Two rats set Li Si on the road to unifying China's script
As a minor clerk in Chu, Li Si noticed that outhouse rats starved while barn rats grew fat, and decided status was mostly luck. He left for Qin, became chancellor to the future First Emperor, standardised writing and measures across an empire, and ordered books burned before a palace plot destroyed him.
Li Si lived from about 280 to 208 BC and came from Cai, in the state of Chu. Sima Qian's history relates how the contrast between hungry rats in a latrine and well-fed ones in a granary convinced him that social position depends on circumstance, so he chose a political career. After studying with the Confucian thinker Xunzi, he went to Qin, then the strongest of the warring states, and served as a guest of the chancellor Lü Buwei.
In 237 BC courtiers urged King Zheng to expel all foreigners as potential spies. Li Si, a Chu native, wrote a persuasive memorial on the value of outsiders to Qin, and the king not only relented but promoted him. His rivalry with Han Fei turned deadly: Li Si argued that the Han aristocrat could be neither trusted nor released, and in 233 BC Han Fei took poison in prison. Han itself fell in 230 BC.
As chancellor from 246 to 208 BC, Li Si helped the new emperor, Qin Shi Huang, unify laws, weights, measures, currency and even cart designs. He made the small seal script the imperial standard, banning regional variants, which had a unifying effect on Chinese culture over millennia, and wrote the Cangjiepian, the first Chinese primer, parts of which survive. The translator John Knoblock placed him in the tiny handful of people who mattered most in China's whole past. He also drafted the 213 BC edict to destroy historical records and Confucian classics, keeping political books in state hands.
When the emperor died away from the capital, Li Si joined the eunuch Zhao Gao in suppressing the chosen heir, Fusu, who was tricked into suicide, and placed Qin Er Shi on the throne. Zhao Gao then turned on his ally, had him tortured into confessing treason, and in 208 BC Li Si was executed at a public market along with his wider family.
Source: Li Si
