Jing Ke
| Jing Ke | |||||||||||||||
This mural shows Jing Ke's assassination attempt. The King of Qin is on the left, Qin Wuyang is kneeling in the middle, and Jing Ke, on the right, has been seized. In the middle is the dagger, sticking out of the column, and the opened box with the head inside.
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| Traditional Chinese | 荊軻 | ||||||||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
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| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Jīng Kē |
| Wade–Giles | Ching K'o |
| IPA | [tɕíŋ kʰɤ́] |
| Yue: Cantonese | |
| Jyutping | gong1 o1 |
Jing Ke (? - 227 BC) was a guest residing in the estates of Dan, crown prince of Yan and renowned for his failed assassination attempt of Ying Zheng, King of Qin state, who later became China's first emperor (reign from 221 BC to 210 BC). His story is told in the chapter entitled Biographies of the Assassins (刺客列傳) in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian.
In 230 BC, the Qin state began conquering other states as part of a unification plan. Qin's army successfully annihilated the weakest of the Seven Warring States, Han. Two years later Zhao was also conquered.
In exchange for peace, King Xi of Yan had earlier forced his son Crown Prince Dan of Yan to be held hostage by the Qin, but Prince Dan returned knowing that Qin was far stronger than Yan and would attack it later.
Jing Ke originally came from the State of Wei (衞). He was a scholar, proficient in the art of the sword. His homeland of Wei was absorbed by Qin, and Jing Ke fled to Yan. A Youxia named Tian Guang (田光) first introduced him to Prince Dan. There Jing Ke accepted the hospitality of Prince Dan, who as a last resort decided to send an assassin against the King of Qin. The plan involved either kidnapping the king and forcing him to release the territories from his control; or failing this, killing him. The expectation in either case was that Qin would be left disorganized, enabling the other six major states to unite against it.
In 228 BC, the Qin army was already at the Zhao capital of Handan, and was waiting to approach the state of Yan. Jing Ke agreed to go to Qin and pretend to be a nobleman begging for mercy. According to events at the time, Dukang (督亢) (in present-day Hebei) was the first part of the Yan state that the Qin wanted, by reason of its fertile farmland. The plan was to present as gifts the map of Dukang and the severed head of the traitorous Qin general Fan Wuji to the king of Qin, in order to approach him.
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Wikipedia