The Emperor And The Assassin (Jeng ki ci qin wang) (1998)

The Emperor and the Assassin is the sort of film that should be taught in film schools as an example of how to produce historical cinema. It actually works as both an intelligent exploration into history and as a grand epic that taps into painfully human themes relevant to any era in history, including ours. Beautifully acted with intricate sets and intoxicating battle scenes that do not overstay their welcome (a problem with so many other historical adaptations), The Emperor and the Assassin is both a spectacle and a satisfying drama.

There is a great deal that could be said about the film itself and its artistry. In the commentary, even the director Chen Kaige is awed by the attention to detail he brought to the movie. However, since this is History vs. Hollywood, let's focus on how well the film works as a historical adaptation. As might be expected with such a complex subject, Ying Zheng, who in his lifespan went from being one of six Chinese kings to being the first emperor to rule all of China and had a number of bizarre traits including a famous pathological terror of death, the filmmakers had to take liberties with their subject. The most obvious is the addition of Lady Zhao, an entirely fictional character who simultaneously serves as Ying Zheng's love interest, his foil, and his increasingly alienated conscience. Some viewers familiar with the original legend of the assassin Jing Ke and the account of Ying Zheng's conquest of China might find her appearances egregious, but she does provide a valuable vintage point through which we can see Ying Zheng's inevitable corruption.

The film centers itself around the timeless question of whether or not the ends of peace and unity is worth pursuing when the means paradoxically brings about bloodshed. The childlike temperament of Ying Zheng which we see in the beginning remains the same, but it is slowly twisted from innocent, simplistic idealism to the sort of vicious impulsiveness and profound lack of empathy exhibited by the likes of Ivan the Terrible and Adolf Hitler. At the start of the film, Ying Zheng is an ideal king, making the meals for his soldiers with his own hands and overflowing with optimistic monologues about ending war in China by bringing the kingdoms together. A viewer might be led to think that they're watching a film like Hero, a shallow propaganda piece on the same historical subject. Yet in the end, beginning with the executions of his very young half-brothers and with the uncomfortable revelation of his own parentage, Ying Zheng is devoured by his paranoia and his need to settle the score with old enemies. By the conclusion, Ying Zheng has turned into Shi Huangdi, isolated from the world in a lavish throne room, surrounded by courtiers and ministers who only fear him and won't risk a finger to help save his life. The assassin Jing Ke is forced into a curiously similar predicament, forced to abandon his pacifism to help the cause of peace. Even Lady Zhou is affected, her love for Zheng and her once devout faith in Chinese unity both gone.

Beyond these themes, The Emperor and the Assassin also works as a genuine character study, making feasible and interesting if untenable speculations on how a young man named Ying Zheng became Shi Huangdi, the megalomaniacal demon of Chinese history. What happens if you raise a child to believe that he will grow up to establish a new empire through conquest and impose order on his entire civilization? And then what happens when reality inconveniently fails to coincide with his ideals? Add in issues with the mother and the father and you have a combustible mix. All in all, this is historical cinema should be: not simply turning history into drama, but combining a sharp view of history with topics worthy of any fictional epic.

History vs. The Emperor and the Assassin

The “Grand Historian”, Sima Qian, traced the Qin dynasty all the way back to Zhuan Xu, one of the mythical “Five Emperors” of prehistoric China. The legendary nature of this genealogy really comes across when we read that the first Qin male, Dafei, was conceived when his mother, Zhuan Xu's daughter, Nühua, swallowed a bird's egg. Turning to a more grounded account, we find that King Xiao of the Zhou dynasty (1122-256 BC) had entrusted Qin Feizi, his horse-breeder, with a noble title and a territory on China's far western frontier, which today forms a part of the Tianshui prefecture in the Gansu province and would become the seedbed for the Qin kingdom.

Over the centuries, Feizi's descendants were entrusted with frontier defenses against the obnoxious “barbarian” peoples that always pestered Chinese rulers. Intermingling with the nomadic peoples that lived on the borders of Chinese civilization, the Qin and their subjects became a more rugged and more militaristic people than their neighbors to the east. Not unlike the Macedonians and their relationship to their fellow Greeks, the Qin spoke a dialect of Chinese and fed from the same cultural soup, but their more rustic way of life and their home on the margins brought on a sort of “quasi-Chinese” status.

Over time, the Qin dukedom became stronger and more vast, while the Zhou dynasty began to sink under the weight of increasingly influential nobles, who along with the Qin began to style themselves as kings. Eventually, as “barbarian” raids into China weakened the Zhou's footing on the pedestal and even drove them from their capital Zongzhou, Qin became one of the major powers in China. Finally, in 256 BC, the last Zhou king had been deposed. Yeng Zheng, who we meet in the first scene, is at the time of the film the current king of Qin, destined to become the First Emperor of all China, a title he actually took on as a new name, Shi Huangdi.

Who is this Lü Buwei?

Lü Buwei was a self-made man, a former merchant from Wei who wheeled and dealt his way into becoming a chancellor under King Zhuangxiang, Ying Zheng's father and predecessor. Besides perhaps his political role, he's most famous for sponsoring the composition of “Lü's Spring and Autumn Annals”, an encyclopedia. According to legend, Buwei had a copy of the text displayed in the marketplace at the Qin capital, Xianyang, under a large bowl of gold, which was offered to anyone who could justifiably add or subtract a single character. By Zhuangxiang's death, Buwei was in enough of a strong position that he ruled as regent for Ying Zheng along with Zheng's mother, Zhao Ji, until Zheng was old enough to assert himself.

Zheng has mother issues!

Naturally it's impossible to know for sure how Zheng and his mother got on, but given what would happen it is unlikely that it was an ideal mother-son relationship. Anyway, Lao Ai, referred to in the English subtitles of the film as “the Marquis”, was Zhao Ji's lover. In order to stay close to the Queen Mother despite the heavy segregation royal women experienced in Qin society, Ai with Buwei's help got himself charged with an offense where the punishment was castration and pretended to go through with the surgery. As a court eunuch, he then had unlimited access to Ji. It's never spelled out in the film, but it's why the fact that Ji and Ai have had two children together is such a tremendous secret. Not only would it expose their affair, but their children are potential rivals to the throne of Qin.

As the film points out, though, once Zheng started asserting himself he moved against not only his mother, but her allies, Ai and Buwei. The only reason Zheng allows Ai to hang around the court is because, as we see, he does not take him seriously.

Now who is Li Si?

Some historians argue that Li Si, Qin's prime minister, was a proponent of an early form of what we today call totalitarianism, Legalism, the principles of which were first laid out by an earlier Qin minister, Shang Yang. There are aspects of Legalism which we twenty-first century Westerners would find understandable, even admirable. Legalism was fundamentally anti-aristocratic, proposing that society should be ruled by ministers chosen by merit, not birth, and that all people should be seen as equal regardless of class. However, unlike Western liberalism, which perceives an equality based on universal rights and a shared human dignity, or Confucianism, which held that all individuals should have the opportunity to demonstrate their worth through moral and intellectual development, in the view of Chinese Legalism all people are unified only by their capacity for corruption and their ability to undermine the State. Precise and harsh punishments, an autocratic figurehead, and an atmosphere of fear and subservience would, Legalists argued, eliminate crime both on the level of the citizen and within the government and insure the prosperity of both the citizenry and the State.

Ironically Shang Yang became the Frankenstein-esque victim of the monster he created. After his patron King Xiaogong died, he was under the power of a new king, Huiwen, who despised Yang for having his tutor disfigured for a crime Huiwen had committed. After being accused of treason, Yang tried to hide out in an inn, but the innkeeper refused to allow him to stay since, under Yang's own laws, no inn could admit people who lacked proper identification papers. Eventually he was caught and executed by being pulled apart by four horse-drawn chariots while his family was also put to death. Yet, in spite of Huiwen's hostility to its inventor, Legalism remained the core philosophy of the Qin state and would become the guidebook for Zheng's government over China.

In practice Legalism was quite brutal. For instance, under Qin law a farmer who failed to meet a production quota could be enslaved and an official who defied a direct order could be executed along with immediate family members (although, to give them credit, at least Qin lawmakers discouraged the use of torture during interrogations, albeit for pragmatic reasons). Legalism stopped being a major force in policy after the fall of the Qin dynasty and Confucianism, which Legalists typically suppressed, filled the void. However, traces of Legalism stuck in the mindset of the Chinese imperial government, particularly through the idea that bureaucratic corruption and inefficiency could be curbed through the omnipresent threat of severe punishments.

Yin Zheng had been a hostage?

Like in medieval Europe, China during the Warring States Period had the custom of giving up the children – well, the sons – of kings as hostages, to be raised in the courts of potential enemies as collateral against military aggression. When he was a child Zheng had been the victim of one such agreement and spent part of his childhood as a hostage in the kingdom of Zhao. It's tempting to think that had a powerfully negative effect on him, but in actuality he probably was well-treated as the son of a reigning king, more like a guest than a prisoner.
There is a woman, Lady Zhao, who is in love with Ying Zheng and agrees to help him in his quest to unify China and end the Warring States Period.

In the film, Lady Zhao is a princess Zheng met while he was a hostage in Zhao. Although she's a key player in the narrative, she is entirely an invention of the filmmakers.

Why are the prisoners being branded?

Branding or tattooing prisoners found guilty of crimes such as theft or murder was a typical Qin legal practice, although it also predated Legalism.

So Zhang gets the idea to arrange his own assassination attempt to get an excuse to invade the kingdom of Yan?

Like Lady Zhao's involvement in the scheme, this part is entirely fictional, although the assassination plot itself was real.

Did the assassin-to-be, Jing Ke, give up his trade and become a pacifist just because he had been hired to kill the family of a blind girl, who after he finished his assignment died?

Well, none of this is in the major accounts of the story of Jing Ke. That episode could very well have been derived from a tradition outside of those, but I suspect the filmmakers added it on to both give Jing Ke more of a background and to create a conflict with Lady Zhao, who needs to get him to agree to kill Zheng.

So the Marquis and the Queen Mother learn the hard way not to mess with Ying Zheng...

Yep. Ying Zheng's near discovery of his young half-brothers in the Queen Mother's palace (and near assassination because of it), Ai's ill-advised armed coup attempt, the arrests of Ai and Ji, and the brutal murders of their children at the hands of Zheng's soldiers are all in the historical record. The film only implies it, but Lao Ai was indeed executed, along with three generations of his family. Ji was put under house arrest until her death. Buwei, who was implicated in the plot, was banished and, as we see in the film, killed himself by poison.

Wait, Lü Buwei was Ying Zheng's father?!

Anything is possible, especially when it comes to bedroom matters. Sima Qian thought he was, although of course he was writing his history under the Han dynasty, who succeeded the Qin as the imperial rulers of China and who wouldn't have minded having the great Qin emperor painted as a former merchant's illegitimate son. Still, Zhou Ji did start out as Buwei's concubine, and it's not entirely out of the realm of possibility that the two continued their relationship (no doubt at great risk) even after she married the Qin king.

After he invaded the kingdom of Zhou, did Ying Zheng have all the surviving children of Zhou buried alive?

Honestly I couldn't find anything that collaborated or disproved the scene, although given the film's general accuracy when it came to the actions carried out by Ying Zheng in his rise to power I am inclined to give the benefit of the doubt. Certainly the sequence of events depicted – Zheng is inclined to spare the surviving children of the Zhou capital (after many of the city's children are instructed to commit suicide by their parents) until one child spits in his face, awakening his fear that any child he spares may try to destroy him in the future – fits the emperor's character. Then again, it is the pivotal moment needed to turn Lady Zhou against Zheng, so the event might have been writing to simply be symbolic of the sort of ruthless actions carried out by the Qin armies and under Zheng's regime as he slowly made himself into Shi Huang Di, the “First Emperor.”

And Jing Ke's assassination attempt...?

Getting past Lady Zhao, everything from the key involvement of the Prince of Yan to the ceremony held by the prince just as Jing Ke began to pass into Qin territory to the plan to approach the king disguised as diplomats from Yan carrying the head of the renegade Qin general Fan Yu Qi (who volunteered to commit suicide for the purpose) with a sword hidden in a map that would be presented to the king comes from Sima Qian's “Biography of the Assassin.” The detail that none of Zheng's courtiers tried to help him while Jing Ke literally chased him around, trying to stab him, is also accurate, although it wasn't Zheng who killed Ke (Zheng did have a sword on his person, but it was a ceremonial weapon and impossible to wield) but rather his guards.

So what happened next?

Despite the depths the film goes to delve into the First Emperor's psychology, the entire length of the film is spent while he's still primarily the king of Qin. Naturally the assassination attempt gave Zheng the excuse he needed to attack and invade Yan. After Yan's fall, Qi became the only independent Chinese kingdom left and promptly surrendered to the Qin. With this, China was unified under Qin rule and the Chinese Empire was officially established but most histories still refer to the earlier dynasties, the Zhou, the Shang, and the Xia, as imperial, which only makes matters rather confusing).

Although Huangdi had optimistically decreed that his successors would be named and numbered as “Second Emperor” and “Third Emperor” and so on, his dynasty would only last two more generations and three years after Huangdi, giving way to the Han dynasty. Ironically it was the oppressive policies that made the Qin state ruthlessly efficient and gave Huangdi the forced labor needed to build the monuments of his reign, his tomb and the Great Wall, that played a large role in inspiring the resistance that finally overcame their dynasty.