Qin Shi Huang: The First Emperor of China

The man known to history as Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇, Qín Shǐ Huángdì) was born Ying Zheng in 259 BCE, the son of the King of Qin and a consort of the Chao family. He succeeded to the throne of the western state of Qin at thirteen in 246 BCE, assumed personal power at twenty-two, and between 230 and 221 BCE completed the conquest of the six rival Warring States, unifying China for the first time under a single ruler. In 221 BCE he adopted the unprecedented title of Shi Huangdi — the First August Emperor — and announced that his dynasty would last “for ten thousand generations.” Within a generation, the Qin dynasty had collapsed under the weight of its own demands, but the institutional framework the First Emperor imposed outlasted him by two millennia.

His story is set in context in famous Chinese emperors, and the comprehensive treatment of the institution he invented is in the section on Chinese emperors and imperial power. The political context is surveyed in the section on Chinese dynasties.

The Warring States Background

The Qin state that produced the First Emperor was the westernmost of the seven Warring States, located in the upper Wei River valley in modern Shaanxi. A series of Legalist reforms in the fourth century BCE — most famously the policies of Shang Yang under Duke Xiao of Qin — had transformed it. Shang Yang reorganised Qin society along Legalist lines: the state rewarded military achievement and agricultural production with rank and land, and punished every other activity with harsh penalties. The result was a state with a powerful professional army, an efficient bureaucracy, and an obedient population. By the late third century BCE, Qin was the strongest of the Warring States, and the conquest of the others was a matter of time. The long conflict that led to Qin’s victory is see Warring States period.

The Conquest of the Six States

Between 230 and 221 BCE, Qin conquered the six rival states one by one. Han fell first, in 230 BCE; Zhao in 228, despite a heroic last stand at Handan; Wei in 225; Chu in 223; Yan in 222; and Qi in 221. The Battle of Changping of 260 BCE, before Ying Zheng’s personal rule, had already demonstrated Qin supremacy: the Qin general Bai Qi had annihilated a Zhao army of perhaps 400,000 men, reportedly burying the survivors alive. The conquest of the six states was the working-out of that supremacy, applied to a divided continent.

The Unification of 221 BCE

Upon completing the conquest, Ying Zheng faced a problem of unprecedented scale: ruling a vast empire populated by peoples with different languages, customs, and traditions. To hold it together, he abolished the feudal fiefdoms and replaced them with a system of commanderies (郡, jùn) and counties (縣, xiàn), each governed by centrally appointed officials who could be moved or dismissed at imperial pleasure. The empire was divided into 36 commanderies (later expanded to more than 40), each subdivided into counties. The system is the ancestor of every subsequent Chinese provincial administration.

He also standardised the written script (書同文), the system of weights and measures (車同軌), the coinage, and the axle width of carts to facilitate the movement of goods. He built an empire-wide network of imperial highways, dug irrigation canals, opened up new agricultural land, and ordered the connection of the older northern walls into a single defensive line — the ancestor of the modern Great Wall. These reforms were the practical expression of a Legalist political philosophy: a uniform state, governed by uniform laws, administered by uniform officials, and protected by uniform defences, would be more efficient and more durable than a patchwork of feudal territories. The Qin reforms imposed, for the first time, the bureaucratic uniformity that would distinguish the Chinese state for the next two thousand years.

The Title of Emperor

The most consequential decision of 221 BCE was the title itself. The First Emperor did not call himself wáng (王), the title of the old Zhou kings and the Warring States rulers. He called himself huángdì (皇帝), combining huáng (august) from the legendary sage-kings of remote antiquity with dì (sovereign) from the Shang dynasty’s high god. The compound was a deliberate claim: he was not the latest in a long line of kings, but the founder of a new and permanent order. The imperial title would be used, with one exception, by every Chinese ruler for the next 2,133 years. The single exception was the only empress regnant, Wu Zetian, who used huángdì in her own right during the Tang interregnum of 690–705.

The Burning of the Books

The most notorious act of the reign was the burning of books (焚書坑儒) in 213 BCE. According to Sima Qian’s Shiji, the chancellor Li Si persuaded the emperor that the proliferation of books and rival schools of thought was a source of disorder. The emperor accordingly ordered that all books be destroyed except those on practical subjects (agriculture, medicine, divination) and the official Qin genealogies. Scholars who refused to surrender their books were reportedly buried alive. The historicity of the burials is disputed, but the episode became a byword for intellectual repression, and shaped the Confucian tradition’s distrust of state power. Yet the repression was not as thorough as tradition suggests: the discovery of pre-Qin texts at Mawangdui and Guodian in the twentieth century showed that pre-Qin literature was more extensive than once thought.

The Terracotta Army and the Imperial Tomb

The most spectacular surviving monument of the reign is the terracotta army (兵馬俑) near modern Xi’an, discovered in 1974 by farmers digging a well. The army consists of more than 8,000 life-size ceramic soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses, and 150 cavalry horses, buried in three pits near the First Emperor’s tomb. The figures are individually crafted, with distinct faces and expressions, and were originally painted in bright colours that have largely faded since excavation. The army was intended to accompany the emperor into the afterlife, and is part of a vast funerary complex that includes the unexcavated tomb mound itself, said to contain a model of the empire with rivers of mercury. The tomb complex was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, and the architecture is treated in Chinese architecture.

The Collapse of the Qin

The First Emperor died in 210 BCE during his fifth inspection tour of the east. His designated heir, the eldest son Fusu, was forced to commit suicide by the eunuch Zhao Gao and the chancellor Li Si, who installed the younger son, Qin Er Shi, on the throne. The Second Emperor was weak and dominated by Zhao Gao, who purged the imperial family, executed capable officials, and provoked a wave of rebellions. In 209 BCE the famous Chen Sheng and Wu Guang uprising broke out at Dazexiang, and within a year much of the empire was in revolt. The Chu-Han Contention of 206–202 BCE ended with Liu Bang’s victory and the founding of the Han Dynasty. The Qin was gone, but the framework of the centralised bureaucratic state survived intact: the commanderies, the script, the roads, the coinage, the canals, and the Great Wall. The First Emperor, in death, achieved a kind of posthumous victory: he had created a state that outlasted the dynasty he founded.

Famous Chinese emperors — profiles of the most consequential rulers
Chinese emperors and imperial power — the institution the First Emperor invented
The Warring States period — the violent background to Qin