# Standard Shiji-based accounts record the 213 BCE burning of privately held writings

Date: 1961

## The fact

Sima Qian’s Shiji, as transmitted and as summarised in modern standard accounts, records that in 213 BCE Qin ordered the burning of privately held copies of historical and non-utilitarian writings, keeping technical and divinatory books. This Fact stores that received act. Han historians had reason to blacken Qin.

## Context

Legalism treated uncontrolled history as a political risk. Confucian bibliographies later counted the loss. Both the harm to texts and the Han incentive to exaggerate are real. Confidence stays medium.

[Qin Shi Huang](/people/qin-shi-huang) is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

Public-domain Shiji translations and Britannica independently retell 213 BCE. They are not a bamboo-slip statute.

Official or archival record: Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian (English trans. on Gutenberg / public translations) (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21800; Project Gutenberg / public-domain Shiji translation).

## Significance

Knowledge-destruction path. Medium confidence because the source is hostile Han narrative.

A Han indictment is not nothing. It is also not a numbered pyre. Keep both clauses.

## What is established and what is not

Established: the received tradition records a 213 BCE book-burning order. Not established: a complete catalogue of what burned, or that every copy of the Songs vanished.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.

## People

- Qin Shi Huang: https://factrail.ai/people/qin-shi-huang

## Drivers

- Digital Learning Access: https://factrail.ai/drivers/edu-digital-learning-access

## Sources

- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Qin-Shi-Huang
- https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21800

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/cn-shiji-burning-of-books