The Classmate's Poison

What actually happened

Han Fei and Li Si had studied under the same master, Xunzi. Han Fei, a stammering aristocrat ignored at home, poured everything into essays the young king of Qin devoured. When Han Fei arrived as an envoy, Li Si, whether from rivalry, policy, or both, persuaded the king he was a risk, jailed him, and sent poison before the king could change his mind.

The king did change his mind; the pardon arrived after the poison. Sima Qian, writing much later, frames Li Si's motive as jealousy of a superior talent. The episode attributes that framing while noting Li Si was already the most powerful minister in Qin.

Li Si's own end, years later, was execution by a court intrigue of exactly the kind Han Fei had catalogued.

The longer arc

Han Fei was born a prince of the small state of Han, one of Qin's eventual targets, and his stutter reportedly kept him from winning influence at his own court, which is why he channeled his political theory into writing instead of speaking. His essays reached Qin's king, the future First Emperor, sometime before 233 BC, when Han sent Han Fei as an envoy hoping his presence might spare the state from invasion; it did not; Qin conquered Han outright three years later, in 230 BC.

Li Si outlived his classmate by a quarter century and by then had helped engineer the unification of China and the burning of rival philosophical texts as imperial chancellor. His own downfall came in 208 BC, after the First Emperor's death, when the eunuch Zhao Gao maneuvered a weak heir onto the throne and turned on Li Si in the ensuing purge: Li Si was tortured into a confession, subjected to the Five Punishments, and executed by being cut in two at the waist in a public market, along with his extended family. Han Fei's surviving text, about fifty-five chapters, remains a core source for Chinese Legalist political theory.