The Cambridge History | Of China, Vol. 1: The Ch'...

As the inspectors’ heavy boots crunched on the gravel outside, Li watched the flames in the courtyard leap higher. He knew that empires, like fires, eventually burned themselves out—but what was hidden in the dark had a way of waiting for the spring.

With a steady hand, Li picked up a blank bamboo slip and began to write, but not the poem. He wrote a mundane report on grain yields in the Guanzhong plain. As he finished, he tucked the old Chu poem deep into the hollow of a ceiling beam, behind a jar of dried lacquer.

"Let them come," Li said, standing up. "I have nothing but the Emperor’s truth here." The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 1: The Ch'...

A young clerk entered, his face pale in the dim light. "Master Li, the inspectors are at the gate. They are checking for 'useless books.' They say the Emperor only wants works of medicine, farming, and the history of our own house."

Li felt the weight of the Ch'in —the sheer, uncompromising force of a state that sought to start time itself at year zero. He looked at the poem. If he hid it, he risked the execution of his entire lineage. If he burned it, the spirit of that mountain died forever. As the inspectors’ heavy boots crunched on the

Li was an archivist for the Qin, a man of records in an age of iron. His task was simple yet monumental: codify the new laws of the First Emperor.

Li looked down at the slip he was currently working on. It wasn't a law. It was a poem from the old State of Chu, a song about a mountain spirit. He wrote a mundane report on grain yields

He looked at a pile of discarded scrolls in the corner—records of the old warring states, written in regional scripts that were now forbidden. To the Emperor, those scrolls were sedition. To Li, they were the voices of ancestors. But the world had changed. The fractured mosaic of the Zhou had been crushed into a single, sharp blade of an empire.