THE CHINESE EMPEROR
Jean Lévi, translated from the French by Barbara Bray
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987
352 pp., $18.95
Chinese themes have been appearing in Western novels for centuries, but episodically, and in ways that say as much about Western concerns as they do about China itself. The Chinese Emperor, Jean Lévi's striking historical fantasy about the first unified Chinese empire established more than two thousand years ago, is no exception.
The action takes place in the empire of Ch'in, from which our own word China is derived. Ch'in started out as one of roughly half-a-dozen states that, in the first millennium B.C., held the territory that would later be China. Although they possessed a certain degree of cultural homogeneity and even recognized a single, rather shadowy monarch, these states were political rivals, and their princes contended for the role of hegemon (as the Chinese word pa is usually translated) of the "Middle Kingdoms" (chung-kuo, originally a plural).
Total transformation
The three remarkable figures who dominate Levi's book welded those "Middle Kingdoms" into a single centralized empire, the ancestor of every great Chinese state since, and also (even more than Greece and Rome for Westerners) the setting in which later generations have dealt, through imagination and by analogy, with the problems and issues of their own times.
The first is Lü Pu-wei. A man of great intelligence and resourcefulness, he belongs to the generation of the first emperor's father (indeed, according to some accounts, he was the emperor's father). Having made himself fabulously rich as a merchant, he turns, as Lévi describes him, to the grander political ambitions that his social class had closed off. He becomes the patron of the future emperor's father whom he discovers, forgotten in the capital of the state of Yen, where the emperor's father is a hostage to ensure fulfillment of a treaty. Lü takes an interest, provides money and advice, and manages to have him adopted as heir back in Ch'in. Lü even presents his favorite concubine (already pregnant with the child who will be emperor, so one story goes) to this protčgč, and ultimately is rewarded with great power and influence.
The second great figure is Li Ssu. Li is a scholar, and that role, in traditional China, is the polar opposite of the merchant. By comparison with Lü Pu-wei, he is austere, even selfless. His passion is philosophy and law, and above all the endeavor to create a system so perfect that the morality of the individual will no longer matter: one in which society will function no matter "whether citizens are honest or deceitful." When the emperor comes to power, Li becomes the prime minister, and architect of what a nineteenth-century scholar called "an extraordinary plan by which the claims of antiquity were to be forever blotted out, and history was to begin again with the ruling monarch."
All existing literature was to be destroyed, "with the exception only of works relating to agriculture, medicine, and divination." Some 460 Confucian scholars were buried alive at the imperial capital. The empire
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