Jing Ke’s Attempt on the King of Qin

Also called: Assassination attempt on Qin Shi Huang

Fearing that Qin would swallow his state, Crown Prince Dan of Yan sent the assassin Jing Ke, who approached King Zheng of Qin with a dagger hidden in a map scroll but failed to strike him and was killed.

After Qin destroyed Han and broke Zhao, Crown Prince Dan of Yan, whose state was next, resolved to save it by killing the king of Qin. He recruited Jing Ke, a swordsman from Wey, and sent him as an envoy bearing the head of Fan Yuqi, a Qin general who had fled to Yan, and a map of Yan’s fertile Dukang district. Parting at the River Yi, Jing Ke is said to have sung: “The wind is mournful, the Yi is cold; the hero, once gone, will not return.”

In the palace at Xianyang in 227 BCE, as Jing Ke unrolled the map to its end, the hidden dagger appeared. He seized the king’s sleeve and stabbed, but missed; the king fled around a pillar and at last drew his sword and cut him down. Qin law forbade ministers to bear arms in the hall, so no one could come to the king’s aid.

The enraged king attacked Yan and took its capital Ji in 226 BCE; the king of Yan sent him Crown Prince Dan’s head, but Yan was destroyed in 222 BCE. Jing Ke’s story, told in the “Biographies of Assassins” of Sima Qian’s Records, became the model of the assassin who gives his life for loyalty.