Scholars › Philosopher / Thinker
Wei Liao
Man of Daliang who urged the king of Qin to bribe the ministers of rival states and was made commandant of Qin; the military text Weiliaozi bears his name, though its authorship is disputed
Mural of the event “Unification of China”, which this person took part in.
At the end of the Warring States, decades of warfare had devastated the populace and crippled production. The long-fractured geopolitical landscape had nurtured a strong popular yearning for unity, and Qin's physical strength to deliver it had matured.
Also known as Wei Liaozi
Wei Liao came from Daliang in the state of Wei; the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji) gives neither his courtesy name nor his dates. According to its annals of the First Emperor, he arrived in Qin in 237 BC and advised the king to spend freely on bribing the leading ministers of the other states, claiming that no more than 300,000 pieces of gold would bring them all down. The king adopted the plan and treated him as an equal, sharing clothes and food with him, but Wei Liao privately judged the king ungrateful and wolfish and slipped away; he was stopped, kept on and made commandant of the realm. The military text Weiliaozi, 24 chapters in its current form, opens with questions from King Hui of Liang, so some scholars ascribe it to an earlier man of the same name. Fragments of it were found among the bamboo slips excavated at Yinqueshan in Linyi in 1972.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; came to Qin in 237 BCE
- 221 BCEUnification of ChinaTook part