The eulogy of Shi Huangdi (formerly Zheng) is engraved on the gates of the city of Jishi. It recognizes not only his destiny as a conquerer, but also his contributions to hydraulic infrastructure:
“He took down the inner and outer fortifications,
“He opened the watercourses and erected dikes,
“He leveled the dangerous gorges.”[405]
His overall influence was clearly civilizing, and he put into place the administrative structures that made the unification of China inevitable. He is harshly treated by Chinese historians, however. Indeed, in a conflict with the scholars in 213 BC he massacres a number of them and burns their writings.
Shi Huangdi’s famous army of 6,000 men in terra-cotta is buried in his monumental tomb near his capital Xianyang, about thirty kilometers from the present-day Xi’an, discovered in 1974. A marvelous testimony to the hydraulic developments of Qin is the reproduction of the land’s rivers on a scale model in his honor, using mercury as the fluid subject to a flow control system:[406]
“In the ninth month, Shi Huangdi was buried in the Li mountain. [….] With mercury, the hundred watercourses were made, the Kiang, the Ho, and the vast sea; machines made the mercury flow and transferred it from one to the other. Above were all the signs of the heavens; below all the geographic details. [….] Those who were put to death were very numerous.”[407]
