The Qin Dynasty

Qin began as a small state on the western edge of the Zhou world, in the Wei River valley of what is now Shaanxi. In 771 BC raiders sacked the Zhou capital and the court moved east. The ruler of Qin helped escort the new king, Ping, to safety and was rewarded with noble rank and a claim to the old Zhou lands in the west, which Qin gradually took over.

For the next five centuries Qin was one of many states that owed nominal loyalty to the Zhou king. During the Warring States period (475–221 BC) those states fought for supremacy, and Qin had clear advantages: a defensible homeland behind mountain passes, fertile land, and room to expand westward.

Its decisive advantage was reform. In the 4th century BC the minister Shang Yang reorganised the state around farming and war. Noble privilege gave way to ranks earned on the battlefield, households were grouped so that each was responsible for its neighbours' conduct, and harsh, uniform laws applied to all.

In 246 BC a boy of thirteen, Ying Zheng, became king of Qin. Between 230 and 221 BC his armies conquered the six remaining rival states, Han, Zhao, Wei, Chu, Yan and Qi. In 221 BC he took a new title, Shi Huangdi, "First Emperor", and the Qin dynasty began.

The First Emperor abolished the old system of hereditary fiefs. The empire was divided into commanderies, each subdivided into counties, and run by salaried officials appointed and dismissed by the throne. This bureaucratic model, rather than rule through noble families, became the pattern for every later dynasty.

Qin government followed the school later called Legalism, associated with Shang Yang and the philosopher Han Feizi: the state was to be ordered by clear laws, strict punishments and rewards for service. The emperor's chief minister, Li Si, was its most powerful advocate.

Standardisation reached into daily life. Li Si's reform made the small seal script the official form of writing across the empire, which helped bind together regions that spoke very different languages. Weights, measures and coinage were unified, and even the axle widths of carts were fixed so that they fitted the ruts of the new roads.

The cost was heavy. According to the historian Sima Qian, in 213 BC the emperor ordered the burning of histories and philosophical works that challenged the state, sparing only practical texts such as those on medicine, divination and farming. The following year more than 460 scholars were put to death. Modern historians debate how far these accounts, written under the Han, exaggerate, but the episode fixed the First Emperor's reputation as a tyrant.

The Qin built on a vast scale. A network of imperial roads radiated from the capital, Xianyang, and the Straight Road, laid out under the general Meng Tian, ran for several hundred kilometres north across the hills towards the steppe frontier.

In the south the Lingqu Canal, dug around 214 BC, linked a tributary of the Yangtze with the Li River, which flows to the Pearl River. It carried supplies for the armies that pushed Qin rule into the far south.

In the north, after driving back the Xiongnu nomads, Meng Tian joined up and extended the walls that the states of Qin, Zhao and Yan had already built along their frontiers. Sima Qian says he commanded 300,000 men. Little of this rammed-earth wall survives above ground, and the stone and brick Great Wall that visitors see today dates largely from the Ming dynasty.

The great majority of people lived by farming, and Qin law treated agriculture and military service as the two duties of the ordinary household. Labour for the state, on roads, walls and palaces, was a heavy and often deadly burden.

The Lüshi Chunqiu, compiled at the Qin court under the chancellor Lü Buwei in about 239 BC, quotes a teaching attributed to Shennong, the legendary Divine Farmer: if a man in his prime does not plough, someone in the world will go hungry; if a woman in her prime does not weave, someone will go cold.

Religion centred on sacrifices to ancestors, spirits and the powers of heaven and earth, with divination to read their will. The First Emperor performed sacrifices on Mount Tai to announce his rule to heaven, and he became preoccupied with finding an elixir of immortality, sending expeditions to search the eastern seas for it.

The First Emperor began preparing his tomb as soon as he became king. It lies beneath a great earthen mound at Mount Li, near modern Xi'an. According to Sima Qian, some 700,000 labourers worked on it, and its chamber held a model of the empire with rivers of mercury, guarded by crossbows set to fire at intruders. The central chamber has never been opened, although soil tests over the mound have found unusually high levels of mercury.

In 1974 farmers digging a well about one and a half kilometres east of the mound found fragments of pottery figures. Excavation revealed pits holding an army of life-size soldiers, an estimated 8,000 figures in all, with horses and chariots. They were built in battle order, facing east.

The figures are grey earthenware, made from moulded and hand-modelled parts and finished individually, so that faces, hairstyles and armour vary. They were originally painted in bright colours, most of which flaked away on exposure to the air, and they carried real bronze weapons. Two half-size bronze chariots with teams of horses were excavated near the mound in 1980.

Because the dynasty was so short, objects that can be firmly attributed to the Qin are scarce. Most were made in the Qin state before unification or in the years just after it, and the dividing line from late Warring States work is often impossible to draw.

The most characteristic survivals are official. Round bronze coins with a square hole, inscribed banliang ("half ounce"), became the single currency of the empire. Bronze and pottery weights and grain measures were inscribed with the First Emperor's edict of 221 BC standardising measurement, and these inscriptions, in small seal script, are the surest sign of Qin date.

Everyday pottery was mostly grey earthenware, and Qin palaces were roofed with grey tiles whose round ends carried moulded designs. There was no porcelain. High-fired, glazed stonewares had been made in southern China since the Bronze Age, but the mature celadons that lead towards porcelain appeared only under the Han.

Excavated relics belong to the Chinese state, and the "terracotta warriors" seen on the market are modern reproductions. Anything else offered as Qin deserves close examination; our guide to detecting fakes explains the principles.

The First Emperor died in 210 BC while touring the east of his empire. Some historians have suggested that the mercury-based elixirs he took in search of long life hastened his death.

The court official Zhao Gao and Li Si concealed the death and forged an order that forced the heir, Fusu, to take his own life. A younger son, Huhai, was placed on the throne as the Second Emperor. Zhao Gao soon had Li Si executed and dominated the court.

In 209 BC two conscripts, Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, led a revolt that spread across the former rival states. In 207 BC Zhao Gao forced the Second Emperor to kill himself and put Ziying on the throne as king. Ziying had Zhao Gao killed, but in 206 BC he surrendered to the rebel leader Liu Bang. The general Xiang Yu then executed Ziying, burned Xianyang and divided the empire into eighteen kingdoms.

Four years of war between Xiang Yu and Liu Bang followed. In 202 BC Xiang Yu, defeated, took his own life, and Liu Bang, a former minor official, became the first emperor of the Han dynasty. He is better known to history as Emperor Gaozu.

The Qin is the shortest of China's major dynasties and among the most influential. The Han condemned its cruelty but kept most of its institutions: the commanderies and counties, the salaried bureaucracy, the unified script and the standard coinage. The idea of a single empire under one emperor, established in 221 BC, lasted until 1912.

The Western name "China" is widely thought to derive from Qin. Its most visible legacy is the mausoleum near Xi'an, where excavation of the pits around the unopened tomb continues. Our pages on the Zhou dynasty before it and the Han dynasty after it follow the story on either side.