Talk:Qin dynasty

More complete family tree???

The current Qin Dynasty tree is incredibly bare bones, it doesn't help that the Imperial tree and the Kings of Qin tree exist but lack information shown in the other.

May I propose we merge/duplicate (at least some of) the information from one tree to the other (I recommend the Qin Dynasty page here, given that it's focused on this specific family, while the Kings of Qin tree only exists on a page compiling several families), and the use of colour to highlight which individuals were emperors and which were kings. It would also allow us to include a note about Ziying's possible alternate positions in the tree that would actually make sense, as the individuals related to him in other positions would then be present.

Qin Shi Huang has a father King Zhuangxiang of Qin and a paternal half-brother Chengjiao.

Qin Shi Huang's grandfather King Xiaowen is noted in the Family tree of Chinese monarchs (Warring States period) as having "~20 other sons" (although his page doesn't mention this, I'm not sure if a source for this claim exists, and the listing of "Prince Xi" on that tree links presumably incorrectly to a Qing Dynasty title, not a Qin Dynasty one).

Qin Shi Huang's great grandfather King Zhaoxiang of Qin was apparently instrumental in setting the Qin dynasty on a path to uniting China, so is perhaps a sensible start to this tree if we want to keep it concise. King Zhaoxiang had the sons King Xiaowen of Qin and the Crown Prince of Dao as well as a daughter ("who married King Kaolie of Chu (278–238 BC) in 271 BC, and had issue (Lord Changping)".

King Zhaoxiang's father, King Huiwen of Qin was someone more prolific, having 10 sons and at least one daughter who married King Yi of Yan, hes the first that seems to refer to himself as a King of Qin, prior rulers taking the title "Duke", thus being another key point one could cut off a larger tree at if wanted.

Also, on the existing tree, what does the "1" above Fusu and the "18 or 25 (disputed)" above Qin Er Shi mean? There's no explanation anywhere on any of the pages for this. 5.151.23.56 (talk) 11:16, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

"Today part of: Vietnam" in infobox

I've seen a lot of recent back and forth about whether to have this parameter in the infobox due to some military action by Zhao Tuo, who later rebelled anyway. I think given the small geographical area and brief duration of control, it makes sense to leave Vietnam out of the infobox. We can discuss it in some subsection if it's really important for encyclopaedic understanding, but putting it in the infobox seems unnecessary. Folly Mox (talk) 17:37, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

insufficcient reference information

Someone put this here: At least one school of thought, Mohism, was eradicated, though the reason is not known. Despite the Qin's state ideology and Mohism being similar in certain regards, it is possible that Mohists were sought and killed by the state's armies due to paramilitary activities. Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, p. 61

I didn't think it was enough source, if you don't agree, you can remove my added source dating back to graham. By the way, Mohism did not disappear, it was incorporated into Daoism and Confucianism.FourLights (talk) 03:08, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

User:FourLights, that source doesn't mention anything about "sought and killed". It says "could not survive during centralized and militarized regime". Your The sentence is purely speculative.

Also, we can't in 2023 say in Wikivoice the grand anachronism the First Emperor conquered all of the states and governed with a single philosophy, Legalism. I have no idea who added the sentence, but the whole "neatly categorised schools of thought" model for early Chinese intellectual history was invented by Sima Tan, and isn't an appropriate heuristic for understanding the historical situation. There wasn't even the word 法家 during the Qin dynasty, and almost everything we knew about the Qin prior to modern archaeological discoveries was filtered through the perspective of their conquerors.

I'd suggest sticking to the facts that reliable sources report. I'll dig up a few links to good modern sources relevant to this comment. Folly Mox (talk) 03:23, 25 November 2023 (UTC) emended with apologies 04:13, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

• Smith, Kidder (2003). "Sima Tan and the Invention of Daoism, 'Legalism,' et cetera". Journal of Asian Studies. 62 (1). Duke University Press: 129–156. doi:10.2307/3096138. JSTOR 3096138.
• Csikszentmihalyi, Mark; Nylan, Michael (2003). "Constructing Lineages and Inventing Traditions Through Exemplary Figures in Early China". T'oung Pao. 89 (1–3). Brill: 59–99. doi:10.1163/156853203322691329. JSTOR 4528923.
• Meyer, Dirk (2012). Philosophy on Bamboo: Text and the Production of Meaning in Early China. Studies in the History of Chinese Texts, Vol. 2. Brill. pp. 247–249 et passim. doi:10.1163/9789004208087. ISBN 978-90-04-20808-7.
• Grebnev, Yegor (2022). Mediation of legitimacy in early China: a study of the Yi Zhou shu and the Grand Duke traditions. The Tang Center Series in Early China, Vol. 5. Columbia University Press. pp. 2–3, 254–255. ISBN 9780231555036. LCCN 2021053942.

All of these are available through the Wikipedia Library (the last one is via Project Muse). Folly Mox (talk) 03:30, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

Hello, I did not make the sentence itself. I added back-end information about descent of "Legalist" government from Mohist hermeneutics. Admittedly, Graham and Makeham predate Ivanhoe. I did not add information to this sentence, I simply questioned whether it was sufficient source. Although Graham is dated, this particular information is already accepted to my knowledge. But, maybe I can come back some time with more research to provide backing for what was already present in Ivanhoe.

Hello, although I would not have been so bold, I am happy to examine the source present in Ivanhoe, to try to make this sentence less speculative, which I did not write.FourLights (talk) 03:33, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

FourLights, please accept my apologies for blaming you for adding the speculative article prose. Indeed, your very first sentence above says Someone put this here. I'll strike the parts of my comment that refer to you as its author. I'm sorry about that. Folly Mox (talk) 04:11, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

By the way, thank you for reminding me of Kidder Smith. Look Hui Shi is also a statesmen now. Yes he was! It was an administrative tradition! Anyway thank you, I'll come back later. Hopefully one day we could have an actual page about a broad evolution that wouldn't be representable under Fajia, which together with Legalism don't mean anything.FourLights (talk) 04:54, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

More nonsense

I could certainly dig through the history to look for salvageable material, but what the heck is Borthwick, Mark (2006). Pacific Century: The Emergence of Modern Pacific Asia. Westview Press. ISBN 978-0-8133-4355-6. FourLights (talk) 14:47, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

Anyway, with Legalism not actually being a subject, apart from my integrating material with it's figures pages, I can otherwise work to clean this page up, but some of that would be deletions. I can certainly add material in the future. It wouldn't be at Folly Moxes level at the start of it, but it would certainly be more discriminating.FourLights (talk) 14:57, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

This source is too over-utilized to be removed currently.FourLights (talk) 15:32, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

Penal policy

The paragraph under "Penal policy" has sentences which are grammatically difficult or impossible to interpret, and may be fragments from two different sentences which have been wrongly conjoined by an insertion or deletion. For example,

• "Only including penal law alongside li ritual, comparative model manuals in the Qin empire guided penal legal procedure and application based on real-life situations, with publicly named wrongs linked to punishments." Is this supposed to be "Comparative model manuals in the Qin empire guided penal legal procedure and application based on real-life situations, with publicly named wrongs linked to punishments. They included penal law alongside li ritual."?
• "The Qin often expelled criminals to the new colonies, or pardoned them in exchange for fines, labor, or one to several aristocratic ranks, even up to the death penalty." What's that "or one to several aristocratic ranks" doing there?

It also joins sentences or clauses which don't go with each other. For example, in this paragraph the word "Regardless" implies a causal connection between the two sentences, but they aren't even on the same topic:

• "The Book of Lord Shang prophecies a future sage of "benevolence and righteous",[43] which the First Emperor declares himself to be.[44] Regardless, in the Qin and early Han, criminals may be given amnesties, and then only punished if they did it again.[45]"

In this sentence, there seems to be no logical connection between the two clauses, or even any way to interpret the first clause:

• "At the very least given Qin expansionism, penal law actually develops more in the Han dynasty."

Philgoetz (talk) 19:58, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

I will remove this bit and try to do a third review in the near future. I am of the opinion that a third review is needed anyway. Technically they are connected, because instead of punishing with something like jail or mutilation, the Qin could try simply sending people to the colonies, and then only punish them if they were a problem in the future. Therefore, because of it's colonization, there was less of a need for penal policy in the first place, which develops more in the Han dynasty.FourLights (talk) 10:21, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

nominate this article as a featured article

i would like this article nominated as a featured article. Minecraft812 (talk) 20:02, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

Articles need to go through the process to become Good articles before they can become featured articles, with the former having less strict rules than the latter. Generally, only people who have contributed significantly to an article are recommended to nominate it, because they are those who are likely to be able to answer questions from and work with the reviewer. Check out the link above if you want to learn a little bit more about the criteria and nomination process. Remsense留 01:06, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Minecraft812, the process is more involved than just proposing a nomination. You would have to shepherd the article through a thorough review by other editors, addressing all their concerns and ensuring the article meets the featured article criteria. I don't see that you've ever contributed to this article, but if you're interested in preparing it for a push towards FA, I'd suggest improving the sourcing to include information on the Qin legal system based on the discoveries at Liye, adding additional modern scholarship outside Lewis 2007 (I might suggest in particular Martin Kern's The Stone Drums of Qin), and clearing out inaccuracies, misleading statements, and the outdated last-century scholarship still rooted ultimately in the literature of the Han dynasty, with all its implicit and explicit biases. Folly Mox (talk) 10:41, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

I just posted on Qin penal law, but didn't know about this and was using older sources. I'll see about looking up "The Stone Drums of Qin", but let me know anything else.FourLights (talk) 04:20, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Chinese character template should be added.

I think wikipedia's template for chinese should be added for characters? It is confusing because traditional and simplified chinese are mixed. User999055 (talk) 04:52, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Qing dynasty which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 16:11, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Territorial issue

I wonder if the Qin Dynasty ever reached Northern Vietnam or even annexed it, this is a controversial issue even among Chinese historians. 113.185.40.49 (talk) 02:38, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

It is indeed controversial, and subject to many revert wars in {{Infobox former country}} (see § "Today part of: Vietnam" in infobox above). Whatever the case may be in historical fact, it's a nuanced bit of trivia that deserves mention in an appropriate subheading rather than the infobox itself. Folly Mox (talk) 14:19, 29 July 2024 (UTC)

Tone

What tone is this in Mandarin? The cited AHD does not say, Wiktionary doesn't have an entry, and my Chinese isn't good enough to read the Chinese Wikipedia page, sorry. DAVilla (talk) 14:42, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

REFVAR change

I'm going to dig into this article, and while much of the article uses manually typed short citations, if no one minds I'm going to be adopting the {{sfn}} reference style throughout. If anyone does mind, I will gladly revert and engage in any discussion about REFVAR that is requested. Cheers. Remsense ‥ 论 01:14, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

We should really be citing:

Barbieri-Low, Anthony J.; Yates, Robin D.S. (2015). Law, State, and Society in Early Imperial China. Sinica Leidensia, vol. 126 1/2. Brill. doi:10.1163/9789004300538. Especially sections 2.6 and 2.7. It incorporates archaeologically recovered documents that severely improve our understanding over the received tradition as recorded by Han historians. I'm trying, but all the legal details are putting me to sleep. Hopefully someone else will have better luck.

I feel like I recall someone in the 80s or 90s who did a lot of work kind of regabilitating the Qin dynasty out from underneath the heaps of Han scorn. Might have been Jack Dull? (I think we cite one of his articles at Liu Bang.) I haven't found much of his output in the usual places yet— having barely started searching, since I could be entirely misidentifying the scholar I'm thinking of.

Oh right, and Martin Kern's Stone Drums of Qin is supposed to be really good. I'm not sure we can TWL that. Folly Mox (talk) 15:32, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Sorry: I'm an idiot. Stone Drums of Chʻin is by Gilbert Mattos (1977); the Martin Kern book is The Stele Inscriptions of Chʻin Shih-huang (2000). The Mattos book was published as a Monumenta Serica special monograph, but Taylor Francis don't host it. Internet Archive have the Kern book, which is pretty technical. Folly Mox (talk) 15:55, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Some other stuff from the library:

• Staack, Thies (2023). "The pragmatics of standardization: document standards and their implementation in Qin administration (late third century BCE)". Bulletin of the School of African and Oriental Studies. 86. Cambridge University Press: 147–173. doi:10.1017/S0041977X23000228.
• Sou, Daniel S. (Suh Sungbin 徐誠彬) (2013). "Shaping Qin local officials: exploring the system of values and responsibilities presented in the excavated Qin tomb bamboo slips". Monumenta Serica. 61. Taylor Francis: 1–34. JSTOR 26159338. (Note that publisher websites will misparse this author name. Jstor breaks him up into three people; haven't checked Tandf.)
• Sou, Daniel Sungbin (2018). "Crossing Borders: Control of geographic mobility in early China". T‘oung Pao. 104. Brill: 217–250. doi:10.1163/15685322-10434P01. JSTOR 10.2307/26566308.
• Yates, Robin D.S. (2022). "The Fate of the Defeated: Qin's treatment of its enemies" 戰敗者的命運：秦對敵人的處理. Bamboo and Silk. 5. Brill: 1–72. doi:10.1163/24689246-00402015. (At least I think |doi-access= free: my memory seems to indicate Bamboo and Silk is an open access journal, of the good kind. Also, it has a tendency to provide English and Chinese variants for all its article titles, since it publishes in both languages.)
• Korolkov, Maxim (2024). "State, Local Communities, and Water Management at the Dawn of China's Imperial Era in the Light of Newly Excavated Documents" 新出土文獻所反映的早期華帝國初期的國家、地方社會與水利管理. Bamboo and Silk. 7. Brill: 219–250. doi:10.1163/24689246-20240008.
• Tong, Chun Fung (2021). "The Construction of Territories in the Qin Empire". T‘oung Pao. 107. Brill: 509–554. doi:10.1163/15685322-10705001.
• Li, Jingrong (2022). "The Governance of New Territories During the Qin Unification". T‘oung Pao. 108. Brill: 1–35. doi:10.1163/15685322-10801003.
• Sanft, Charles (2010). "Law and Communication in Qin and Western Han China". Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. 53. Brill: 679–711. doi:10.1163/156852010X539140. JSTOR 41305782.
• Lau, Ulrich (2014). "Qin criminal case records of the collection Wei yu deng zhuang". Oriens Extremus. 53. Harrassowitz: 139–192. JSTOR 10.2307/26372427.
• Tsang Wing Ma (2020). "Between the State and Their Superiors: The anxiety of low-ranked scribes in the Qin and Han bureaucracies". Asia Major. 3rd series. 33 (2). Academia Sinica: 25–59. (Free download; forgot the url; no doi.)

The following two I have actually read:

1. Pines, Yuri (2004). "The question of interpretation: Qin history in the light of new epigraphic sources". Early China. 29. Cambridge University Press: 1–44. JSTOR 23354539.
2. Pines, Yuri (2005–2006). "Biases and Their Sources: Qin history in the Shiji". Oriens Extremus. 45. Harrassowitz: 10–34. JSTOR 24047638.

Sorta related:

• Riegel, Jeffrey (2023). A Journal of My Misgivings: Liang Yusheng, Sima Qian, and the history of Qin. China Research Monograph 79. University of California Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies. ISBN 9781557292049 – via Project Muse.

That's just what's in my offline storage, before I got busy and had to go. Folly Mox (talk) 17:03, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Killer, thank you Folly!! Remsense ‥ 论 04:46, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Of particular interest may be: Galambos, Imre (2004). "The Myth of the Qin Unification of Writing in Han Sources". Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae. 57 (2): 181–203. JSTOR 23658631. Folly Mox (talk) 19:59, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

"Legacy" section?

Perhaps a bit off-kilter for a historical polity, but if there's such an article that would benefit from such a section, it's this one? Seems more elegant than either constantly interpolating or wholly omitting asides about "the Han also did XYZ and then everyone else did". It also seems likely worth a mention how modern China views the Qin, e.g. how they were eventually put forward as an ideal during the Cultural Revolution for a bit there. Remsense ‥ 论 06:40, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Definetly a good idea. Probably worth noting in it that the Qin and Qin Shi Huang have rather conflated legacies as well. Also the idea that Qin had to exist for the Han to prosper, which echoed into the Sui having to exist for the Tang; the Qin = Sui trope is common enough to include. Having a section like this could also more clearly include something like "The Qin dynasty inuguarated Imperial China..." which I don't believe is sourced anywhere atm. Nice cleaning up so far. Aza24 (talk) 07:45, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Routledge

It's not really an expansive reference for the subject, but the Routledge backs my statement that "Qin law was primarily administrative, with penal law included alongside li ritual ("orthpraxy"). People have rejected this reference in the past for some reason, but the current other one currently is from 1986, unless we dig up something else some time.FourLights (talk) 01:05, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

With limitations, Qin law still had collective responsibility carried over from Shang Yangs time. But I don't have a source for it apart from pines commentary on the book of Lord Shang itself. I read it in a scholarly internet article commenting on discovered qin laws. I was not able to find a document. I'll try again some time.FourLights (talk) 18:46, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

FourLights, have you had a chance to look at Barbieri-Low and Yates 2015, the first source I mentioned two sections up? I'm pretty sure there are clarifications about collective responsibility. The TWL links for the most relevant sections are 2.6 and 2.7, but Brill have the whole book available for download. I found the legal details too tedious, but I'll try to struggle through it if no one else wants to. It's not a difficult book; I'm just bad at paying attention at law stuff. Folly Mox (talk) 22:03, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

ok thanks, I'll have a look when I can.FourLights (talk) FourLights (talk) 03:54, 16 December 2024 (UTC)