Born in Wey
Born a minor prince of the small state of Wey, he left to seek a ruler who would let him test his ideas.
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Shang Yang was the statesman who turned Legalist theory into a working machine. Serving the state of Qin, he abolished hereditary privilege, tied rank to military merit, standardized measures, and bound the population into mutual-responsibility groups under a code of strict, public, impartial law. Virtue does not govern people, he held; clear rewards and certain punishments do. Qin grew into the power that would unify China. When his protector died, the nobles he had stripped of privilege turned the law against him, and he was executed by the very system he had built.
