 Yet history was cruel to the Legalists. The Qin dynasty (221–207 BCE), which was designed to rule for “myriad generations” (Shiji 6: 236), collapsed shortly after the founder’s death, brought down by a popular rebellion of unprecedented scope and ferocity. This swift collapse—which took place just a few years after Li Si’s infamous biblioclasm—shaped the image of Qin for millennia to come. The dynasty was no longer a success story, but rather that of miserable failure; and the ideas which guided its policymakers were discredited as well. Already in the first generations after the Qin, consensus was reached: its collapse was due to excessive activism, abnormal assertiveness of its administrative apparatus, over-reliance on penalties, senseless expansionism, and debilitating mistrust between the emperors and their entourage (Jia Yi 賈誼 [200–168 BCE] as cited in Shiji 6: 276–284; Xin yu 4: 62). All these policies could be meaningfully attributed to the Legalists, whose intellectual legacy was as a result discredited. At best it was reduced to Sima Tan’s assessment: “a one-time policy that could not be constantly applied.”