Qin Shi Huang

The young king’s response was swift and merciless. His loyal forces crushed the rebellion, placing a bounty of one million copper coins on Lao Ai’s head. When captured, the pretender was tied to five horse-drawn carriages and torn to pieces. His entire family to the third degree was executed; the two hidden half-brothers were murdered; and the Queen Dowager was placed under permanent house arrest. Lü Buwei, implicated in the disaster, was banished and eventually drank a cup of poisoned wine in 235 BCE to preempt a more agonizing death. At twenty-four, Ying Zheng had cleared his court of regents, pretenders, and family rivals, including his legitimate half-brother Chengjiao, who had earlier rebelled and surrendered to Zhao, leaving his retainers to be executed. The king stood alone, assisted now by a brilliant, ruthless new chancellor named Li Si.

With his domestic house in order, Ying Zheng turned the military machine of Qin toward its neighbors. For centuries, the Warring States period had carved China into competing kingdoms. Qin, located in the mountainous west, had long been regarded by the eastern states as a semi-barbaric march, but it possessed a highly disciplined society organized around Legalism—a philosophy that rejected moralizing Confucian ideals in favor of total state control, strict laws, and agricultural and military efficiency. One by one, the rival states fell before Qin’s relentless armies. Between 230 and 221 BCE, Han, Zhao, Yan, Wei, Chu, and Qi were systematically conquered, their ruling houses extinguished, and their lands annexed.

When the last state, Qi, surrendered in 221 BCE, Ying Zheng achieved what no ruler before him had done: he unified the fractured lands of the old Zhou dynasty into a single, cohesive realm. To match this unprecedented achievement, he rejected the traditional title of wang (king). Working with Li Si, he coined a new title: Huangdi. Combining huang (the shining or splendid epithet of Heaven used by the mythical Three Sovereigns) and di (the high god of the Shang dynasty used by the legendary Five Emperors, notably the Yellow Emperor), he became Qin Shi Huang—the First Emperor of Qin. He decreed that his successors would be named the Second Emperor, the Third Emperor, and so on, down through ten thousand generations. He took the first-person pronoun Zhen for his exclusive imperial use and declared his presence so sacred that he was to be addressed in person only as "Your Majesty" and in writing as "Your Highness."

Having conquered the known world, the First Emperor set about standardizing it. Together with Li Si, he dismantled the feudal system that had fractured China for half a millennium, replacing it with a centralized administrative structure of commanderies and counties ruled by appointed bureaucrats rather than hereditary lords. To prevent future rebellions, he ordered the private weapons of the empire confiscated, melted down, and cast into twelve colossal bronze statues. He unified the currency into circular copper coins with square holes and standardized weights, measures, and even the axle width of carts so they could travel smoothly along his newly constructed national road system. Most profoundly, he standardized the written Chinese script, bridging the linguistic divides of his vast territories with a uniform written tongue that remains the foundation of Chinese literacy to this day.

To defend this fragile new unity from the nomadic Xiongnu of the north, the emperor dispatched his general Meng Tian to conquer the Ordos Plateau and directed the connection of existing regional fortifications into a precursor of the Great Wall. To the south, his generals pushed deep into the Yue lands of Hunan and Guangdong, permanently drawing these southern regions into the Chinese cultural sphere. Yet these monumental public works came at a crushing human cost. Millions were conscripted to build his roads, his wall, and his gargantuan city-sized mausoleum.

This relentless drive for uniformity eventually sparked intellectual resistance. In traditional histories, Qin Shi Huang is notorious for the "burning of books and burying of scholars," an episode where he allegedly ordered the destruction of philosophical and historical texts that did not conform to Legalist doctrine and executed scholars who criticized his regime. While modern historians debate the scale and exact nature of these purges, the memory of them cemented his reputation as a ruthless tyrant among later generations of Confucian historians.

As the emperor aged, he became obsessed with his own mortality. He began to refer to himself as Zhenren ("The Immortal") and embarked on five grand tours of his eastern empire, searching for the mythical islands of the eastern sea where the elixirs of eternal life were said to reside. It was during his fifth tour of eastern China, in 210 BCE, that the First Emperor died, likely poisoned by the very mercuric compounds his alchemists had prepared to grant him immortality.

Fearful of a rebellion if the emperor's death became known before they could secure their own power, Li Si and the eunuch Zhao Gao concealed his demise. They returned his carriage to the capital in the heat of summer, hiding the smell of his decomposing body by surrounding his imperial carriage with cartloads of rotting fish. His body was laid to rest in his massive, unfinished mausoleum at Mount Li, guarded by a subterranean army of thousands of unique, life-sized terracotta warriors—soldiers designed to protect him in the afterlife just as they had in the world of the living.

The Qin dynasty did not last ten thousand generations; it collapsed into rebellion and civil war mere years after his death, replaced by the Han dynasty. Yet the administrative framework Qin Shi Huang established—the concept of a unified, bureaucratic Chinese state governed from a single center—survived the fall of his lineage. His title, Huangdi, would be claimed by every ruler of China until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 CE. He had demolished the old world so thoroughly that, despite the briefness of his reign, China could never return to what it was before.