The famous terra-cotta soldiers of the first Qin emperor are really quite striking.  But after my trip to Dunhuang, I see them in a different, less celebratory light.   And now I find that Mencius presaged my misgivings:

When Confucius said "Whoever invented burial figures deserved no descendants," he was condemning the way people make human figures only to bury them with the dead.  But that’s nothing compared to the way you’re pitching your people into starvation. (7-8).

    Mencius is speaking here to Emperor Hui of Liang, whom he has just admonished for tolerating rural poverty.  He is also writing before the first Qin emperor, who made the megalomaniacal construction of burial figures the mark of his brutal reign.  Clearly, a Mencian view would hold that Qin deserved no descendants, a bad, bad outcome from a Confucian perspective.  Oddly enough, Qin’s male line was decimated when, after the first emperors death, his two sons and grandson were either killed or forced to commit suicide. 

    Qin’s big mistake was to care more about his power, and trying to take that power with him to the next life, than the lives of his subjects.  His clay soldiers stand in silent testament to the transience of inhumanity.