Li Si

Biography

A commoner from Chu who studied under the great Confucian-turned-realist Xunzi, Li Si rose to become Qin Shi Huang's indispensable chief minister and the intellectual engine of unification. He argued against expelling foreign advisers, pressed the strategy of picking off the states one by one, and after victory drove the standardization that turned conquest into empire: a single script, single coinage, single legal code, and the abolition of the old feudal fiefs in favor of centrally-appointed commanderies. He is also remembered for the era's most notorious act of thought control — the burning of books and, in tradition, the burying of scholars, meant to erase competing philosophies and rewrite the past. After the First Emperor's death Li Si was drawn into a fatal court intrigue with the eunuch Zhao Gao, helped forge the succession, and was ultimately outmaneuvered, tortured, and executed by the Five Pains, lamenting that he would never again walk out to hunt hares with his son.