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How have ancient and modern historians evaluated Qin Shi Huangdi, and what problems of evidence shape that debate?

An evaluation of Qin Shi Huangdi's reign and legacy: the problem that almost the entire literary tradition descends from Sima Qian's Han-era Shiji; the hostile-successor and Confucian condemnation of the First Emperor as tyrant and book-burner against the archaeological record; the modern reassessment of him as founder of a unified China whose institutions later dynasties inherited; and the caution offered by ideological readings such as the Mao-era rehabilitation

A focused answer to the HSC Ancient History dot point on evaluating Qin Shi Huangdi - how the entire literary tradition descends from Sima Qian's Han-era Shiji, the Confucian tyrant and book-burner image against the archaeological record, and the modern reassessment of the First Emperor as founder of a unified China (Bodde, Lewis, Portal).

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Almost the entire literary record of Qin Shi Huangdi descends from one hostile source: Sima Qian's Shiji, completed around 91 BC under the Han dynasty that had overthrown Qin and justified itself by condemning Qin's cruelty, with Jia Yi's "The Faults of Qin" supplying the moral thesis. That Han and Confucian tradition fixed the image of the tyrant and book-burner (the burning of the books in 213 BC, the buried scholars in 212 BC), an image no contemporary Qin voice survives to answer. From the 1970s the archaeological record - the Terracotta Army (1974), the Shuihudi legal slips (1975), the standardisation of script, coinage and administration, and the tomb-mound mercury - gave Qin an independent, contemporary voice, powering a modern reassessment (Bodde, Lewis, Portal) of the First Emperor as the ruthless but foundational architect of unified China whose institutions every later dynasty kept. The Mao-era rehabilitation of 1973 to 1974 is a final caution: judgements of Qin have repeatedly been bent to the politics of the age judging him, so the soundest verdict treats his evaluation as a problem of evidence before it is a problem of character.

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Historians and the evidence base

What this dot point is asking

NESA's "Evaluation and interpretations" strand for Qin Shi Huangdi wants you to weigh up the First Emperor's reign and legacy while confronting head-on the single hardest fact about him: almost everything written about Qin comes from ONE later, hostile source. You need to explain how the demonised image of the tyrant and book-burner was constructed, test it against the archaeological record, set out the modern reassessment of the First Emperor as the founder of a unified China, and recognise that even the "founder" reading has been bent to political purposes. This is the historiography and source-evaluation capstone of the personality.

In plain English

Imagine the only surviving "biography" of a company's founder was written a hundred years later by the rival firm that had taken over after his company collapsed, and that this rival firm needed everyone to believe the founder was a monster so that its own takeover looked justified. Every dramatic story you have heard about him - that he burned the libraries, that he buried the professors alive - traces back to that one hostile account. Then, in the 1970s, workers digging a well accidentally uncover the founder's actual filing cabinets and his enormous private vault, full of his real rulebooks and his own paperwork. Suddenly you can check the rival's story against the founder's own records, and the picture gets more complicated: still ruthless, but also the person who invented the standard rulebook, the standard money and the standard forms that every later company - including the rival that trashed his name - quietly kept using. That gap between the hostile story and the buried evidence is the whole problem of judging Qin Shi Huangdi.

The answer

The problem of evidence: almost everything descends from one source

The First Emperor unified China in 221 BC, ruled until his death in 210 BC, and his dynasty collapsed by 207 BC. Yet the narrative of his reign that every later age inherited was not written by Qin. It was written by Sima Qian, the Grand Historian of the succeeding Han dynasty, in the Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), completed around 91 BC, roughly a century after Qin fell. The Basic Annals of the First Emperor (Shiji, chapter 6) is the spine of almost all subsequent knowledge of the reign.

This creates the central methodological problem. The Han dynasty (founded 202 BC) had overthrown Qin and legitimised its own rule by the claim that Qin had forfeited the Mandate of Heaven through cruelty and misgovernment. Sima Qian, writing under the Han emperor Wu, worked within that political settlement and within a Confucian moral tradition that judged rulers by benevolence. He was not a crude propagandist - the Shiji is a careful and sometimes admiring work - but the framework through which Qin reaches us is that of a hostile successor. There is no surviving Qin-era literary account to set against it.

The hostile-successor bias and the Confucian condemnation

Two motives reinforced each other to produce the demonised First Emperor. The first was DYNASTIC. Jia Yi (died 168 BC), whose essay "The Faults of Qin" (Guo Qin lun) Sima Qian preserved, argued that Qin conquered the warring states by force but collapsed at the first peasant revolt because it "did not rule with humanity and righteousness." This was a lesson aimed at Han rulers, teaching that benevolent government was the price of keeping the Mandate of Heaven; a blackened Qin was politically useful to the dynasty that had replaced it.

The second motive was INTELLECTUAL. Qin's governing philosophy was Legalism (fajia): rule through strict, uniform law, rewards and punishments, and concentrated state power, developed by Shang Yang in the fourth century BC and theorised by Han Feizi (died 233 BC). Legalism was openly hostile to the Confucian appeal to ancient precedent. In 213 BC, on the advice of the chancellor Li Si, the regime ordered the "burning of the books": private copies of the classics, especially the odes and documents, were to be surrendered and burned, while practical works on medicine, divination and agriculture were spared. The Shiji then records that in 212 BC more than 460 scholars were executed and buried for slandering the emperor. Under the Han, Confucianism recovered and became the state orthodoxy, and its scholars had a standing grievance against the emperor who had tried to destroy their books and kill their predecessors. The tradition that judged Chinese history for two thousand years therefore had every reason to remember Qin Shi Huangdi as the archetypal tyrant.

The archaeological counter-record

For most of history there was nothing to set against the Shiji. That changed in the 1970s. In 1974, farmers digging a well near Lintong, east of Xi'an, struck the Terracotta Army: thousands of life-sized figures (an estimated 8,000, on the excavators' projections) drawn up to guard the First Emperor's tomb complex at Mount Li. In 1975, at Shuihudi in Yunmeng (Hubei), the tomb of a minor Qin legal official yielded bamboo slips preserving Qin's own statutes, administrative regulations and case-record forms. Further Qin administrative archives, such as the Liye slips (found 2002 in Hunan), have since deepened the picture.

This material matters because it is a Qin-INTERNAL voice, contemporary and untouched by Han editing. The Shuihudi statutes reveal a legal system that was undeniably harsh and punitive, but also graduated, procedural and bureaucratically precise, rather than the arbitrary savagery of the literary caricature. The physical record also shows the scale of what Qin built and standardised: a unified script (the small seal script promoted by Li Si), a single currency (the round banliang coin with its square central hole), standard weights and measures, even standard cart axle-widths, and a centralised system of commanderies and counties administered by appointed officials rather than hereditary lords. Crucially, the Han and every later dynasty kept this administrative architecture. Even the tomb is a partial vindication of Sima Qian: the Shiji describes an interior with rivers of mercury, and soil surveys reported by Chinese archaeologists have found anomalously high mercury concentrations in the mound above the still-unexcavated burial chamber, broadly consistent with that account. The archaeology neither simply confirms nor simply refutes the Shiji; it lets historians test it.

The modern debate: cruel tyrant or founder of unified China

Modern historiography splits along the fault line the evidence problem creates. The TRADITIONAL reading, inherited directly from Sima Qian and Confucian orthodoxy, keeps the First Emperor as the cruel megalomaniac: the book-burner, the mass-murderer of scholars, the tyrant whose forced labour on the Great Wall, imperial highways and colossal tomb worked his subjects to death and whose dynasty deservedly collapsed.

The REASSESSMENT, made possible partly by the archaeological finds and partly by a more sceptical reading of the Shiji, treats him instead as the founder of a unified China whose institutions proved permanent. Derk Bodde, in China's First Unifier (1938) and later in the Qin chapter of the Cambridge History of China, argued that the standardising, centralising Qin state created the template for imperial China that the Han inherited. Mark Edward Lewis, in The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (2007), treats Qin and Han as a single foundational moment, with Qin providing the administrative and ideological structure of the unified empire. Jane Portal, editing the British Museum's exhibition catalogue The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army (2007), used the material record to present a ruler whose achievement and brutality were inseparable. The reassessment does not deny Qin's ruthlessness; it argues that ruthlessness and foundational achievement were two sides of the same centralising project, and that the purely moral verdict of the Shiji obscures the second half.

Mao-era rehabilitation: a caution about ideological readings

The most striking modern twist is a political one. In the People's Republic of China, and especially during the Anti-Lin Biao and Anti-Confucius campaign of 1973 to 1974 (Pi Lin Pi Kong), the First Emperor was rehabilitated as a progressive, forward-looking Legalist who had crushed reactionary Confucian conservatism and forged national unity. Mao Zedong explicitly identified himself with Qin Shi Huangdi and is reported to have boasted that where the First Emperor buried a few hundred scholars, the Communists had buried far more. The book-burning was recast as a revolutionary act against a backward-looking elite.

This episode is a warning, not a source. It shows that the "founder" reading can be just as politically driven as the Han "tyrant" reading: the Han needed a monster to justify replacing Qin, and Mao's China needed a hero to justify attacking Confucian tradition and centralised authority alike. A Band-6 evaluation uses the Maoist rehabilitation to make exactly this point - that judgements of Qin have repeatedly been bent to serve the interests of the age doing the judging - rather than adopting either the demonised or the heroic portrait wholesale.

How to read a source on this topic

Section III sources on Qin's evaluation are usually one of three kinds: an extract from or paraphrase of the Shiji (including Jia Yi's "Faults of Qin"), a description of an archaeological find (the Terracotta Army, the Shuihudi slips, the tomb), or a quotation from a modern historian. Three reading habits matter.

First, always fix WHEN a written source was produced relative to Qin. The Shiji is a century later and comes from the hostile successor dynasty; that single fact governs its reliability. Separate ancient EVIDENCE (a Qin legal slip, a coin, a terracotta figure) from later ancient MEMORY (the Shiji, the "Faults of Qin"), because they answer different questions.

Second, treat the famous atrocities as contested tradition, not settled fact. The number 460 for the buried scholars is a round figure from a single hostile source, and historians debate whether the victims were Confucian scholars or the alchemists who had failed to find the emperor an elixir. Say "the tradition records," not "he did."

Third, when a source quotes a modern historian, place them on the spectrum before using them: the traditional condemnation (following Sima Qian), the institutional reassessment (Bodde, Lewis, Portal), or the politicised rehabilitation (the Mao-era reading), which should be treated as evidence about the twentieth century, not about Qin.

Command words and using historiography

Command words: "Outline" wants a compact, sequenced factual answer (the book-burning then the buried scholars; the finds of 1974 and 1975). "Explain" wants a causal or interpretive LINK (why the Han condemned Qin; why the archaeology complicates the tyrant image). "Assess" / "evaluate" / "to what extent" demand a sustained JUDGEMENT: state a verdict and defend it in every paragraph rather than describing both sides neutrally.
Using a source in four moves: (1) Content: what does it actually show (the Shiji's charge, a legal slip's procedure, a coin's standard weight). (2) Reliability: who produced it, how long after the events, with what bias (the Shiji is a century-later Han verdict). (3) Usefulness: what specific question it can answer despite that bias (the Shiji is excellent for how Qin was REMEMBERED). (4) Perspective: whose interest it serves (Han-dynastic, Confucian, Qin-administrative, or modern-scholarly).
Weaving in historiography: Never simply list historians. Use the pattern "[the Shiji] casts X as tyranny; [Bodde or Lewis] reads the same institution as foundation because Z; and the Mao-era rehabilitation warns that even that reassessment can serve present politics." That structure earns historiography marks in a Section III response.

Model exam responses

1. Source-analysis response (content, reliability, usefulness). "Sima Qian's account of the burning of the books in 213 BC is useful evidence of Qin's Legalist hostility to the Confucian appeal to the past, and of the memory that later ages preserved of the First Emperor. Its reliability as a neutral record is limited: it was written around 91 BC under the Han, the dynasty that had overthrown Qin and legitimised itself by condemning Qin's cruelty, and it reflects the grievance of a Confucian tradition whose classics had been the target. Its usefulness therefore lies chiefly in showing what the Han wanted believed about Qin, and must be tested against Qin's own surviving legal documents rather than accepted as an impartial account of the reign."

Marker's note: this response separates content from reliability and usefulness explicitly, dates the source, and points to corroboration against archaeology rather than treating the Shiji as impartial.

2. Essay paragraph (weighing the tyrant tradition against the reassessment). "Where the Shiji frames Qin's standardising, centralising measures as instruments of a tyranny that worked its people to death, Bodde and later Lewis read the very same measures - the unified script, the banliang coinage, the commandery-and-county administration - as the foundation of the imperial state that the Han and every later dynasty retained. Neither reading can appeal to a contemporary Qin literary defence of the emperor, since none survives; but the Shuihudi legal slips, recovered in 1975, give Qin an internal voice absent from the Shiji, revealing a system that was punitive and demanding yet regulated rather than capricious. The more defensible position is that Qin was simultaneously a ruthless authoritarian and the founder of unified China, and that the 'tyrant or founder' framing is itself a product of reading the reign through a single hostile source."

Marker's note: names historians with their actual positions, ties each to specific dated evidence, and reaches an explicit judgement rather than juxtaposing quotations.

3. Short-answer response (the buried scholars). "The tradition that Qin buried 460 scholars alive in 212 BC survives only in Sima Qian's Shiji, written a century later under the hostile Han. The round number is uncorroborated, and historians debate whether the victims were Confucian scholars or the alchemists who had failed to produce an elixir of immortality. Some act of repression late in the reign is plausible and fits Qin's Legalist suppression of dissent, but the precise scale and the 'Confucian martyrs' framing should be treated as later hostile tradition rather than established fact."

Marker's note: rewards naming the single-source problem and reaching a qualified conclusion instead of asserting the atrocity as settled.

Common exam traps

Treating the Shiji as a neutral eyewitness: It was written around 91 BC under the Han, the dynasty that overthrew Qin and had every reason to condemn it. Date it and flag its perspective every time you use it.
Stating the atrocities as confirmed fact: The book-burning is well attested, but the number and even the victims of the "buried scholars" rest on a single hostile source. Write "the tradition records," not "he buried 460 scholars."
Ignoring the archaeology: A Section III answer that never mentions the Terracotta Army (1974), the Shuihudi legal slips (1975) or the standardisation reforms cannot test the literary tradition and cannot reach the modern reassessment.
Swallowing the "founder" reading uncritically: The Mao-era rehabilitation shows the heroic portrait can be as ideological as the Han's tyrant. Use both readings to argue that judgements of Qin serve the interests of the age judging him.
Listing historians instead of using them: Naming Bodde, Lewis and Portal without tying each to specific evidence and a clear position earns little; use them to build an argument.

Historians and the evidence base

Sima Qian (c. 145 to c. 86 BC), the Grand Historian of the Han, wrote the Shiji, the near-exclusive literary source for Qin; careful but working within the Han settlement and a Confucian moral framework, so his verdict is that of a hostile successor.

Jia Yi (died 168 BC), the Han statesman whose essay "The Faults of Qin" (Guo Qin lun), preserved in the Shiji, supplied the enduring thesis that Qin fell because it ruled by force rather than humanity and righteousness.

Derk Bodde, sinologist, argued in China's First Unifier (1938) and the Cambridge History of China that Qin created the institutional template of the unified empire that the Han inherited.

Mark Edward Lewis, in The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (2007), treats Qin and Han as a single foundational moment, with Qin providing the administrative and ideological architecture of imperial China.

Jane Portal, curator, used the material record in the British Museum's The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army (2007) to present a ruler whose achievement and brutality were inseparable.

The Mao-era reading (Pi Lin Pi Kong, 1973 to 1974) rehabilitated the First Emperor as a progressive Legalist to attack Confucian tradition, a caution that the "founder" portrait can be as politically shaped as the Han "tyrant."

Practice questions

Original practice questions graded from foundation to exam level, each with a full worked solution. Try them before revealing the solution.

foundation4 marksSource A: an ExamExplained paraphrase of the type of narrative found in Sima Qian's account of the First Emperor: "In his thirty-fourth year the chancellor Li Si advised that all records except those of Qin, and all books other than works on medicine, divination and agriculture, should be handed to the officials and burned; any who dared to discuss the ancient odes and documents were to be executed. The following year, scholars who had slandered the emperor were rounded up, and more than four hundred and sixty were put to death and buried." Using Source A and your own knowledge, outline what this passage records about the "burning of the books" and the "burying of the scholars."

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1 mark: identifies the burning of the books (213 BC), on Li Si's advice, targeting private copies of the classics (the odes and documents) while sparing practical works on medicine, divination and agriculture.
1 mark: identifies the burying of the scholars (212 BC), the traditional figure of more than 460 put to death.
1 mark: links both to Qin's Legalist policy of suppressing rival thought, especially Confucian appeals to the past, to secure the new unified state.
1 mark: notes that Source A is not a Qin document but Sima Qian's Shiji, written under the succeeding Han dynasty, so the numbers and framing come from a later, hostile tradition, not from Qin itself.

Marker's note: full marks require BOTH atrocities correctly dated/attributed AND the observation that the source is later Han testimony, not contemporary Qin evidence; a retelling of the two events with no source awareness caps at 2 marks.

foundation4 marksOutline why the Shiji of Sima Qian is both indispensable and problematic as the main source for Qin Shi Huangdi.

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1 mark: identifies the Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian) as the near-exclusive surviving literary source for the First Emperor, its Basic Annals (chapter 6) providing the narrative framework for his life and reign.
1 mark: notes it was completed by Sima Qian around 91 BC under Emperor Wu, roughly a century after Qin fell.
1 mark: explains the problem of perspective - it was written under the Han, the dynasty that overthrew Qin and legitimised itself by condemning Qin's cruelty, so its verdict is that of a hostile successor.
1 mark: adds a second limitation - Sima Qian worked within a Confucian moral framework that judged rulers by benevolence, incorporating Jia Yi's essay "The Faults of Qin," so its condemnation is also ideological.

Marker's note: rewards holding BOTH ideas together - the Shiji is essential AND compromised - rather than either dismissing it or treating it as neutral fact.

core6 marksSource B: an ExamExplained reconstruction of the type of museum label used for the Shuihudi Qin bamboo slips: "Bamboo strips inscribed in Qin clerical script, recovered in 1975 from the tomb of a minor Qin legal official at Yunmeng. They preserve statutes, administrative regulations and case-record forms setting out graduated fines, terms of forced labour and precise procedures for investigation and reporting." Using Source B and your own knowledge, explain how archaeological evidence of this kind complicates the traditional image of Qin as simple cruelty.

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1-2 marks: describes the content - contemporary Qin legal documents preserving statutes, graduated penalties and set procedures for officials.
2 marks: explains the significance - unlike the Shiji, the Shuihudi slips are a Qin-internal voice, buried with a Qin official and untouched by later Han editing; they show a legal system that was harsh and punitive but regulated, procedural and bureaucratic, not arbitrary savagery.
2 marks: draws the interpretive consequence - this material lets historians test the literary "tyranny," suggesting the reality was a demanding, tightly administered Legalist state, so the demonised picture is partly a construction of the hostile literary tradition.

Marker's note: top responses use the phrase "contemporary" or "Qin's own voice" and contrast the slips explicitly with the later, hostile Shiji, rather than treating the slips as just "more detail."

core6 marksExplain why the Han dynasty and later Confucian tradition had reason to portray Qin Shi Huangdi as a tyrant.

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1-2 marks: sets the context - the Qin dynasty collapsed within a few years of the First Emperor's death (210 BC), and the Han dynasty was founded (202 BC) by the victors of the resulting civil war.
2 marks: explains the political motive - the Han legitimised its own rule on the claim that Qin had forfeited the Mandate of Heaven through cruelty and misgovernment; Jia Yi's "The Faults of Qin" made Qin's fall a moral lesson justifying benevolent Han rule.
2 marks: explains the intellectual motive - Confucianism, suppressed by Qin's book-burning and the killing of scholars and then patronised under the Han, had a standing grievance against the emperor who had tried to destroy its classics, so its historians blackened his memory.

Marker's note: rewards distinguishing the DYNASTIC motive (Mandate of Heaven, legitimising the Han) from the INTELLECTUAL motive (Confucian revenge for the book-burning), not one reason stated twice.

core5 marksAssess the reliability of the tradition that Qin Shi Huangdi buried 460 scholars alive.

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1 mark: states the tradition - the Shiji reports that in 212 BC more than 460 scholars were executed and buried for slandering the emperor.
2 marks: assesses the limits - the account survives only in Sima Qian's Shiji, written a century later under the hostile Han; the round, large number is a literary figure with no contemporary corroboration, and modern historians debate whether the victims were Confucian scholars or the alchemists and diviners (fangshi) who had failed to deliver the emperor an elixir of immortality.
2 marks: reaches a judgement - some act of repression late in the reign is plausible and consistent with Qin's Legalist suppression of dissent, but the precise number and the "Confucian martyrs" framing should be treated as a hostile later tradition rather than an established fact.

Marker's note: rewards a qualified judgement (probably a real episode, uncertain in scale and target) and naming the source problem, not a flat acceptance or a flat denial.

exam10 marksSource C: an ExamExplained paraphrase of the type of argument found in Jia Yi's essay "The Faults of Qin," as preserved within the Shiji: "Qin, from a small state, swallowed the warring kingdoms and faced south as emperor. Yet it trusted to force and punishments, and did not rule with humanity and righteousness; and so, when one common man raised his arm in revolt, the whole edifice fell, and Qin became the laughing-stock of the world." Using Source C and your own knowledge, evaluate the usefulness of the literary tradition for assessing Qin Shi Huangdi's reign.

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A 10-mark response should use the source, add own knowledge, and reach a judgement on usefulness and its limits.

Use the source: Jia Yi's argument is that Qin conquered by force but fell because it "did not rule with humanity and righteousness," collapsing at the first peasant revolt - a moral thesis, not a neutral report.
Corroborating own knowledge: This essay was written under the Han (Jia Yi, died 168 BC) and then embedded by Sima Qian in the Shiji (c. 91 BC). It is the template for the whole later tradition: the burning of the books (213 BC), the burying of the scholars (212 BC), and the crushing labour on the Great Wall, roads and the Lishan tomb all reach us framed as proofs of a tyranny that lost the Mandate of Heaven.
Usefulness: The literary tradition is highly useful for one thing above all - showing how Qin was REMEMBERED and why: it preserves the Han's political need to condemn its predecessor and the Confucian grievance against the book-burner, which is itself important historical evidence for the Han settlement.
Limitations: As evidence for what Qin actually did, it is compromised: it is late (a century after the fall), hostile (written by the victors), and ideological (Confucian moralising). Its numbers are round and uncorroborated, and it has no rival contemporary literary voice to check it.
Judgement: The literary tradition is indispensable but must be read as hostile MEMORY, most reliable for the Han verdict on Qin and least reliable for a fair account of the reign; it should be tested against the archaeological record (the Shuihudi legal slips, the standardisation, the tomb complex) rather than trusted alone.

Marker's note: Band 6 responses separate "usefulness for how Qin was remembered" from "reliability for what Qin did," date the tradition, and name the need to corroborate it against archaeology, rather than simply retelling Jia Yi's charges.

exam25 marksESSAY. Evaluate the extent to which Qin Shi Huangdi should be regarded as a tyrant rather than the founder of a unified China, with reference to ancient and modern interpretations and the problems of evidence.

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A Band 6 essay sustains a judgement on "to what extent," uses named dated evidence, and weaves ancient AND modern historiography. Plan plus model paragraph.

Thesis: "Tyrant" and "founder" are not true alternatives but two readings of the same reign, and the choice between them is dictated less by what Qin did than by who recorded it. The literary tradition is uniformly hostile because it descends from the Han, which had to condemn Qin to justify replacing it; the archaeological record, recovered only from the 1970s, is less moralised. A sound verdict must therefore treat this evaluation as an evidence problem first.
Argument line 1: the tyrant case and its single source: The demonising image - the burning of the books (213 BC), the burying of the scholars (212 BC), and the forced labour on the Great Wall, the imperial roads and the Lishan tomb - comes almost entirely from Sima Qian's Shiji (Basic Annals, chapter 6), completed around 91 BC, and from Jia Yi's "The Faults of Qin," which Sima Qian embedded.
Argument line 2: the hostile-successor bias: The Han legitimised itself on the claim that Qin had lost the Mandate of Heaven through cruelty. Jia Yi's thesis - that Qin fell because it "did not rule with humanity and righteousness" - is a political lesson for Han rulers, not a neutral report; Confucian orthodoxy then had a standing motive to blacken the emperor who had tried to burn its classics.
Argument line 3: the archaeological counter-record: The Terracotta Army (found 1974) and the Shuihudi Qin legal slips (found 1975) bypass the Shiji entirely. The slips reveal a graduated, procedural legal code - harsh but regulated, not capricious cruelty. The standardisation of script, coinage (the banliang), weights, measures and cart axle-widths, and the centralised commandery-and-county administration, were inherited wholesale by the Han and every later dynasty. Soil surveys reporting anomalously high mercury over the unexcavated tomb mound partly corroborate Sima Qian, showing the Shiji is not pure invention either.
Argument line 4: modern reassessment and its own politics: Derk Bodde (China's First Unifier, 1938; the Cambridge History of China Qin chapter) and Mark Edward Lewis (The Early Chinese Empires, 2007) present Qin as founder of the imperial template; Jane Portal's British Museum exhibition (2007) reframed him through the material record. But ideology cuts both ways: Mao Zedong's regime rehabilitated the First Emperor during the Anti-Confucius campaign of 1973 to 1974, praising the book-burning as revolutionary - a warning that "founder" readings can be as politically driven as the Han "tyrant" one.
Model paragraph (line 3): The starkest check on the tyrant tradition is that it rests on a record his enemies wrote. Almost every hostile detail reaches us through Sima Qian's Shiji, compiled a century after Qin fell under the very dynasty that had overthrown it. Against this, the Shuihudi bamboo slips, buried with a minor Qin official and recovered only in 1975, preserve Qin's own statutes: exacting and punitive, yet graduated and administratively precise rather than arbitrarily savage. The same centralised bureaucracy, standardised script and unified coinage that the Shiji casts as instruments of oppression were retained by the Han and became the permanent architecture of imperial China. The evidence supports neither a simple monster nor a blameless statesman, but it does show that the monster is largely a Han literary creation.
Conclusion: To a considerable extent the "tyrant" label is a Han and Confucian construction, and the archaeological record justifies recognising Qin as the founder of the unified imperial state whose institutions endured for two millennia; but because the "founder" reading has its own ideological uses, the soundest verdict is that Qin was a ruthless authoritarian whose institutions proved foundational, and that any confident moral verdict must first reckon with the hostility and thinness of the surviving sources.

Marker's note: Band 6 answers name at least three interpretive positions (the Han and Confucian tradition through Sima Qian and Jia Yi; the modern reassessment through Bodde, Lewis or Portal; the Maoist politicisation), use specific dated evidence (213 and 212 BC, the 1974 and 1975 finds, the Shiji c. 91 BC), and make the problem of evidence central rather than treating "tyrant or founder" as a simple factual question.