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two thousand years that the current wall stretching across north China is newer—a mere five hundred years old or so—and often follows a very different path than the original.³

       Search for the Secret of Eternal Life

      When he gave himself the title of First Emperor, Shi Huang Di intended that all subsequent emperors would continue the naming scheme. His son would become Er Shi Huang Di (Second Emperor), followed by the Third, Fourth, and so on. However, deep down, Shi Huang Di really wanted to become the Only Emperor. He spent a great deal of effort seeking immortality.

      The court alchemist told the emperor that mercury was the key to eternal life, and provided him with potions that would grant him eternal life. Shi Huang Di also sent the Taoist sorcerer Xu Fu to search eastward for the secret of immortality. The Eight Immortals, Taoist saints who had learned the secrets of the universe, were said to live on Penglai Mountain beyond the eastern seas. Xu Fu was given a fleet of sixty ships, five thousand crewmen, accompanied by three thousand virgin boys and girls because it was believed that their purity would aid the quest. Several years after he had disappeared over the horizon, Xu Fu returned and reported that a large and frightening sea monster blocked the way, so Shi Huang Di sent a boatload of archers to kill the monster. Then Xu Fu tried again, but he was never heard from again.

      Modern historians trying to make sense of this tale suggest that Xu Fu simply discovered Japan and settled down. Archaeology shows that Chinese culture began to appear in Japan around this time.⁴

       Failure in the Search for Eternal Life

      When Shi Huang Di died in 210 BCE on a tour of the provinces—possibly poisoned by the mercury in his magic elixirs—Li Si kept the news secret for two months until he could return to the capital and tie up some loose ends. Among them, he had to strip command from a dangerously conservative general and to force Shi Huang Di’s eldest son to commit suicide. To keep the empire from dissolving into chaos, Li Si kept up a pretense of a live ruler by arriving at the emperor’s carriage every day and ducking behind the curtain to consult with him. A wagonload of fish joined the entourage to disguise the smell of the emperor’s corpse.⁵

      The First Emperor had begun building his tomb many years earlier, employing seven hundred thousand workmen on the project and working many of them to death. The tomb complex measured three miles across, reputedly protected with booby-trapped crossbows. To protect the secret locations, the men who installed these were locked in the tomb as well. In 1974, excavation uncovered an underground army of eight thousand terra cotta statues of soldiers guarding the tomb, and that may be only a small part of treasures buried there. The tomb is reputed to contain a replica of the world floating in a sea of mercury, and a 2006 soil analysis suggests that a substantial amount of mercury is still buried in the unexcavated section.⁶

      Once Li Si removed all of the conservatives from any possible influence over the succession, he announced the death of the emperor and allowed the throne to pass to a prince who agreed with all of the radical changes of the previous decade. Er Shi Huang Di (the Second Emperor), however, ruled only a few years before China fell into civil war.

       How Bad Was He?

      As with most ancient individuals, there are only a handful of original sources, all filtered through centuries of copying and recopying, censoring, fictionalizing, moralizing, and sensationalizing, so there’s a very good chance that everything we know about Shi Huang Di is wrong, or at least more complicated than we are led to believe. If you go around burying scholars alive, you won’t fare well in the writings of subsequent scholars.⁷

      We can’t be certain how many people he killed, but for the sake of ranking, I’m following the common accusation of a million.

SECOND PUNIC WAR

      Death toll: 770,000¹

      Rank: 58

      Type: hegemonial war

      Broad dividing line: Rome vs. Carthage

      Time frame: 218–202 BCE

      Location: western Mediterranean

      Who usually gets the most blame: Hannibal

      Another damn: Roman conquest

      BY NOW ALMOST ALL OF THE COASTAL REGIONS OF THE WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN had fallen under the domination of either Carthage or Rome. These competing empires were divided by the Ebro River in Spain until the city of Saguntum in the Carthaginian sphere switched sides and asked for Roman protection. Hannibal, the Carthaginian general on the spot, would allow none of that, so he stormed and sacked Saguntum. Then, before the Romans could do much more than complain and issue their formal declaration of war, Hannibal marched a Carthaginian army from Spain, up the coast, and over the Alps into Italy.

      Over the next few years, a series of Roman armies tried to stop Hannibal, but each was defeated in turn. More than just defeated—annihilated. At Trebia in northern Italy, Hannibal faked a retreat, which lured the Romans out of a strong defensive position to be ambushed in a shallow river. At Lake Trasimene, three Roman legions were enticed along the lakeside road and ambushed in a morning fog. By now, the Romans were wise to Hannibal’s tricks and refused to meet him in battle for another year.²

      Finally, the Romans fielded their largest army ever, eight Roman legions plus allies and cavalry—80,000 men in all—and fought Hannibal on open ground, in broad daylight, at Cannae in southern Italy. Hannibal stood to meet them with an army around half their size. He stationed two heavy blocks of infantry on small elevations in the field and connected them with a flexible line of light infantry in the center. When the Romans attacked into his line, Hannibal’s flanks held while the center was pushed backward. This created a funnel that drew the Roman army into the center. The Roman front line shoved against the Carthaginians while the Roman back lines shoved against their front lines, and soon the Romans bunched up too tightly to wield their weapons effectively. Meanwhile, Hannibal’s cavalry chased away the Roman horsemen and sealed the open back of the funnel, trapping the entire Roman army in a crowded killing field. The Romans were systematically butchered for the rest of the day until none were left standing.³

      In two years, the Romans had lost 150,000 men at Hannibal’s hands. Roman allies began to defect after this. Syracuse tossed in with Carthage and defended itself against Roman retaliation using an awesome (and probably mythical) collection of war engines devised by the mathematician Archimedes—improved catapults, a mechanical claw that grabbed ships and dashed them against the rocks, and a mirror that focused the sun’s rays into a deadly heat beam. Eventually, however, Roman discipline and martial skill defeated Greek ingenuity. Syracuse was taken, and Archimedes was killed during the sacking of the city.

      Unable to defeat the Carthaginians in Italy, the Romans sent an army under Scipio to take Spain away from them. After a protracted war that cut Carthage off from this vital source of wealth and manpower, Hasdrubal, the Carthaginian commander in Spain, broke contact and followed his brother Hannibal’s path into Italy. Along the way, two Roman armies converged on his army and cornered it on rocky, uneven ground at the Metaurus River in Italy, where he found it difficult to deploy his battle lines. The Roman armies wiped out Hasdrubal before he could add his army to Hannibal’s, and a Roman rider flung his severed head into his brother’s camp.

      Eventually, Scipio’s Romans landed in North Africa, which forced Hannibal to abandon Italy and hurry back to defend his homeland. Scipio convinced the Numidian neighbors of Carthage—suppliers of prime cavalry—to switch to the Roman side, and then he destroyed the last Carthaginian army at Zama when Hannibal’s war elephants

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