Why did the Qin Dynasty die in two lifetimes?
Who plays a key role?
What did they do right and what did they do wrong?
In Sima Guang's textbook "Zizhi Tongjian" written to the emperor, the above questions have answers.
But the original text was too difficult to read, until I found out that Mr. Xiong Yi was starting a class, explaining this huge historical masterpiece word by word.
Title: "Zizhi Tongjian Xiong Yi Edition Series III".
Author: Xiong Yi.
Corresponds to volumes 7 to 14 of the Zizhi Tongkan.
Although it only involves a short history of 39 years, because there are too many historical events during this time, and most of the time is in the midst of war, many events are only partial.
Therefore, when Mr. Xiong Yi led us to read, he referred to and cited many other historical books, many of which were documents that his author Sima Guang had not read.
When reading this book, we can get some inspiration on how to read from Mr. Xiong Yi's interpretation:
1. Read a book but don't believe in it, Sima Guang will also make mistakes.
For example, when it comes to the meeting between Liu Heng, the acting king, and the ministers of the current dynasty in Weiqiao, Guan Ying, Cao Qi and others, who contributed a lot, did not appear, but a "great general Wu" appeared.
Teacher Xiong Yi traced back to the source and found that it was probably in the "Book of Han" borrowed by Sima Guang, and he copied the wrong words,".'Great General Takeshi'It should be a baby".
2. For the same problem, you might as well look at different people and think from different angles.
For example, when it came to the Qin Dynasty's laws being too strict, which laid the groundwork for Chen Sheng and Wu Guangzexiang's uprising, Mr. Xiong Yi took us to review an article by Su Shi "On Yangshi".
In this article, Su Shi proposed that in addition to turning the common people into productive forces and combat effectiveness, the Qin Dynasty should have set aside enough redundancy for those who were neither satisfied with ordinary labor nor wanted to go to war.
3. Be good at correlation when learning, and the inspiration you get in one field may be transferred to other fields.
Again, in terms of the need for redundancy, in addition to the need for rulers to leave enough redundancy for society, the same should be true for our own lives and financial planning.
Everything is carefully calculated, planned to the second, and every penny wants to be used on the blade, leaving no surplus at all, then encountering a little wind and grass will "easily lead to systemic collapse".
As Morgan Hauser expresses in his new book "Same as Ever": there is no shortcut to what is worth pursuing, and the right way is often the hard way.
If you want to learn and learn from the experience of doing things and being a person from this historical masterpiece, there is no shortcut, you still have to read it step by step, word by word, fortunately, we have the "Xiong Yi version". Information Governance