The great big book of horrible things

To my mother, who gave me my sense of humor,
and my father, who gave me my sense of justice


CONTENTS

List of Maps

Foreword by Steven Pinker

Introduction

Second Persian War
Alexander the Great
Age of Warring States
First Punic War
Qin Shi Huang Di
Second Punic War
Gladiatorial Games
Roman Slave Wars
War of the Allies
Third Mithridatic War
Gallic War
Ancient Innumeracy

Xin Dynasty
Roman-Jewish Wars
The Three Kingdoms of China

Fall of the Western Roman Empire
Justinian
Goguryeo-Sui Wars
Mideast Slave Trade
An Lushan Rebellion
Mayan Collapse
The Crusades
Religious Killing

Fang La Rebellion
Genghis Khan
Albigensian Crusade
Hulagu’s Invasion
Hundred Years War
Fall of the Yuan Dynasty
Bahmani-Vijayanagara War
Timur
Chinese Conquest of Vietnam
Aztec Human Sacrifice
Atlantic Slave Trade
Conquest of the Americas
Genocide

Burma-Siam Wars


French Wars of Religion
Russo-Tatar War

The Time of Troubles
Thirty Years War
Collapse of the Ming Dynasty
Cromwell’s Invasion of Ireland
Aurangzeb
Great Turkish War
Peter the Great
Great Northern War
War of the Spanish Succession
War of the Austrian Succession
Sino-Dzungar War
Seven Years War
Napoleonic Wars
World Conquerors

Haitian Slave Revolt
Mexican War of Independence
Shaka
French Conquest of Algeria
Taiping Rebellion
Crimean War
Panthay Rebellion


American Civil War
Hui Rebellion
War of the Triple Alliance
Franco-Prussian War
Famines in British India
Russo-Turkish War

Mahdi Revolt
Congo Free State
Cuban Revolution
The Western Way of War

Mexican Revolution
First World War
Russian Civil War
Greco-Turkish War
Chinese Civil War
Joseph Stalin
Crazed Tyrants

Italo-Ethiopian War
Spanish Civil War
Second World War
Expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe
French Indochina War


Partition of India
Mao Zedong
Korean War
North Korea
The Black Chapter of Communism

Algerian War of Independence
War in the Sudan
Vietnam War
The Cold War

Indonesian Purge
Biafran War
Bengali Genocide
Idi Amin
Mengistu Haile
Postwar Vietnam
Democratic Kampuchea
Mozambican Civil War
Angolan Civil War
Ugandan Bush War
Post-Colonial Africa

Soviet-Afghan War


Saddam Hussein
Iran-Iraq War
Sanctions against Iraq
Somalian Chaos
Rwandan Genocide
Second Congo War
Ranking: The One Hundred
Deadliest Multicides
What I Found: Analysis
What I Found: Raw Numbers
Appendix 1
Disputing the Top One Hundred
Appendix 2
The Hemoclysm

Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index


LIST OF MAPS

The Roman Republic and Dominions, ca. 133 BCE
Ming China, 1368–1644 CE
Europe, ca. 1675
Qing China, 1850–1873
The Communist World, ca. 1955
Recent Africa, 1960s–2000s


FOREWORD

TRADITIONAL HISTORY IS ABOUT KINGS AND ARMIES RATHER THAN PEOPLE. Empires
rose, empires fell, entire populations were enslaved or annihilated, and no one seemed to think there
was anything wrong with it. Because of this lack of curiosity among traditional scholars about the
human cost of historical extravaganzas, a curious person had nowhere to go to answer such basic
questions as whether the twentieth century was really the most violent in history or whether religion,
nationalism, anarchy, Communism, or monarchy killed the most people.
During the past decade, though, historians and laypeople alike have gone to the sprawling website of
a guy on the Internet, Matthew White—self-described atrocitologist, necrometrician, and quantifier of
hemoclysms. White is a representative of that noble and underappreciated profession, the librarian,
and he has compiled the most comprehensive, disinterested, and statistically nuanced estimates
available of the death tolls of history’s major catastrophes. In The Great Big Book of Horrible
Things, White now combines his numerical savvy with the skills of a good storyteller to present a

new history of civilization, a history whose protagonists are not great emperors but their unsung
victims—millions and millions and millions of them.
White writes with a light touch and a dark wit that belies a serious moral purpose. His scorn is
directed at the stupidity and callousness of history’s great leaders, at the statistical innumeracy and
historical ignorance of various ideologues and propagandists, and at the indifference of traditional
history to the magnitude of human suffering behind momentous events.
—Steven Pinker


INTRODUCTION

NO ONE LIKES STATISTICS AS MUCH AS I DO. I MEAN THAT LITERALLY. I CAN never find
anyone who wants to listen to me recite statistics.
Well, there is one exception. For several years, I’ve maintained the Historical Atlas of the Twentieth
Century, a history website on which, among other things, I’ve analyzed statistics of changing literacy,
urban populations, casualties of war, industrial workforce, population density, and infant mortality.
Of those, the numbers that people want to argue about are casualties.
Boy do they want to argue.
From the moment I first posted a tentative list of the twenty-five largest cities in 1900, the twenty
bloodiest wars, and the one hundred most important artworks of the twentieth century, I was swamped
by e-mails wondering how, why, and where I got my casualty statistics. And why isn’t this other
atrocity listed? And which country killed the most? Which ideology? And just who the hell do I think
I am, accusing the Turks of doing such things?
After many years of this, my website has become a major clearinghouse for body counts, so believe
me when I say that I have heard every debate on the subject. Let’s get something out of the way right
now. Everything you are about to read is disputed. There is no point in loading the narrative with
every “supposedly” or “allegedly” or “according to some sources” that it deserves. Nor will I make
you slog through every alternative version of events that has ever been suggested.
There is no atrocity in history that every person in the world agrees on. Someone somewhere will
deny it ever happened, and someone somewhere will insist it did. For example, I am convinced that

the Holocaust happened, but that Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents did not. It would be easy to find
people who disagree with me on both.
Atrocitology is at the center of most major historical disputes. People don’t argue about nice history.
They argue about who killed whose grandfather. They try to draw lessons from the past and speculate
about who is the most Hitleresque politician coming over the horizon. On a particularly contentious
topic, two historians from the opposite poles of politics can cover the same ground yet appear to be
discussing two entirely different planets. Sometimes you can’t find any overlap in the narratives, and
it becomes nearly impossible to fuse them into a seamless middle ground. All I can say is that I have
tried to follow the consensus of scholars, but when I support a minority view, I will tell you so.
Most people writing a book about history’s worst atrocities would describe the “One Hundred Worst
Things I Can Recall at the Moment.” They would include the Holocaust, slavery, 9/11, Wounded
Knee, Jeffrey Dahmer, Hiroshima, Jack the Ripper, the Iraq War, the Kennedy assassination, Pickett’s
Charge, and so on. Unfortunately, just brainstorming a list like that will usually reflect an author’s
biases rather than a proper historical balance. That particular list makes it look like almost everything
bad in history was done either to or by Americans rather recently, which implies that Americans are


intrinsically, cosmically more important than anyone else.
Other lists might make it seem like everything bad can be associated with one root cause (resources,
racism, religion, for example), one culture (Communists, the West, Muslims), or one method (war,
exploitation, taxation). Most people acquire their knowledge of atrocities haphazardly—a TV
documentary, a few movies, a political website, a tourist brochure, and that angry man at the end of
the bar—and then proceed to make judgments about the world based on those few examples. I’m
hoping to offer a broader and more balanced range of examples to use when arguing about history.
To be fair to all sides, I have carefully selected one hundred events with the largest man-made death
tolls, regardless of who was involved or why they did it. To emphasize the statistical basis of this
list, I devote more space to describing the deadliest events, while quickly summarizing the lesser
events. A death toll of several million gets several pages, while a death toll of a few hundred
thousand gets a few paragraphs. The deadliest event gets the longest chapter.
One of the standard ways to skew the data is to decide up front that certain kinds of killing are worse

than others, so only those are counted. Gassing ethnic minorities is worse than bombing cities, which
is just as bad as shooting prisoners of war, which is worse than machine-gunning enemy troops,
which is better than plundering colonial natives, so massacres and famines are counted but not air
raids and battles. Or maybe it’s the other way around. In any case, my philosophy is that I wouldn’t
want to die in any of these ways, so I count all killings, regardless of how they happened or to whom.
You might wonder how I can possibly know the number who died in an atrocity. After all, wars are
messy and confusing, and people can easily disappear without a trace. The participants happily lie
about numbers in order to look brave, noble, or tragic. Reporters and historians can be biased or
gullible.
The best answer would vary on a case-by-case basis, but the short answer is money. Even if a general
is reluctant to tell the newspapers how many men he lost in a bungled offensive, he still has to tell the
accountants to drop 4,000 men from the payroll. Even if a dictator tries to hide how many civilians
died in a massive resettlement, his finance minister will still note the disappearance of 100,000
taxpayers. A customs official at the harbor will be collecting duties on each cargo of new slaves, and
someone has to pay to have the bodies carted away after every massacre. Head counts (and by
extension, body counts) are not just an academic exercise; they have been an important part of
government financing for centuries.
Obviously these death tolls have a significant margin of error, but a list of history’s one hundred
biggest body counts is not entirely guesswork. For one thing, big events leave big footprints. Even
though no one will ever know exactly how many Inca or Romans died in the fall of their civilizations,
histories describe big battles and massacres, and archaeological excavations suggest a massive
decline of the population. These events killed a lot of people even if “a lot” can’t be defined
precisely.
At the top of the scale, a million here and a million there barely moves an event’s rank a couple of
notches along the list. Some people would disagree with my estimate that Stalin killed 20 million
people, but even if you claim (as some do) that he killed 50 million, that would move him from


Number 6 to Number 2. On the other hand, defending Stalin by claiming (as others do) that he killed a
mere 3 million will drop him down to only Number 29, so for my purposes, there’s not much point in

arguing about the exact number. Stalin will be on my list, regardless.
At the same time, some events won’t reach the lower threshold no matter how much we dispute the
precise numbers. An exact body count is hard to come by for Castro’s regime in Cuba, but no one has
ever suggested that he killed the hundreds of thousands necessary to be considered for a slot on my
list. Many infamous brutes such as François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Vlad the Impaler, Caligula, and
Augusto Pinochet easily fall short, as do many well-known conflicts, such as the Arab-Israeli wars
and the Anglo-Boer War.
Some people would bring more cleverness to this task than I do. They might track the world’s worst
multicide back to some distant root cause and declare that to be the most horrible thing people ever
did. They might blame influential people for all of the evil done by those who followed them. They
would blame Jesus for the Crusades, Darwin for the Holocaust, Marx for the Gulag, and Marco Polo
for the destruction of the Aztecs.
Unfortunately this approach ignores the nature of historical causality. Yes, you can take an event (let’s
say, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks) and track back through the chain of cause and effect to
show how this is the natural result of, say, the 1953 coup against the prime minister of Iran, but you
can just as easily track that same event back to the First World War, the Wright brothers, D. B.
Cooper, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Henry Ford, the Russian conquest of Turkistan, Levittown,
the founding of Yale University, Elisha Otis, the Holocaust, and the opening of the Erie Canal. So
many threads of causality feed into any individual event that you can usually find a way to connect any
two things you want.
Aside from morbid fascination, is there any reason to know the one hundred highest body counts of
history? Four reasons come to mind:
First, things that happen to a lot of people are usually more important than things that happen to only a
few people. If I’m in bed with the flu, no one cares, but if half of the city is stricken with the flu, it’s a
medical emergency. If I lose my job, that’s my bad luck; if thousands of people lose their jobs, the
economy crashes. A few murders a week is business as usual in a big city police department; twenty
murders a day is a civil war.
Second, killing a person is the most you can do to him. It affects him more than teaching him, robbing
him, healing him, hiring him, marrying him, or imprisoning him—for the simple reason that death is
the most complete and permanent change you can inflict. A killer can easily undo the work of a

teacher or a doctor, but neither a doctor nor a teacher can undo the work of a killer.*
Therefore, just by default, my one hundred multicides had a maximum impact on an enormous number
of people. Without too much debate, I can easily label these to be among history’s most significant
events.
You may be tempted to dismiss the impact of these events as solely negative, but that’s an artificial
distinction. Destruction and creation are intimately intertwined. The fall of the Roman Empire cleared


the way for medieval Europe. The Second World War created the Cold War and democratic regimes
in Germany, Italy, and Japan. The Napoleonic Wars inspired works by Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, and
Goya. I’m not saying that the 1812 Overture was worth the half-million lives lost in the Russian
Campaign, morally speaking. I’m just saying that as a plain historical fact, there would be no jazz,
gospel, or rock and roll without slavery, and everyone born in the postwar Baby Boom of 1946–64
owes their existence to World War II.
A third reason to consider is that we sometimes forget the human impact of historic events. Yes, these
things happened a long time ago, and all of those people would be dead now anyway, but there comes
a point where we have to realize that a clash of cultures did more than blend cuisines, vocabularies,
and architectural styles. It also caused a lot of very personal suffering.
The fourth and certainly most practical reason to gather body counts is for risk assessment and
problem solving. If we study history to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, it helps to know what
those mistakes were, and that includes all of the mistakes, not just the ones that support certain pet
ideas. It’s easy to solve the problem of human violence if we focus only on the seven atrocities that
prove our point, but a list of the hundred worst presents more of a challenge. A person’s grand unified
theory of human violence should explain most of the multicides on this list or else he might need to
reconsider. In fact, the next time somebody declares that he knows the cause of or solution to human
violence, you can probably open this book at random and immediately find an event that is not
explained by his theory.
Despite my skepticism about any common thread running through all one hundred atrocities, I still
found some interesting tendencies. Let me share with you the three biggest lessons I learned while
working on this list:

1. Chaos is deadlier than tyranny. More of these multicides result from the breakdown of authority
rather than the exercise of authority. In comparison to a handful of dictators such as Idi Amin and
Saddam Hussein who exercised their absolute power to kill hundreds of thousands, I found more and
deadlier upheavals like the Time of Troubles, the Chinese Civil War, and the Mexican Revolution
where no one exercised enough control to stop the death of millions.
2. The world is very disorganized. Power structures tend to be informal and temporary, and many of
the big names in this book (for example, Stalin, Cromwell, Tamerlane, Caesar) exercised supreme
authority without holding a regular job in the government. Most wars don’t start neatly with
declarations and mobilizations and end with surrenders and treaties. They tend to build up from
escalating incidents of violence, fizzle out when everyone is too exhausted to continue, and are
followed by unpredictable aftershocks. Soldiers and nations happily change sides in the middle of
wars, sometimes in the middle of battles. Most nations are not as neatly delineated as you might
expect. In fact, some nations at war (I call them quantum states) don’t quite exist and don’t quite not
exist; instead they hover in limbo until somebody wins the war and decides their fate, which is then
retroactively applied to earlier versions of the nation.
3. War kills more civilians than soldiers. In fact, the army is usually the safest place to be during a
war. Soldiers are protected by thousands of armed men, and they get the first choice of food and
medical care. Meanwhile, even if civilians are not systematically massacred, they are usually robbed,


evicted, or left to starve; however, their stories are usually left untold. Most military histories skim
lightly over the massive suffering of the ordinary, unarmed civilians caught in the middle, even though
theirs is the most common experience of war.*

The Ascent of Manslaughter

Where do we start? People have been killing each other ever since they came down from the trees,
and I wouldn’t be surprised to find bodies stashed up in the branches as well. Some of the earliest
human bones show fractures that must have come from weapons. Early inscriptions boast of thousands
of enemies slaughtered. The oldest holy books record battles in which the followers of one angry god

smite the followers of some other angry god; however, the small tribes and villages caught in these
ancient wars didn’t have enough potential victims to be killed on a scale that could compare with
today. It took many centuries of human history before people were gathered in large enough
populations to be killed by the hundreds of thousands, so the earliest of history’s one hundred worst
atrocities didn’t occur until the Persians built an empire that spanned the known world.


SECOND PERSIAN WAR

Death toll: 300,0001
Rank: 96
Type: clash of cultures
Broad dividing line: Persians vs. Greeks
Time frame: 480–479 BCE
Location: Greece
Major state participants: Persian Empire, Athens, Sparta
Who usually gets the most blame: Xerxes

Prequel: The First Persian War

When the land-based Persian Empire, which had conquered everyone it could reach, from Pakistan to
Egypt, came up against the seafaring Greeks, the Persians scooped up several Greek colonies on the
Ionian coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). Many years of quiet subservience passed, but then the
Greek ruler of the Ionian city of Miletus got ambitious. He threw off Persian rule and asked for help
from free Greek cities overseas—first Sparta (which refused), then Athens (which agreed). A joint
Greek army of Ionians and Athenians marched inland and attacked the Persian provincial capital at
Sardis, which they briefly occupied and accidentally burned down. Within a couple of years,
however, the revolt was put down, and the Athenians hurried home to lie low and hope that the
Persians hadn’t noticed them.
Shah Darius of Persia, however, had not gotten where he was by letting insults pass unpunished, and

he assigned a servant to remind him every day to remember the Athenians. Darius decided he needed
to conquer the independent Greek states on the European mainland that were stirring up trouble among
his Greek subjects; however, the first assault directly across the sea failed. The Athenians beat his
army badly and drove it away at the Battle of Marathon.
Second Persian War


Ten years later, a new shah, Xerxes, gathered levies (peasant draftees) from all over the empire into
the largest army ever seen,*too large to move by boat. Taking the overland route up through the
Balkans and down into Greece, he forced his way past all barriers, man-made and natural. He
crossed the Dardanelles strait on a floating bridge made of boats; then his engineers dug a canal
across the dangerous Acte Peninsula, home of Mount Athos.
With the Persians bearing down on them, a scratch army of 4,900 Greeks under Spartan leadership
tried to slow them at the mountain pass of Thermopylae, while the Greek fleet stopped an amphibious
end run at the nearby strait of Artemisia. The Greek phalanx, the traditional Greek battle formation in
which heavily armored spearmen lined up into a human wall of shields and spearheads, easily held
against repeated Persian assaults. After a few days of tough fighting, however, the Persians found
another way around Thermopylae, so they outflanked and slaughtered the last defenders blocking their
way. The Persian army moved into the Greek heartland, taking Athens after the inhabitants had fled to
nearby islands.
When all seemed lost, the Athenian fleet met the Persian warships in the narrow channel between the
island of Salamis and the mainland. In the confusing swirl of galleys darting, ramming, and
splintering, the Persians lost over two hundred ships and 40,000 sailors. With the Greeks now in
control of the sea, the huge and hungry Persian army was cut off from supplies.
Xerxes returned to Persia with part of his army, leaving behind a smaller force to live off the land and
finish the conquest. This army hunkered down for the winter in northern Greece and then moved south
again in the spring, reoccupying Athens. After frantic diplomacy by the displaced Athenians, the
Greek city-states finally agreed to combine their armies. The two forces met at Plataea, where the
Greek phalanx overwhelmed the Persians. The survivors made their long, painful retreat back to
Persia, losing thousands along the way. Meanwhile, the Athenian fleet shot across the Aegean Sea and

finished off the remaining Persian ships with an amphibious attack on their naval camp at Mycale in
Ionia.2
Legacy

Almost every list of decisive battles or turning points in history begins with something from the
Persian Wars, so you might already know that Greek victory rescued Western Civilization and the
concept of individual freedom from the faceless Oriental hordes who are the villains of Victorian
histories and recent movies.
On the other hand, let’s not get carried away. Being conquered by the Persians would not have been
the end of the world. By the standards of the day, the Persians were rather benign conquerors. For
example, they were one of the only people in history to be nice to the Jews. They allowed the Jews to
return to Palestine and rebuild their temple, instead of massacring or deporting them as the Assyrians,
Babylonians, Romans, Spaniards, Cossacks, Russians, and Germans did at various other junctures of
history. Even with a Persian victory at Salamis, free Greeks would have remained in Sicily, Italy, and
Marseilles. Greek civilization would later prove vibrant enough to survive—and eventually usurp—a
half millennium of Roman rule. There’s no reason why the Greeks couldn’t get through a few


generations of Persian rule intact.


ALEXANDER THE GREAT

Death toll: 500,000 died, including 250,000 civilians massacred1
Rank: 70
Type: world conqueror
Broad dividing line: Macedonians vs. Persians
Time frame: ruled 336–325 BCE
Location: Middle East
Who usually gets the most blame: Alexander III of Macedon

THE BATTLE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST WENT IN TWO PHASES. THE PERSIAN Wars
decided that the West would survive, but Alexander the Great ensured that the West would dominate.
Alexander’s father, King Philip II of Macedon in northeastern Greece, redesigned the phalanx by
strengthening the solid infantry block with longer spears and covering its flanks with archers and
cavalry. He conquered Greece with his new army but was assassinated before he could turn against
the Persian Empire. His twenty-year-old son, Alexander III, then took over and put down a couple of
immediate revolts with what would come to be characteristic ruthlessness—one revolt to the north by
the tribes of Thrace; then one to the south by the strongest Greek city, Thebes. Having covered his
back, Alexander crossed into Asia Minor (Turkey) and destroyed the Persian provincial garrison
when it tried to block his path at the Granicus River. He then began an epic march across the Middle
East.
Alexander was recklessly direct, as shown in the story of the Gordian knot, a mystical tangle of rope
kept in a temple in Asia Minor. A prophecy foretold that whoever could undo the knot would rule
Asia, but Alexander refused to be distracted by the impossibility of the task. He simply drew his
sword and cut through the knot. His characteristic battle strategy was similar. He aimed for what
appeared to be the strongest part of the enemy line and attacked straight into it. The tactic was risky,
and he accumulated an impressive collection of battle wounds from a variety of weapons, but
Macedonian kings were expected to lead by personal example.2
After maneuvering through the pass between Asia Minor and Syria, Alexander discovered that Shah
Darius III of Persia had slipped his full army behind him, cutting the Macedonians off at Issus. With
hardly a thought, Alexander spotted a weakness in the Persian line and charged into it with his


cavalry. The Persians broke ranks and were slaughtered as they ran, abandoning their baggage train to
the Macedonians, including the Persian empress and her daughter.
Alexander moved south to capture the ports that allowed the Persian fleet to threaten his lines of
communication. The Phoenician port of Tyre had been built safely on an offshore island, beyond the
reach of countless earlier armies. The Macedonians, however, settled in and spent the next several
months building a causeway out to the island. Once Alexander connected the mainland to the island,

Tyre fell to assault. Alexander massacred the men and sold the women and children into slavery.
When Alexander visited Egypt, he was hailed as a god, and he no doubt agreed. In 331 BCE, at the
mouth of the Nile River he laid the groundwork for Alexandria, a new city of culture and learning that
would soon be the home of the greatest library in the ancient world, the greatest lighthouse, the
original Museum (Temple of the Muses), and just about every scholar for the next several centuries.
At Gaugamela in northern Mesopotamia (Iraq), the Persians threw their largest army yet again against
Alexander’s smaller army on flat open ground where their numbers should have had the advantage.
The Persians had gathered elephants, scythed chariots, and several hundred thousand exotic levies
from all across the Middle East. Alexander defeated them anyway. He then seized the royal Persian
city of Persepolis, which he burned in a drunken accident, and hounded the fugitive Darius to his
death deep in the wilderness.3
Alexander disappeared off the edge of the map, fighting tribes in their mountain strongholds in central
Asia. With those taken, he moved south into India and beat the native kings and their war elephants.
Finally, his exhausted soldiers realized he would not turn around until he reached the edge of the
world. The army mutinied and forced him to return home.
Alexander took his soldiers home the hard way, across the scorching desert on the coast of Iran. Some
say it was a brilliant move to stay resupplied by the navy while taking the most direct route possible.
Others say he was punishing his men for making him go home. In any case, two-thirds of his army
died by the time they returned to civilization.4


AGE OF WARRING STATES

Death toll: 1.5 million1
Rank: 40
Type: failed state
Broad dividing line: Qin vs. Chu
Time frame: 475–221 BCE
Location: China
Who usually gets the most blame: a string of increasingly vicious kings, culminating with

Zheng of Qin

Prologue: Spring and Autumn Period (ca. 770–475 BCE)

To understand where China went, you should appreciate where it began. During the Zhou dynasty (ca.
1050 BCE–256 BCE) a nominal emperor ruled the whole of China, but he was more like a hereditary
pope—a vestige of an ancient, almost forgotten era, a spiritual presence rather than a true monarch.
Real power rested with feudatory states that incorporated pieces of the old empire. Below that level
was the standard feudal arrangement of lesser lords and peasants.
The Chinese during the Spring and Autumn Period were a very well-mannered people, but their
solution to every moral dilemma seemed to be ritual suicide. Let’s role-play a couple of actual
scenarios found in the history books: 2
You are a noble of a minor rank who has been ordered by your lord, the prince of Jin, to assassinate
his state minister for a serious transgression. When you discover that your target has been wrongly
accused, you will
A. Do your job and kill him anyway, as soldiers have been doing for centuries.
B. Not kill him, and then hide because your lord will be quite angry.
C. Not kill him, and then commit suicide for betraying your lord’s trust.


You are a noble of the state of Chu, and you firmly believe that your prince is embarking on a
dangerous policy that will turn out badly for him. You will
A. Keep your mouth shut and not risk angering him.
B. Convince him to change his mind, and then bask in his gratitude.
C. Convince him to change his mind, and then cut off your own feet for having disagreed with him.

If you answered (c) to these questions, you would have enjoyed the Spring and Autumn Period.
Answer (c) was the chosen solution among the actual individuals in the history books.
During the Spring and Autumn Period, states fought for prestige rather than conquest. Usually, a
defeated Chinese king was allowed to keep his title and lands as long as he acknowledged the

magnificence of the man who beat him.
One episode probably says it all: After a decisive victory, a chariot of the Jin army was chasing a
chariot of the defeated Chu army when the fugitive chariot got stuck in a ditch. The pursuing chariot
pulled up alongside so the Jin charioteer could helpfully advise his enemy on how to free the chariot.
When the chariot was up and running again, the chase resumed. The fleeing chariot easily reached the
safety of the Chu army.3
The Age of Warring States (ca. 475–221 BCE)

Chinese war-making turned cold-blooded after 473 BCE. For years, the two states of Wu and Yueh
had been fighting each other whenever they had a spare moment. The king of Wu had won the
previous round and followed the tradition of being a gracious winner, leaving the state of Yueh intact
as long as its people acknowledged Wu’s magnificence. Then in 473 BCE, while Wu was off fighting
elsewhere, the king of Yueh snuck in and took Wu’s capital. Fair enough—Yueh won that round. Wu
admitted defeat and agreed that Yueh was now top dog; however, instead of leaving it at that, Yueh
stripped his broken enemy of his lands and stashed him in a humiliating new kingdom consisting of a
river island with three hundred inhabitants. The king of Wu refused to accept this shame and
committed suicide.
The Spring and Summer Period had ended with the kingdom of Jin foremost among the others, but
now a civil war ripped it apart. Three independent kingdoms (Han, Zhao, and Wei) emerged from the
chaos in 403 BCE.
In time, “war became a business of wholesale slaughter, unmitigated by acts or gestures of chivalry
which was considered as a folly hopelessly out-of-date by the people of the time. In the battlefield
killing pure and simple was encouraged. A soldier was rewarded according to the number of human
heads or, when these became too cumbersome, the number of human ears that he could produce after


the battle. Ten thousand was considered a modest casualty list for a single campaign; twenty or thirty
thousand was quite common. The wanton murder of prisoners of war, unthinkable in the former age,
became a practice by no means unusual, it being considered the best, the surest, and the cheapest way
of weakening a rival state.”4

The warring states were helped along by the invention of crossbows. About the same time, battle
tactics shifted from chariots to cavalry. Increasingly the Chinese made weapons and armor from iron
rather than bronze. All of these innovations made war cheaper, meaning everyone could get involved,
not just the nobility.
Rise of Qin

By the 360s BCE, only eight feudal states were still on the board, chief among them Wei in the central
north. Wei had reduced the kingdoms of Han, Lu, and Sung to vassals, which provoked a counteralliance of two more kingdoms, Zhao and Qi, to keep Wei under control. This briefly created an
equilibrium in which no one state was strong enough to expand, so peace broke out.
Most states were compressed in the center of China along the Yellow River, small in size but densely
populated; however, a couple of outer states held vast frontier territories with large armies hardened
by battles with barbarians in the wilderness. In the west, backing up against the open steppe, was Qin
(pronounced “chin”). This land was good for raising horses, and the kingdom was inhabited by tough,
no-nonsense people who were considered crude by the rest of China. One ancient critic described
their music as nothing more than beating clay jars with thigh bones and chanting, “Woo! Woo! Woo!”
Duke Hsiao ruled Qin from 361 to 338 BCE, guided by his minister Lord Shang. Together they
organized a totalitarian state to maximize the state’s agricultural output and war-making abilities.
They abolished the nobility and replaced it with a professional army in which soldiers were
promoted for bravery rather than connections. They crushed dissent. They restricted travel. These
reforms gave Duke Hsiao the most powerful army in China, which he used in a surprise attack that
broke Wei’s hegemony in 351 BCE.
Lord Shang’s reforms stirred up a lot of anger inside Qin, so when Duke Hsiao died, Shang’s enemies
hunted him down. He tried to flee anonymously, but his own laws made unauthorized travel
impossible. He didn’t get very far before an innkeeper turned him over to the authorities for failure to
produce the right documents. Shang was hauled off and torn apart with chariots. His reforms,
however, stayed in place.5
In 316 the Qin kingdom annexed the barbarian lands of Shu and Pa, which added thousands of tribal
warriors to the army.6 By now, most of the initiative in international relations lay with Qin, and the
other kingdoms could only respond. The only other state powerful enough to have its own foreign
policy was Chu, a large kingdom that was expanding into forests of the southern frontier.

To keep Qin from expanding eastward into the Chinese heartland, the states that lined up north to