l records, except those relating to the existing reign, were to
be burned, and all who dared even to speak together about the Confucian
"Book of Odes" and "Book of History" were condemned to execution. All
who should even make mention of the past, so as to blame the present,
were, with all their relatives, to be put to death; and any one found,
after thirty days, with a book in his possession was to be branded and
sent to work for four years on the Great Wall. Hoangti did not confine
himself to words. The whole empire was searched for books, and all found
were burned, while large numbers of the literati who had disobeyed the
edict were arrested, and four hundred and sixty of them were buried
alive in a great pit dug for that purpose.

It may well be that Hoangti had his own fame largely in view in this
unprecedented act, as in his preceding wall-building and road-making. He
may have proposed to sweep away all earlier records of the empire and
make it seem to have sprung into existence full-fledged with his reign.
But if he had such a purpose, he did not take fully into account the
devotion of men of learning to their cherished manuscripts, nor the
powers of the human memory. Books were hidden in the roofs and walls of
dwellings, buried underground, and in some cases even concealed in the
beds of rivers, until after the tyrant's death. And when a subsequent
monarch sought to restore these records of the past, vanished tomes
reappeared from the most unlooked-for places. As for the "Book of
History" of Confucius, which had disappeared, twenty-eight sections of
the hundred composing it were taken down from the lips of an aged blind
man who had treasured them in his memory, and one was obtained from a
young girl. The others were lost until 140 B.C., when, in pulling down
the house of the great philosopher, a complete copy of the work was
found hidden in its walls. As for the scientific works that were spared,
none of them have come down to our day.

We shall now briefly complete our story of the man who made himself the
most thoroughly hated of all Chinese monarchs by the literati of that
realm. Organizing his troops into a strong standing army, he engaged in
a war of conquest in the south, adding Tonquin and Cochin China to his
dominions, and carrying his arms as far as Bengal. In the north he again
sent his armies into the desert to chastise the troublesome nomads, and
then, conceiving that no advantage was to be gained in