The Qin unification and the First Emperor

For more than two centuries before 221 BCE, the lands along the Yellow and Yangzi rivers were divided among rival kingdoms. Chinese historians call it the Warring States period (475–221 BCE). It was brutal, with armies of hundreds of thousands, but also creative: this was the age of Confucius’s followers, of Daoist thinkers and of the “Legalists”, who argued that a state should be run by strict laws, rewards and punishments.^•

How Qin won

Qin, a kingdom on the western edge, took the Legalist path most seriously. From the fourth century BCE its reformers broke the power of the old nobility, organised farmers into units responsible for each other’s behaviour, and rewarded soldiers for heads taken in battle. Between 230 and 221 BCE its king, Ying Zheng, conquered the six remaining states one by one.^•

He then took a new title, huangdi, usually translated “emperor”, and called himself Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor, expecting his heirs to rule for ten thousand generations.^•

Making one country

The First Emperor abolished the old kingdoms and divided the land into commanderies run by appointed officials rather than hereditary lords. He standardised the written script, coins, weights and measures, and even axle widths so carts could use the same ruts. He linked existing frontier walls in the north, a forerunner of the later Great Wall (most of what tourists see today was built under the Ming, more than 1,500 years later), and built roads and canals.^•

The unified script mattered most in the long run. Spoken Chinese varied enormously from region to region, as it still does, but a single written language let officials, scholars and later ordinary readers share one literature across a vast territory.^•

The price

Qin rule was harsh. Hundreds of thousands were conscripted to build walls, roads, palaces and the emperor’s vast tomb near today’s Xi’an. In 213 BCE, according to the historian Sima Qian writing about a century later, the emperor ordered the burning of books that did not serve the state, and later had scholars executed; modern historians think the scale of the second story may have been exaggerated by Han-era writers keen to blacken Qin’s name.^•

The First Emperor died in 210 BCE. Within four years, rebellions had destroyed his dynasty. Out of the chaos came the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), which kept Qin’s centralised state but softened it with Confucian ideals. Han rule lasted four centuries, and the majority ethnic group in China still calls itself the Han people.^•

The Terracotta Army

In 1974, farmers digging a well near Xi’an found pieces of a clay figure. They had stumbled on the pits of the Terracotta Army, thousands of life-size soldiers buried to guard the emperor in death. The tomb mound itself has not been excavated. The site is now one of China’s most visited places and a potent symbol of the country’s antiquity.^•

A lasting pattern

After Qin, China was often divided: after the Han, after the Tang, in the early twentieth century. But each time, the ideal of reunification under one centre returned. The pattern of “unity after division” is a basic part of how many Chinese people read their own history, opened famously by the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms: “the empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.”^•

Why it matters today