A frontier state in the west
Qin began as a small state in the Wei River valley, on the western edge of the Zhou world. According to tradition, its rulers were granted territory and recognition by the Zhou kings when the Zhou court moved east in 770 BCE, and over the following centuries Qin built a reputation as a hard-fighting border power. Its distance from the central plain was an advantage: it faced the other states mainly across a few mountain passes, and it could expand west and south without being drawn into every quarrel among its neighbours.
The empire that Qin created lasted from 221 to 206 BCE, only about fifteen years. Placed within the wider Chinese dynastic timeline, it is among the shortest of the major dynasties, yet much of the machinery of later imperial government traces back to it.
Duke Xiao and Shang Yang
The decisive change is usually dated to the reign of Duke Xiao (about 361 to 338 BCE). He invited Shang Yang, a thinker from another state, to reorganise Qin, and the reforms that followed, from about the 350s BCE, are the clearest early example of what is now called Legalism. Broadly, they did four things:
- grouped households into mutually responsible units, with shared liability for crimes;
- tied rank and reward to service, including success in battle, rather than to birth alone;
- encouraged farming and tightened state control of land and labour;
- replaced some hereditary local power with officials answering to the ruler.
Sources written later are not neutral about Shang Yang, and some details of the reforms are debated. What is generally accepted is that Qin gained a more centralised and more militarised state than most rivals. After Duke Xiao died, Shang Yang was executed, but the system largely survived him.
Expansion under the Qin kings
In the 4th century BCE Qin’s rulers began to call themselves kings, as other states had already done. In 316 BCE Qin took Shu and Ba, the rich basin of modern Sichuan, which gave it grain and a base for later campaigns down the Yangtze. Under King Zhaoxiang, who ruled for most of the first half of the 3rd century BCE, Qin repeatedly defeated its main eastern rival Zhao, notably at Changping in 260 BCE. Later sources report enormous casualties there, but such figures are probably exaggerated. In 256 BCE Qin put an end to the nominal Zhou royal house.
By then Qin was clearly the strongest of the Warring States, though it was not yet certain that any state could swallow all the others.
Ying Zheng and the conquest of the six states
Ying Zheng became king of Qin in 246 BCE, still a boy, and for years the court was dominated by the chancellor Lü Buwei. He took control of government around 238 BCE after a palace conspiracy, and he came to rely on officials such as Li Si, a Legalist administrator. Between 230 and 221 BCE Qin eliminated its rivals one by one, in the order traditionally given as Han, Zhao, Wei, Chu, Yan and Qi. An assassination attempt on the king by Jing Ke in 227 BCE failed, and the campaigns continued.
Historians still debate how far Qin unification was inevitable and how far it depended on luck and on the rivals’ failure to cooperate, but the political result is simple to state. In 221 BCE Ying Zheng adopted a new title, Qin Shi Huangdi, usually translated as the First Emperor.
Ruling an empire
The First Emperor divided the empire into commanderies and counties run by appointed officials rather than hereditary lords. Traditionally there were thirty-six commanderies at the start, a number that grew as territory was added. The government standardised writing, weights, measures and coinage, and built roads and canals. Later writers often credited these Qin standardised measures with holding a diverse territory together. The emperor also sent armies north against the pastoral peoples whom Chinese sources associate with the Xiongnu confederation, and south into the region of modern Guangdong and beyond.
Qin government was also harsh. Heavy conscription, forced labour on walls, roads and the emperor’s palaces and tomb, and severe punishments caused resentment. Later Han historians, writing under a dynasty that had replaced Qin, made these complaints central to their account. Stories such as the burning of books in 213 BCE and the burying of scholars in 212 BCE come mostly from those later writers, and historians debate how extensive and how deliberate they were. It is wise to treat the picture of Qin as pure tyranny as partly shaped by its successors.
Death and succession crisis
The First Emperor died in 210 BCE, in his late forties, while touring the eastern part of his empire. The chief ministers Li Si and the eunuch Zhao Gao are said to have concealed the death and arranged for a younger son, Huhai, to succeed as the Second Emperor, while the designated heir, Fusu, was ordered to take his own life. The accounts come from the historian Sima Qian, who wrote about a century later, so the details cannot be checked independently, but the outcome is not in doubt: the court was unstable from the start.
The emperor was buried in a vast tomb complex near modern Xi’an. The famous pits of clay soldiers were part of it, and they are often described as the First Emperor tomb guardians.
Collapse
The Second Emperor’s reign lasted only about three years. In 209 BCE two conscripts, Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, rebelled after being delayed on their way to a frontier posting, and risings spread across the former states. The commander Xiang Yu and the commoner-born Liu Bang became the leading rebel figures. In 207 BCE Zhao Gao forced the Second Emperor to kill himself, and a successor named Ziying ruled briefly as king, not emperor. Early in 206 BCE he surrendered to Liu Bang, and Xiang Yu soon afterwards executed him and burned much of the Qin capital.
Liu Bang defeated Xiang Yu in the following years and founded the Han dynasty in 202 BCE. The Han dynasty rise is the natural next chapter: the Han kept the commandery system and many Qin laws, while presenting itself as milder.
How to read the Qin story
Two cautions apply. First, much of what we know about Qin rulers comes from Sima Qian’s Shiji and other texts written under the Han, which had their own reasons to explain why Qin fell. Second, archaeology now offers a check. Thousands of bamboo and wooden documents from Qin legal and administrative offices, found in tombs and wells, show a bureaucracy with detailed rules, which supports the general picture of a highly organised state.
Qin lasted only briefly as an empire, but its practices of central appointment, written law and standard measures became the pattern that later dynasties adapted.