Chinese Empire

What Came Before the Qin Dynasty

When the western state of Qin completed its conquest of the rival warring states in 221 BCE and its ruler declared himself Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor, he was not founding a state out of nothing. He was unifying a civilisational world that had existed, in some form, for almost two thousand years. To understand the Qin, and through it all of imperial China, you have to understand what came before. The early Chinese dynasties section covers the whole pre-imperial period, our section overview of Chinese dynasties places it in context, and our piece on the Warring States period examines the immediate background to the Qin conquest in particular.

The political entities that existed in China before the Qin fall into three layers. At the deepest layer is the prehistorical and legendary period of the Xia, Shang, and early Zhou, when the Yellow River valley was dominated by a small number of city-centred states. At the middle layer is the late Zhou period, when the Zhou king’s authority collapsed and a handful of great states fought for supremacy. At the top layer is the Warring States period of 475–221 BCE, when the surviving states fought a generation-long war that ended with the Qin conquest.

The Legendary Period: Xia, Shang, and the Beginnings of Chinese Kingship

The earliest period of Chinese history is half-legendary. The traditional account, going back to Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian of the first century BCE, names a sequence of dynasties beginning with the Xia (c. 2070–1600 BCE), founded by the flood-tamer Yu the Great, and continuing with the Shang (c. 1600–1046 BCE) and the Zhou. For most of the twentieth century Western historians treated the Xia as a myth, on the grounds that no contemporary evidence for it had been found. The discovery and excavation of the Erlitou site in the 1950s and after has changed this picture: Erlitou, a large urban settlement of about 300 hectares in central Henan, has been dated to roughly 1900–1500 BCE, and many Chinese archaeologists now argue that it is the late Xia.

The Xia established a template for Chinese kingship: a king ruled by hereditary right, performed sacrifices to the ancestors and to Heaven, controlled the great rivers and the flood-control works, and was advised by ministers. The Shang Dynasty is the first for which contemporary evidence survives, in the form of oracle bone inscriptions — divinations carved onto ox scapulae and turtle plastrons. The last Shang capital, Yinxu near modern Anyang, has been excavated since the 1920s, and the inscriptions and royal tombs have given an unmatched picture of late Shang life: a warrior aristocracy, ancestor worship, bronze ritual, and large-scale human sacrifice.

The Shang left a permanent legacy: the Chinese writing system, the bronze ritual tradition, and the idea of a hereditary kingship with a divine right to rule. The broader context of the pre-Qin period see our longest Chinese dynasty.

The Zhou Dynasty and the Fengjian System

In 1046 BCE the Zhou state, based in the Wei River valley, attacked and overthrew the last Shang king, Di Xin, in the Battle of Muye. The Zhou kings, who ruled from a capital near modern Xi’an, established a far larger state than the Shang. To govern it, they created the fengjian (封建) system, by which land was granted to relatives and allies in exchange for military service, ritual subordination, and tribute.

The Western Zhou kings were great conquerors, and Zhou bronze vessels have been found across a vast area of north China. By the ninth century BCE, however, the system was straining. The fiefdoms had grown powerful, and the king had limited means of compelling distant vassals. In 771 BCE a coalition of western barbarians and a rebellious vassal killed King You of Zhou, and the new king fled east to Luoyang, beginning the Eastern Zhou (770–256 BCE). The Eastern Zhou is the longest chapter in Chinese pre-imperial history, and the period in which the foundations of Chinese civilisation were laid down.

The Spring and Autumn Period: Hegemony and Philosophy

During the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BCE) the Zhou king was a figurehead with religious prestige but no military power. Real power lay in the hands of a small number of large states: Qi, Jin, Chu, Song, Lu, Wey, Zheng, and a few others. The political system of the period was the hegemony (霸) system, in which the strongest state would lead an alliance, convene interstate conferences, and act as a kind of international police. The most famous of the hegemons was Duke Huan of Qi, who relied on the brilliant minister Guan Zhong.

The Spring and Autumn period also saw the first great flowering of Chinese philosophy. Confucius (551–479 BCE) was active in Lu, and his disciples spread his teaching of ritual propriety, humaneness, and the rectification of names. The Daoist tradition associated with Laozi was forming. These philosophical traditions would shape Chinese thought for two and a half thousand years, and they are treated in detail in Chinese philosophy.

The Warring States Period: Industrialised Warfare and Reform

By 475 BCE the number of major states had shrunk to seven: Qi, Chu, Yan, Han, Zhao, Wei, and Qin. The next 250 years saw industrialised warfare with mass infantry, cavalry, crossbows, and supply trains. Battles involved hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and the famous Battle of Changping in 260 BCE, in which the Qin general Bai Qi reportedly buried 400,000 Zhao prisoners alive, was one of the bloodiest single engagements in pre-modern world history.

The Warring States period also saw administrative reform. The states abolished hereditary aristocracies and replaced them with merit-based bureaucracies. The most thoroughgoing reform was the Legalism of Shang Yang in Qin, which created a state capable of mobilising the entire population for war. The period also produced the Hundred Schools of Thought: Confucian (Mencius, Xunzi), Daoist (Zhuangzi), Mohist (Mozi), Legalist (Han Feizi), Yin-Yang, Logician, and others. These developments are treated in detail in our Warring States period.

The Political Map on the Eve of the Qin Conquest

On the eve of the Qin conquest, the seven major states were: Qin in the upper Wei River valley, the strongest militarily; Chu in the middle Yangzi, the largest by area and population; Qi in Shandong, the great commercial state; Yan in the northern frontier; and Han, Wei, and Zhao, the three successor states of the old state of Jin, caught in the middle. The Qin conquest of 230–221 BCE absorbed all seven into a single unified empire.

The Inheritances the Qin Absorbed

What did the Qin inherit from the pre-imperial period? Almost everything that made it possible: the Chinese writing system from the Shang, the Mandate of Heaven doctrine from the Zhou, the Confucian and Legalist philosophical vocabulary, the bureaucratic apparatus of the late Warring States, the military technology, the road and canal-building tradition, and the economic infrastructure of iron coinage and the market economy. Without these inheritances, the Qin could not have built an empire, and the Han, Tang, and Song could not have built theirs. The political entities that existed before the Qin were the deep structure on which two thousand years of imperial China was built.