He did not solve the problem till near the end of his reign.  In 213 he called a great meeting in the Hall of Audience at Changan.  See the squat burly figure enthroned in grand splendor; the twelve weighty statues arranged around; the chief civil and military officers of the empire, thorough Taoists like himself, gathered on one side; the Academies and Censorates, all the leaders of the literati, on the other.  The place was big enough for a largish meeting.  Minister Li Ssu rises to describe the work of the Emperor; whereafter the latter calls for expressions of opinion.  A member of his household opines that he “surpasses the very greatest of his predecessors”:  which causes a subdued sneer to run through the ranks of scholars.  One of them takes the floor and begins to speak.  Deprecates flattery guardedly, as bad for any sovereign; considers who the greatest of these predecessors were:—­Yao, Shun, and Yu, ’Tang the Completer, Wu Wang; and—­implies a good deal.  Warms to his work at last, and grows bitter; almost openly pooh poohs all modern achievements; respectfully—­or perhaps not too respectfully—­advocates a return to the feudal—­

“Silence!” roars Attila-Napoleon from his throne; and motions Li Ssu to make answer.  The answer was predetermined, one imagines.  It was an order that five hundred of the chief literati present should retire and be beheaded, and that thousands more should be banished.  And that all books should be burned.  Attila-Napoleon’s orders had a way of being carried out.  This was one.

He had meanwhile been busy with the great material monument of his reign:  the Wall of China; and with cautious campaigns yearly to the north of it; and with personal supervision of the Commissariat Department of all his armies everywhere; and with daily long hikes to keep himself in trim.  Now the Wall came in useful.  To stretch its fifteen hundred miles of length over wild mountains and valleys in that bleak north of the world, some little labor was needed; and scholars and academicians were many and, for most purposes, useless; and they needed to be brought into touch with physical realities to round out their characters;—­then let them go and build the wall.  He buried enough of them—­alive, it is to be feared:  an ugly Ts’in custom, not a Chinese,—­to make melons ripen in mid-winter over their common grave; the rest he sentenced to four years of wall-building,—­which meant death.  That, too, was the penalty for concealing books.  He was now in dead earnest that the Past should go, and history begin again; to be read forever afterwards in this order,—­the Creation, the Reign of Ts’in Shi Hwangti.

But he spared books on useful subjects:  that is to say, on Medicine, Agriculture, and Magic.