the primary passages:

The verb indicated in all these relocations, qiān 遷 (to banish), and the noun lǔ 虜 (a captive) used in one case, definitely indicates that these moves were coerced and punitive. So, were Mr. Zhuo, Mr. Cheng, and Mr. Kong being punished for being wealthy and influential, or was their wealth just confiscated by the Qin state as the spoils of conquest, and they were exiled as an afterthought? Scholars like Ma Feibai and Donald Wagner after him detect a pattern in the banishment of people like Mr. Zhuo and Mr. Cheng from the well-developed iron infrastructure of the heartland of China to the undeveloped frontier in Sichuan, which was full of mineral resources and had easy access to slave labor traded in from the Tibetan Plateau and Yunnan. They suggest that the Qin may have intentionally deported these iron industrialists to this specific area to foster economic development, allowing them to resume their careers as iron industrialists. They would develop the mines and foundries, fill the empire with their products, and probably pay their share in excise taxes as well, which during the Qin could be assessed as high as 40 percent from iron production on government land.Footnote ⁴³ The Qin had been enticing and coercing colonists to settle in Shu for nearly a century, but to more rapidly increase the economic development of this area of great potential took a certain type of colonist, men like Mr. Zhuo and Mr. Cheng, who had already built iron empires elsewhere during the pre-imperial period. Wagner argues that “the Qin rulers were well aware of the usefulness of what might be called ‘proto-capitalists,’ wealthy men who invested in industry rather than land and therefore helped to build up the political and military strength of the state.”Footnote ⁴⁴ He then equates this Qin practice with the Prussian practice under Bismarck, which also utilized financiers and industrialists to bolster the state.

Although there is scant historical evidence in the Records of the Grand Scribe or excavated administrative documents to substantiate it, a cluster of references in later texts suggest that internal population movements during the Qin imperial period were far more extensive than just the movement of aristocrats to the capital and industrialists to the frontier. In the references collected by Ma Feibai 馬非百 (1896–1984), the lineage biographies of prominent persons mentioned in Han-period and later texts frequently state that the lineage was forcibly relocated during the Qin period from one part of the empire to another. Ma suggests that the Qin were attempting some kind of large-scale internal population “equalization” to even out the population disparities in the empire after unification.Footnote ⁴⁵ While there were disparities in population density during the early empire, with higher concentrations of people along the middle to lower Yellow River floodplain and less in the far west and south, I would argue that these Qin internal relocations were more likely carried out to facilitate land allocation to veterans than for any equalization of population density. Under the idealized system of land allocation under the Qin, those holding high rank, or gaining rank on the battlefield, were supposed to be allocated a certain amount of land for agriculture along with a homestead.Footnote ⁴⁶ All the land in the Qin capital area had probably been allocated for some time. When the densely populated and productive lands to the east were conquered in the 220s BCE, this opened up an opportunity to reward those who had gained merit on the battlefield (one was given one step increase in rank for each enemy head cut off in battle). By evicting long-standing landlords from their lands and relocating their households to some uncultivated or unproductive part of the empire, the Qin state could reward their veterans with prime land already opened up for cultivation. At the same time, these relocations would break up regional gentry families and their ties to local power bases and resources they might be able to use for rebellion. If this large-scale internal reshuffling, hinted at in the Han texts, can be further substantiated, it would increase the total estimated population movement during the empire from the 10 percent range (2.5 million) to the 20–25 percent (5–6 million) range, which is staggering to consider.

Some of the more famous coerced migrations in the Qin imperial period were related to the conquest and colonization of the northern and southern frontiers, and many of these relocated persons were convicted criminals or members of despised social groups. In the north, the First Emperor ordered his general Meng Tian in 215 BCE to drive out the Xiongnu nomadic pastoralists from the bend in the Yellow River (the Ordos), and to build a Great Wall to keep them out. Following this campaign, the Qin carved up this region into forty-four counties, and colonized them with approximately 320,000 persons from the interior of the empire who had been sentenced to frontier garrison duty for some infraction.Footnote ⁴⁷ In 211 BCE, another 150,000 normal peasants (i.e. 30,000 households) were moved from the interior of the empire to the far north of the Ordos, giving an estimated total of 470,000 colonists.Footnote ⁴⁸ As noted above, these lands were very hard for agriculturalists to work, being more suited to pastoralism, and the later Han Dynasty would have to repeat the Qin colonization experiment a century later, since most of the Qin colonists had vanished.

Shortly after the conquest in 221 BCE, the First Emperor reportedly sent nearly 500,000 troops to the far south (all the way to the border with Vietnam) to conquer the many chieftainships of the indigenous Yue people. After a setback around 219 BCE, in which the Qin commander was killed in a revolt, the Qin renewed colonization attempts in 214 BCE, when they sent a large force of amnestied criminals and other despised groups under two commanders to retake and garrison the south.Footnote ⁴⁹ This was followed shortly after by a reported 500,000 colonists from the interior provinces of China who were compelled to move to the far south.Footnote ⁵⁰ Another large group of colonists was deported to the south shortly before the emperor's death in 210 BCE.Footnote ⁵¹ At the same time, a large number of Yue people were deported out of their homeland to other parts of China.

Many of those colonists sent to the far north and far south belonged to the so-called “seven despised groups” (qīkēzhé 七科適)Footnote ⁵² According to Zhang Yan's 張晏 (third century CE) commentary they were:

1. 1. officials guilty of crimes

2. 2. absconders

3. 3. adopted sons-in-law

4. 4. merchants

5. 5. those formerly registered as merchants

6. 6. those who parents were merchants

7. 7. those who grandparents were merchants

The Qin targeted these groups for forced relocation, rather than further stressing the peasant population already burdened by taxes and labor demands, since that could lead to agricultural disruption and to revolt. Colonizing the far north and the far south was dangerous, and likely fatal in the case of the malarial south. The Qin considered it appropriate to use despised and convicted persons for these near suicide missions rather than further alienate the already stressed peasant base. This also allowed the First Emperor to maintain the appearance that peasants were left at peace in their occupations and would no longer be required for war. He could also maintain the ideological stance that these despised groups were being allowed to redeem their sordid past and could become new persons through their colonization efforts for the Qin.

I would like to introduce one further type of forcible resettlement, for which newly excavated texts now give us fresh evidence. The documents from well no. 1 at the site of Liye demonstrate that soon after the Qin conquest of the formerly Chu-held territory, Qin colonial administrators were expected to have the lands under their control opened up for cultivation and under the plow in rapid order. To accomplish this, the Liye documents reveal that officials were provided with convict and slave laborers to aid in cultivation.Footnote ⁵³ The terms used in the text from Liye suggest that some of these field laborers were captured indigenous people. If the officials failed to open up this land for cultivation, or failed to order the local people or captured laborers to farm that land, they were subject to criminal prosecution. It thus appears that the Qin government had large pools of unfree labor at their disposal—convicted criminals, government slaves, and captured peoples—and that it distributed these to newly conquered areas as work gangs to get the land opened up for cultivation.

Theoretical Considerations and Policy Motivations

The traditional way of studying the many coerced population movements that occurred during the Qin period is to examine the policy motivations beyond them from political, economic, demographic, and strategic military perspectives. This is best exemplified in the analysis of the twentieth-century historian of China, Ma Feibai. In his compilation of Qin history, Qin jishi 秦集史 (1982), Ma argued that the Qin policy of forcibly moving populations began during the reign of Duke Xiao, and became consistent Qin policy through the unification of China and continued during the imperial period.Footnote ⁵⁴ He identified the Legalist minister Shang Yang (i.e. Lord Shang) 商鞅 (d. 338 BCE) as the originator of this policy; but this is unlikely, since I have shown that the Qin were using such relocation tactics against indigenous peoples since the seventh to sixth centuries BCE. The Han Dynasty, being the true inheritors of the Qin legacy, also relocated millions of people as part of government policy. Ma argues that part of the instigation for the First Emperor's mass relocations was related to imbalances in population between the different regions of China, but primarily he identifies three major benefits to the policy. First, politically, the Qin recognized that rich and powerful families derived their support from their local area, where their lineages had dominated for decades or centuries. By relocating these lineages to other areas of the empire, the First Emperor was able to reduce the risk of rebellion or other sedition they might stir up, while avoiding having to execute them all, damaging the productive resources of the empire. Second, economically, many of the relocations, such as those wealthy individuals sent to Shu, allowed peripheral areas of the empire to be economically developed at very little cost to the state. In the case of the relocations of people to colonize the far south (Guangdong, Guangxi, Vietnam), positive economic benefits were not really felt until a century later during the Han, but scholars like Yü Ying-shih have argued that such economic colonialism facilitated later cultural and political integration of this area so distant from the traditional Chinese centers in the north.Footnote ⁵⁵ Third, strategically, the Qin relocations allowed the state to shore up the border regions, by flooding them with new colonists who could assist in defense, and to bolster the population of the capital region, which was relatively underpopulated compared to the great traditional centers to the east. Such an imbalance posed a great threat well into the Han period, for the first emperor of the Han also relocated nearly a dozen large, wealthy lineages from the east to the Capital Area around Chang'an.

While Ma Feibai's ideas for the reasoning behind the Qin policy of relocations are very pragmatic and widely accepted, another scholar has recently proposed a more radical view. In his synthesis of Chinese frontier expansion, The Rise of the Chinese Empire (2007), Chun-shu Chang (b. 1934) argues that even though coerced population movements had been part of Qin expansionist policy since at least the fourth century BCE, their character and ultimate purpose changed completely with the foundation of the first empire under King Zheng of Qin.Footnote ⁵⁶ Chang argues that one of the goals of the First Emperor in all his policies was to erase the old regional differences that had kept China divided for centuries. By calling all his new imperial subjects qiánshǒu 黔首 (lit. “black-headed ones”), he erased their regional and clan identities, and by registering all households in the empire, he erased much of their lineage and personal identity. Chang argues very provocatively that the end result, and probably the intentional purpose, of all the forced relocations of millions of people during the brief empire was to forge a new “national identity” among the relocated people as Qin subjects, and no longer as a “Chu person” or a “Zhao person.” Ripping these people out of their old locality, with all its cultural, historical, linguistic, and kinship ties, forced them to reframe their identity along with other colonists. Chang also argues that this was another unintentional effect of participation in the army, or in large works projects like the Great Wall, pooling men from all over the empire towards a new shared purpose, and generating a new national identity. While all this shock may have been too much, too fast, and partially led to the rapid downfall of the Qin Dynasty, Chang suggests that the homogenizing and unifying effects of all the relocations probably took some time to develop and were the chief reasons that the subsequent Han Dynasty lasted for four centuries. In essence, Chang is saying that there is one China today because the First Emperor forcibly reshuffled millions of people during the early empire, erasing centuries of regional division that could have led to a permanent separation into distinct polities, as eventually occurred in post Roman Empire Europe.