‘Hero’s’ historic facts

You may not have watched yet the movie Hero—which is now playing in theaters since last weekend and has topped sales so far—but here are some historic facts that could help one better understand the movie.

The Chinese film is about a plot to assassinate a cruel king of Qin. His name is actually Ying Zheng, one of seven kingdoms in China that fought each other constantly about 2,200 years back. Qin’s kingdom eventually united China by force under Ying Zheng, and named himself the first ever emperor. However, to say Ying Zheng was the first to unite China is wrong. Before the seven kingdoms, there were three dynasties in China. Each lasted about a thousand years. When the third dynasty was first established, it was known as the Zhou Dynasty. The king divided his land into 73 pieces, big and small, and named all his 72 sons the kings of the lands, with the king becoming the king of the kings. He just took a small peace of land and acted as judge over his 72 son-kings. After generations, those small kingdoms started to fight each other for land and many other reasons and often ignored the order from the king of the kings, and so, before the rising of the seven kingdoms, the king of the kings had been dethroned and the various kingdoms were scattered to carry out their own designs. (According to legend, one of the smallest kingdoms that disappeared quite early on was the Xing Kingdom, located near Beijing, which is where my ancestors came from, and I still bear the kingdom’s name.)

Back to the seven kingdoms, the Qin Kingdom was located far west and generally wasn’t involved much with the daily conflicts that the rest of the six kingdoms struggled with incessantly. Besides that, the Qin Kingdom had three great kings right before Ying Zheng took the throne when he was still a teenager; this gave him the strength to confront one of the kingdoms, and he wasted no time in using his diplomatic tactics and military power to conquer all the other six kingdom within 10 years.

The Hero’s story happened in the last year of Ying Zheng’s conquest for the six other kingdoms. The assassin was not nameless; he was called Jinkle. He was not from Zhao Kingdom, he was from Yan, another of the seven kingdoms.

When Ying Zhang was about to attack Yan, Yan’s prince, Dan, knew there was no chance to survive the attack, so he sent his top knight, Jinkle, to assassinate Ying Zheng, in a bid to prevent the attack. Jinkle then pretended to be an envoy from the Yan kingdom and presented a rolled map to Ying Zheng showing a large portion of the Yan kingdom to be given to the Qin kingdom in exchange for peace. Inside the rolled map, however, was a dagger.

Yin Zheng got suspicious when Jinkle opened the map. Jinkle managed to injure Ying Zheng with the dagger, but Ying Zheng managed to defend himself by using his sword. Dozens of the king’s guard watched the fight from the doorway breathlessly because without the king’s order, nobody can approach him in any situation. Until the chief guard asked, “Your majesty, do you need help?”

After the Qin Kingdom united China, becoming the Qin Dynasty, Ying Zheng started to shape China in a way that we can still see today. He made the country operate under only one system of laws. Standards, or common rules, were set for the written language; for weights, measures, and coins; and even for the length of cart axles. Ying Zhang started a series of projects that bound China together. Roads, canals, and bridges were built to connect the towns and states. He put the six kingdom’s ruling families in his capital city under his direct monitoring. He collected all the metal weapons used by his enemies, melted them down and built giant statues to commemorate his great achievement and prevent anyone from using these weapons against him. He buried alive hundred of the country’s top scholars and their books because he didn’t need a second voice. He built the1,500 mile long Great Wall to protect China from the fierce tribes to the north, but hundreds of thousand of people never returned to their home alive because they got buried under the wall.

In his fifties, during a nationwide inspection, Ying Zheng died of apoplexy. He thought his dynasty would last forever; that’s why he named himself the first-ever emperor. But the six kingdoms’ people saw his death as a great chance to free themselves. They fought side by side, and the dynasty only stood two years before it fell apart.

Nonetheless, China would never go back to the seven kingdoms. After another five years of wars, the Han Dynasty arose. Thus, to this day when you ask the majority of Chinese their race, he or she will tell you, I am a Han.

Norman Xing
Koblerville