The burning of the books and burying of the scholars in 213 and 212 BCE is the tradition's founding trauma and the historiography is contested. Sima Qian, writing a century later under the Han and therefore with an interest, records that on Li Si's advice the First Emperor ordered the destruction of the historical records of the conquered states and of privately held copies of the Book of Songs, the Book of Documents and the writings of the hundred schools, with copies retained in the imperial library and technical works on medicine, divination and agriculture exempted; and that some four hundred and sixty scholars were executed the following year, the traditional account saying buried alive. Modern historians dispute the scale, the number, and whether the second episode targeted Confucian scholars specifically or alchemists who had defrauded the emperor. What is not in doubt is the effect on memory: it fixed the Confucian account of what government without ritual restraint looks like, and it is invoked in every subsequent Chinese argument about state power over learning, including about the twentieth century.