# Standard Shiji-based accounts record the killing of scholars under the First Emperor

Date: 1961

## The fact

Shiji-based standard accounts record that Qin executed groups of specialists (often later labelled Confucians) after failed immortality quests and speech crimes. Numbers in later telling grow.

## Context

Later dynasties used ‘Qin burned books and buried scholars’ as a slogan. Slogans inflate. A low-confidence row is still required because the indictment is central to the emperor’s later welfare reading. It is not upgraded to a counted massacre.

[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

Shiji translations and Britannica note the tradition and the doubt about scale.

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

Rights path, low confidence on scale, medium on some punitive killings of specialists in the received court story.

Do not write 460 buried as a Factrail original number. Do not write zero because Han disliked Qin.

## What is established and what is not

Established: the received tradition records specialist killings. Not established: a reliable headcount or that all victims were Confucian classicists.

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

- Protection of Minority Rights: https://factrail.ai/drivers/protection-of-minority-rights

## 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-killing-of-scholars