[Why] In the early years of unified empire, conservative Confucians repeatedly invoked the ancient enfeoffment ritual to criticize the new commandery-county centralization. The court grew alarmed at the risk of intellectual fragmentation. [What] Qin Shi Huang accepted Li Si's recommendation and ordered the burning of books outside the Qin state archive and prohibited private schools. The next year, in fury at the deception of certain alchemists, he buried alive over four hundred Confucian scholars and alchemists in Xianyang. [Who] Qin Shi Huang was the decisive enforcer of this extreme ideological purge. Li Si was the architect of the Legalist book-burning policy, devastating the Confucian textual lineage in a short period. [How] This event stands as the painful historical symbol of empire imposing thought unity through cultural centralization, badly damaging the diverse pre-Qin heritage. It sharply intensified the antagonism between imperial power and the scholarly class.
Why
The historic event of Burning of Books and Burying of Scholars represents a key developmental peak of the Huaxia dynastic system. A tragic symbol of imperial state-directed ideological centralization. By establishing this moral or administrative benchmark, it continues to shape the structural and philosophical fabric of ancient Chinese statecraft.