Laughs in Qinese

Chinese rulers exaggerating numbers by 10x. Wow that’s certainly something I could never imagine.

There’s not a single battle that the Qin fought and won where they suffered 500,000 casualties.

There’s the “Battle” of Changping, where they suffered 200,000 casualties, but at the same time, that battle (more like a campaign) lasted for nearly 3 years, with 2 years of it being a stalemate where both sides were dug in fortifications. For the entire length of the campaign, that’s at least 182-183 casualties per day. Still quite a lot, but when you have to factor in that this number includes soldiers that died to disease, or the effects of weather, or deserted, along with considering the numbers can be exaggerated, suffering 10,000 casualties in a single day is pretty disastrous in comparison.

I feel like now is a good time to remind people that Chinese literature tended to dramatize in a very specific way.

A “battle” was often the culmination of an entire campaign in actual history, or more specifically, they would dramatize events by rolling all of them into one decisive battle that was way more narratively gripping than dragging it out. A single hero riding out in front of the army and getting into a bout (or clashing of weapons) with an enemy commander is just way cooler than “We surrounded the fortress and besieged it for three weeks before they were forced to sally out or starve to death.”

So a “battle” that had 500,000 casualties? That’s likely not only a gross exaggeration in itself, but more likely an exaggeration on top of really being a description of an entire campaign’s collective casualties for the state be they from diseases, starvation, or downstream effects. Rather than soldiers killed in a single battle.

Chinese historical writing was basically just fishermen tales with their own comic book characters of the time, only instead of Captain America fighting the Nazis, it was Zhuge Liang being a master of 4D Chess to the point even dead he could troll Sima Yi.

So we get “Minor Border skirmish; 3 million dead, Decisive Tang Victory” because the numbers tended to inflate in correlation with the storytelling styles, not unlike how Herodotus is not considered the most reliable source when numbers come up.

Additionally though, it is important to remember that Chinese bureaucracy was extensive by comparison to their European counterparts, so it could legitimately sustain larger populations than one would see in say….Burgundian France. The Song dynasty alone sustained highly urbanized populations for its time that were in some ways incredibly similar to modern times, despite being from the late 10th century to the 13th. That’s, of course, comparing a historic low point in Europe to a golden age in China, but the point stands. Bigger nations field bigger armies, even when the literary styles of the time absolutely encouraged embellishment, often to further and further unbelievable degrees.

Remove a 0 and spread the remaining casualties over an entire campaign including desertion and disease and you’d have a more accurate comparison