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'''Qin Shi Huang''' the king of the state of Qin who in 221 BC completed the conquest of the warring states and became the first emperor of a unified China (259-210 BC). Taking the unprecedented title of First Emperor, he founded the Qin dynasty, imposed a centralised empire in place of the old feudal order, standardised writing, coinage and measures, and left behind the vast tomb complex guarded by the terracotta army.

== Early Life and the State of Qin ==
Qin Shi Huang was born in 259 BC as Ying Zheng, the son of the king of Qin, a state in the north-western frontier of the Chinese world. His early years were marked by the dangerous politics of the court and of the hostage exchange between Qin and the neighbouring state of Zhao, for his father had been held as a hostage there and the boy was born during that period. He succeeded to the throne of Qin in 246 BC at the age of thirteen, with a regent governing on his behalf.

The state of Qin had been transformed over the preceding century by the legalist reforms associated with the statesman Shang Yang, which strengthened the army, weakened the hereditary nobility and organised the population for war and agriculture. This foundation gave Qin the resources and the military efficiency to dominate its rivals, and by the time Ying Zheng took personal charge of government in 238 BC after suppressing a rebellion, the state was ready for conquest.

In 221 BC, after a decade of campaigns in which the six remaining great states were destroyed in turn, Ying Zheng stood as master of the Chinese world. He rejected the title of king, which had been shared with defeated rivals, and adopted the new title of huangdi, meaning august thearch or emperor, calling himself Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor, and decreeing that his successors would be numbered for countless generations.

== Unification and Reform ==
The emperor and his chancellor Li Si undertook a sweeping reorganisation of the realm. They abolished the hereditary fiefs of the old aristocracy and divided the empire into commanderies and counties administered by officials appointed and dismissed by the central government. This system of territorial administration, staffed by a salaried bureaucracy, replaced the feudal order and became the basic structure of Chinese government for the next two millennia.

To bind the far-flung territories together the Qin standardised weights, measures and the currency, and regulated the width of cart axles so that vehicles could travel the same roads. Writing was also unified through the promotion of the small seal script, a standard form that allowed documents to circulate across regions with different local traditions. The emperor ordered the construction of roads, canals and harbour works, and linked existing frontier walls into the beginnings of the long defensive barrier later known as the Great Wall.

The new state mobilised enormous numbers of labourers for its public works and for the defence of the frontiers, imposing heavy taxes, corvee labour and conscription. These demands, together with the harsh penalties prescribed by law, weighed heavily on the population. The emperor also undertook repeated tours of his domains, erecting stone inscriptions that proclaimed his achievements and the unity of the empire under a single rule.

== Ideology and the Burning of Books ==
Qin Shi Huang favoured the doctrines of legalism, which taught that order depended on uniform law and the absolute authority of the sovereign rather than on the moral example of the ruler or the traditions of the past. His chief minister Li Si pressed these principles into policy, arguing that the scholars who praised antiquity and criticised current measures threatened the unity of the state and the authority of the throne.

In 213 BC the emperor approved a policy of suppressing unauthorised writings and punishing those who cited the classics and the historical records against the government. Books on medicine, divination and agriculture were spared, and copies were preserved in the imperial archives, but much of the Confucian and philosophical literature was banned from private circulation. A generation later the scholar-officials who had been punished or silenced were remembered in tradition as the victims of the burning of the books and the burying of the scholars.

The emperor sought to unify not only the state but also its beliefs. He travelled to the sacred mountain of Mount Tai and performed the imperial sacrifices to heaven and earth, asserting a cosmic mandate for the new dynasty. He also patronised scholars and diviners who pursued the quest for immortality, sending expeditions in search of the fabled islands of the blessed, a concern with death and transcendence that shaped the last years of his reign.

== The Tomb and the Terracotta Army ==
From soon after his accession the emperor devoted immense resources to building his tomb, a vast complex near present-day Xi'an in Shaanxi province. The historian Sima Qian describes an underground palace with rivers of mercury, ceilings adorned to represent the heavens and a crossbow mechanism intended to kill intruders. Though the central burial chamber remains unexcavated, later surveys found unusually high concentrations of mercury in the surrounding soil, lending some credence to the ancient account.

The most celebrated part of the necropolis is the terracotta army, an estimated eight thousand life-sized figures of soldiers, archers, charioteers and horses arranged in battle formations in several pits. These and many other figures were excavated after farmers digging a well discovered fragments of the army in 1974. Each figure was modelled with individual features and originally painted in bright colours, and they rank among the greatest archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century.

The tomb complex also included bronze chariots, models of officials and entertainers, and a host of grave goods meant to serve the emperor in the afterlife. Together they reveal the ambition of a ruler who sought to carry his empire with him beyond death. The site was inscribed on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1987 and remains one of the most visited archaeological monuments in the world.

== Death and Legacy ==
Qin Shi Huang died in 210 BC on a tour of the eastern provinces, possibly from illness exacerbated by the elixirs of mercury that he had taken in his search for immortality. His death was concealed by the chief eunuch Zhao Gao and the chancellor Li Si, who forged an edict naming a younger son, Huhai, as successor and forcing the heir apparent Fusu and the loyal general Meng Tian to take their own lives. The Second Emperor proved weak and the court fell into intrigue.

The burdens imposed by the Qin regime provoked widespread rebellion, and within four years of the emperor's death the dynasty had collapsed. The empire he had created, however, endured in its essential form. The succeeding Han dynasty preserved the centralised bureaucracy, the unified script and the territorial administration of the Qin, and the ideal of a single empire ruling all under heaven became a permanent feature of Chinese civilisation.

Qin Shi Huang is remembered as a figure of extraordinary ambition whose achievements and cruelties both shaped the course of Chinese history. The name of China in many languages derives from Qin, the state he ruled. Alongside his reputation as a tyrant and a suppressor of learning stands his role as the unifier who ended centuries of war and gave China its enduring political framework, and historians continue to weigh the two against each other.

== See also ==
* Terracotta Army
* Qin dynasty
* Great Wall of China
* Li Si

== References ==

<ref name="r1">Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian: Qin Dynasty, Columbia University Press, 1993.</ref>
<ref name="r2">Derk Bodde, China's First Unifier: A Study of the Ch'in Dynasty as Seen in the Life of Li Ssu, E. J. Brill, 1938.</ref>
<ref name="r3">Frances Wood, The First Emperor of China, Profile Books, 2007.</ref>
<ref name="r4">Jane Portal, The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army, British Museum Press, 2007.</ref>

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[[Category:History]]
[[Category:Royalty]]
[[Category:Qin dynasty]]

Qin Shi Huang - Revision history

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