Burning of the Books. An infamous episode in 213 BC in which the Chinese emperor Qin Shihuangdi ordered collected and burned all the records of the non-Qin states, copies of the Shi and Shu (Confucian classics of poetry and history), as well as the works of the philosophers. Exempted were copies of these texts held by official scholars and works on medicine and other practical subjects. As a byword in heinousness, this decree is often paired with an event of the following year, commonly known as the Burying of the Confucian Scholars, when more than 460 were buried alive. In the earliest records of these events, Sima Qian's Shiji, however, no connection is implied between them.

The extent of the destruction is not detailed in the Shiji. Its seeming thoroughness, however, has long been doubted: aside from the fact that official copies were preserved, the edict's effectiveness might have been limited by the emperor's death in 210 and the fall of Qin in 206. Another loss, however, was related: the concentration of permitted copies in official hands meant further destruction when the capital was burned upon the fall of Qin. Although neither unprecedented nor the last of its kind, the Burning of the Books achieved a unique reputation because the pre-Qin centuries produced the philosophical writings and texts that were later valued as central to Chinese culture, and because of the contrast with succeeding dynasties, which generally accepted responsibility for maintaining literary records.

Derk Bodde, China's First Unifier: A Study of the Ch'in Dynasty as seen in the Life of Li Ssu (280?-208 BC) (1938).