Warring States · War Crimes & Atrocities
The Warring States pioneered not only mass warfare but mass atrocity. Qin's doctrine of annihilation — destroying the enemy's soldiers rather than merely defeating them — produced deliberate massacres of prisoners on a scale unmatched in the ancient world, while sieges ended in the drowning or starvation of whole cities. Ancient casualty figures are often inflated, but the practice of exterminating surrendered armies is attested again and again in the sources.
400,000+
deaths
Victims: Surrendered soldiers of the state of Zhao(Sima Qian's figure of 400,000 buried alive is likely exaggerated, but historians accept that a massacre of surrendered troops on an enormous scale took place; a 1995 excavation near Gaoping uncovered pits of hacked and buried bones.)
240,000+
deaths
Victims: Soldiers of the Han and Wei coalition(The figure of 240,000 beheaded comes from the chronicles and reflects the head-counting reward system as much as an exact tally.)
100,000+
deaths
Victims: The population of the Wei capital(No reliable count survives; the death toll from the three-month inundation of a great city was certainly very large.)