The Qin Dadi Waishi is an anonymous work of early modern Earth Kingdom history, written during the reign of the forty-first Earth King. It covers the life and times of QIN Ji (秦籍), a warlord who arose in the Far West and came to dominate almost the entire Kingdom except for Ba Sing Se. Although primarily a biography of the hegemon, it also goes into a varying amount of detail about the course of his campaigns against the Hao Ting government and the actions of Qin’s associates. Although not written according to modern standards of historiography (which were, at best, nascent at the time of its writing), it is a valuable near-contemporary source for the Earth Kingdom Civil War, i.e. Qin’s Rebellion.
The Qin Dadi Waishi is usually attributed to the Yonggan scholar Ba-Yanja Sayin of Omashu, better known by her literary name Ai-La (愛喇, 308 - 224 BG). However, the attribution is not entirely certain. The Qin Dadi Waishi draws on a number of pre-existing sources, and during her lifetime, Ai-La denied having authored the Qin Dadi Waishi even as it began to circulate around her (probably for reasons of political safety). Ai-La was born in the Nemuland, and having been a teenager during the war, she was a first-hand witness to some of its important events; her family relocated to Omashu to avoid its tumultuous aftermath. There, she studied at the Royal University. She spent most of her working life translating Yonggan texts dating to the Ri Dynasty into the Common Language; many such documents were preserved in Omashu. Supposedly, Ai-La did confess to being the author on her deathbed, and various students and associates of hers testify that she admitted her authorship secretly to them during her life. In any case, no serious alternative has presented itself.
The theory has been put forward that Ai-La was secretly a member of the Nara clan, who were notably exiled to the Hanwang desert at the conclusion of the war, for their early and vigorous support of Qin’s movement. Admittedly, Ai-La only appears in extant historical records as an inhabitant of Omashu, and the local family history records which might have contradicted her own claims about her clan affiliation were apparently lost when the Triangle Lake prefectural yamen was burned by the Hao-Ting army. By her own account, Ai-La was a member of the Yanja hala of Yonggan, a lowland clan of the Nemuland, and her house was the Ba family of landholding nobles. The claims that Ai-La was a Nara may originate with her social rivals among the Omashu literati. That being said, Ai-La had some clear sympathies with the Nara; she grew up around them and surely counted some among her non-patrilineal ancestors. Her literary name may even be a reference to the Nara Clan. The name of the Nara Clan is written 納喇 in the Common Language. While these characters were chosen for their phonetic values in rendering the native Yonggan name of the clan, they can be read as “enjoy the sound of rain”; compare Ai-La’s literary name, 愛喇, which means “love the sound of rain” and uses the same second character.
One of the factors which makes the Qin Dadi Waishi so valuable as a source is that its author appears not to have written it for general distribution, and hence wasn’t constrained by the need to conform to the official narrative of the war, or to gloss over the social conditions that led to it. These circumstances cast a rather unflattering light on the Hao-Ting government of the time, and on the administration of the late Earth Sage Minister Jianzhu. Ai-La is sympathetic to her subject, but does not gloss over his faults, painting him as a tragic hero undone by his fatal flaw of stubbornness. She vividly portrays him as weighed down by the heavy burdens of leadership and frustrated by his Providentially-ordained inability to take the Capital. This nuanced portrayal contrasts with the image promoted by the official histories in the immediate aftermath of the war: Qin as a bloodthirsty villain little better than the Yellow Neck rebels which had done so much to destabilize the country during the minority of the Avatar.
It is not thought that Ai-La created the Qin Dadi Waishi out of whole cloth, though some parts of it are undoubtedly her original compositions, perhaps even based on her own memories. Other parts are written records of stories of the war told by refugee storytellers, and polished as they were retold by native Omashu bards. Some of them use storytelling tropes common at the time in other stories, and include popular elements of uncertain historicity. The Qin Dadi Waishi also owes something to the official History of the Rebellion of Qin, which was swiftly published after the war in an attempt to control the narrative: the Qin Dadi Waishi relies on the History for some facts, but it also seems to choose events to cover with the aim of contradicting the Hao-Ting propaganda embodied in the official History.
The Qin Dadi Waishi, as it has come to us, exists in two recensions. The short recension (of 82 chapters) circulated during the lifetime of Ai-La, and an edition was printed in Omashu not long after her death. The long recension (of 100 chapters) circulated among the Yonggan diaspora community, with the earliest datable manuscripts belonging to the forty-third reign. With the recent political changes in the Kingdom, and the relaxation of censorship laws, both recensions have received several printed editions. In general, the long recension is more favorable to Qin’s side (if not necessarily to Qin himself, about whom it includes some unfavorable stories not found in the short recension). It adds sixteen additional chapters that deal with Qin’s would-be successors and the conclusion of the War, the last of which is a highly reworked version of the original final chapter. It also removes the seventh chapter found in the short recension (Official Meng Remonstrates with Qin the Great) and inserts an expanded biography of two of Qin’s early companions, The History of the Illustrious Wang Siblings, in its place. The long recension further adds two chapters concerning the Flying Lemur Great Sage which contrast tonally with the rest of the work and are an adaptation of an older story in the genre of enduringly-popular Flying Lemur Great Sage stories, co-opted and revised to be more flattering to Qin’s movement.