Chunyu Yue 淳于越 warned the First Emperor of Qin 秦始皇 (r. 246-210) against the flattering words of many persons at his court, especially Zhou Qingchen 周青臣. The Emperor should, he suggested, keep to the traditional Zhou-period system of local administration by giving the government of commanderies into the hands of princes or supporters that had earned merits. Yet counsellor-in-chief Li Si 李斯 countered that the times of the ancient Zhou-period system were over and that the empire would have to rely on a more bureaucratic apparatus. This story is recorded in the Shiji 史記, not in the Zhanguoce 戰國策.