Sima Qian: Jia Yi

 

By the end of class, it seemed we agreed with Jia Yi that Qin had failed miserably from beginning to end [Q77m].   Then Mr. Drueker asked what happened to Sima Qian’s statement [Q87m] that Qin “managed to change with the times and its accomplishments were great.”  A couple of students were also disappointed that Sima Qian gave the last words to Jia Yi, because his own comments would have been perhaps more interesting.  But the true last words did in fact  belong to Sima Qian, because the next chapter is his reflections on the rise of the Qin.  He reminds us that the end does not negate the beginning or the middle, and we need to remember to study the entire story. 

In the time-honored manner of “they say,” Sima Qian allowed Jia Yi to detail the First Emperor’s great faults and why “Qin was in error from first to last.” [Q77m]  The Emperor chose to listen only to himself and never sought the advice of true ministers, and he replaced virtue, benevolence, and righteousness with increasingly harsh penal codes.  Jia Yi also quoted the saying, “Former affairs, not forgot, teach those who come after.”  While this was a lament for the Emperor’s disregard of the antiquities, I think Sima Qian was using Jia Yi's well-written condemnations as a subtle reminder that excellent scholars may still need to pay attention to the Emperor’s accomplishments.  Sima Qian's narrative was certainly not laudatory, but he did  recognize the achievements: the administrative apparatus, the standardization of weights and measures, the reformation of the writing system.  While these measures enforced the Emperor's authority, they also signaled a new era of cultural unification.   

I believe Sima Qian used Jia Yi’s essay as a way to point out how scholars who continued to  think of Qin as nothing more than an “object of ridicule and decline,” were in a sense also obliterating history (as they accused the Qin of doing) by not truly studying the dynasty in total.  As a historian, Sima Qian inherited an incomplete record.  He knew he could not compound the problem by perpetuating incomplete scholarship. 

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