This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 213 BCE, acting on a proposal from his chancellor Li Si, the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the burning of poetry, non-Qin historical records and rival philosophical writings judged to threaten the Legalist ideology his newly unified empire was built on. The following year, 212 BCE, an unknown number of scholars were executed, an episode later chroniclers folded into the same act of suppression.
The traditional account of what happened rests on Sima Qian's Records, compiled more than a century after the events themselves, which cast the burning and the executions as a targeted destruction of Confucian learning and put the death toll above 460. Modern historians dispute much of that account: the scholars executed in 212 BCE were probably not specifically Confucian, since Confucianism had not yet crystallized as a distinct school at the time; the casualty figure has no corroboration earlier than Sima Qian himself; and the phrase traditionally translated as scholars being buried alive may originally have meant only that they were put in a pit or trap, not that they were killed that way.
What is not disputed is that Qin and Han writings kept citing the Classics in the years that followed, which means whatever was burned in 213 BCE was not, in fact, wholly destroyed. For Confucianism's spread, the episode marks the tradition's low point under a state that saw it as a threat, a suppression severe enough to be remembered for two thousand years but incomplete enough that the texts it targeted survived to be restored to official favor within a century, under the Han emperor Wu.