Qin Shi Huang: The First Emperor of China

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Sometimes he is called Qin Shi Huang and sometimes Shi Huang Di. He is also referred to as Ying Zheng and other times Zhao Zheng. Regardless of the name, the man behind it represents one of the most important figures in the history of China. He was the founder of the Qin Dynasty, which was short-lived, lasting only 15 years, but had a significant impact on the country. The Qin Dynasty was the first to rule over a united imperial China.

Before becoming emperor, Qin Shi Huang was king of the Qin state during a tumultuous time known as the Warring States period. He emerged victorious in battles against neighboring kingdoms, conquering them all and bringing them under his dominion. This alone would have earned him a place in the history books, but the new administrative policies he introduced also marked a significant departure from centuries of tradition, aiming to ensure that China would never experience a Warring States period again.

There were also ambitious construction projects, chief among them the Great Wall of China and the thousands of Terracotta Warriors that still guard the emperor’s mausoleum today. Qin Shi Huang spent the last years of his life in a bizarre pursuit of the elixir of life, hoping to live forever. While things might not have worked out as he wished in the end, his actions certainly immortalized him as one of China’s greatest rulers.

Before we examine the life of Qin Shi Huang, we should look at the state of China prior to its reunification under his reign. There was a powerful dynasty called the Zhou, which ruled over a large territory but not quite all of what is traditionally considered the core Chinese mainland. They were led by a king who had the Mandate of Heaven, recognized as the Son of Heaven with the divine right to rule.

Technically, the Zhou Dynasty lasted for almost 800 years, from the 11th century BC until the middle of the 3rd century BC. However, as early as the 8th century BC, the power of the king began to diminish as local military leaders and noblemen asserted their authority. The king simply didn’t have the power to keep these ambitious upstarts in line while also fending off neighboring powers trying to invade. Consequently, the territory splintered into hundreds of small states. On paper, they were all still loyal to the king, but in reality, each one wanted to assert its sovereignty. Soon, the states began fighting each other to expand their territories.

This led to some states becoming powerful enough to declare independence from the Zhou Dynasty and even go to war against it. The tail end of the Zhou Dynasty was a particularly violent and turbulent time known as the Warring States period, which lasted for around 250 years, from the 5th century BC until 221 BC. There was a struggle for supremacy among seven kingdoms: the Qin, the Zhao, the Chu, the Han, the Wei, and the Yan. The Zhou was not among them, as by this point, the king’s power was merely symbolic. He managed to hold on thanks to alliances and conspiracies with more powerful rulers who wanted to legitimize their authority with approval from the Son of Heaven. However, this could not last forever, and the Zhou Dynasty finally ended in 256 BC when the Qin state captured the city of Chengzhou and killed King Nan.

Qin Shi Huang was born circa 259 BC. As his title implies, in the Qin state, he is usually known as Qin Shi Huang or Shi Huang Di, but both were titles. His actual name was Ying Zheng, sometimes also called Zhao Zheng. However, once he had conquered all the other states in unified China, he gave himself the new title of Huang Di or Emperor and assumed the regnal names of Shi Hong Di, meaning “First Emperor,” and Qin Shi Huang.

His parentage is somewhat controversial, thanks to an ancient historian named Sima Qian, who indicated that Ying’s father might not have actually been his biological father. Ostensibly, Ying Zheng was the eldest son of King Zhuangxiang of Qin and Lady Zhao. According to the historian, the king and his future queen met when he was still known as Prince Yiren, being held hostage in Zhao to ensure peace between their two kingdoms. However, the prince was liberated with the help of a wealthy merchant named Lu Buwei, who also introduced him to his future wife, known at the time as Xiao Ji.

What Prince Yiren never found out was that Zhao was one of Lu’s former concubines and might have already been pregnant when they married. Therefore, Ying Zheng would have actually been the son of Lu Buwei and not King Zhuangxiang. Of course, there is no way to verify this, and it is possible that the historian invented this to slander the former emperor, but this rumor has persisted for millennia.

Regardless, Zhuangxiang ruled for three years before dying in 246 BC and was succeeded by Ying Zheng, who was only 13 years old at the time. Lu Buwei stepped in again to serve as his regent. Again, we are going strictly on the word of Sima Qian, but it seems that once the king was out of the picture, Lu resumed his affair with the queen dowager Zhao, or maybe it never really ended in the first place.

As the years went on and Ying Zheng was getting closer to assuming control of the kingdom, Lu became more concerned with the possible consequences of his relationship with the young king’s mother. Therefore, he tried to distance himself from Queen Zhao, who was not too thrilled with this idea, not necessarily because of her affection for Lu, but because she still wanted someone to satisfy her desires. The two compromised, and Lu found a good substitute named Lao Ai, who was allegedly so well-endowed that he could spin a wheel on his erect member.

Of course, the queen wouldn’t have been allowed publicly to have a boy toy, so Lao Ai was always shaved and dressed to look like a eunuch. Queen Zhao was very happy with this arrangement, and Lao Ai quickly became her favorite. She gave him titles, wealth, and power, and the couple might have even had two children together. But all of this went to his head, and soon enough, he started to get ideas about overthrowing Ying Zheng and installing one of his own sons as the new king.

Around 238 BC, Ying Zheng found out the truth after a drunken Lao Ai foolishly boasted that he was the king’s stepfather. Enraged, Ying Zheng decided it was time to execute a whole bunch of people. Lao Ai, with nothing to lose, tried to stage a revolt, but he couldn’t get many people to rally to his cause, and the rebellion was easily crushed. Lao Ai was killed by being torn apart by horses, while three generations of his family were also executed, including his two sons with the queen.

As for Zhao, she was not killed but condemned to live under house arrest for the rest of her days. For his role in the affair, Lu Buwei was punished by being stripped of his powers and banished to a remote part of the kingdom, where he committed suicide by drinking poison a few years later. Many modern historians put this entire chapter of Qin Shi Huang’s life under a big question mark and even argue that Lao Ai might not have existed at all. However, whether or not it happened, the end result was the same: Ying Zheng assumed full power as the king of Qin and was able to dedicate himself to conquering the six other warring states.

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Now, back to ancient China. Right from the start, Ying Zheng had an advantage over his adversaries because the kingdom he inherited was the largest and most powerful of the Warring States and was well-positioned at the western edge of Chinese territory. The first to fall was Han, which proved to be the weakest of the seven kingdoms. Located in the middle of ancient China, it had always been surrounded by larger, more powerful states and could never expand.

The main reason it survived thus far was that whenever one state tried to invade, another usually came to its defense out of self-interest to prevent its enemy from growing too powerful. But this mattered little to Ying Zheng since he intended to attack everyone anyway. In 230 BC, he marched his army into Han, and the state was conquered that same year.

Afterward came a much bigger foe: the Zhao state. A lot of the hard work had been done before Ying Zheng even ascended to the throne. The two states had already fought a war a few decades prior, culminating in the Battle of Changping in 260 BC, which ended in a decisive victory for Qin. Therefore, the Zhao state that Ying Zheng faced was much weaker than it used to be. Even so, this would prove to be the king’s longest military campaign, one that saw him face many setbacks and even defeats.

Zhao had one big ace up its sleeve: Li Mu, considered one of the greatest generals of ancient China. He was one of the main reasons why Zhao was not overrun immediately. Even when Qin gained territory, Li Mu defeated them in combat several times, especially at the Battle of Fei in 233 BC. As long as he was still standing, the enemy found it difficult to make any permanent headway in Zhao.

If he could not achieve his goal through war, Ying Zheng resorted to deception. The details are unclear, but he used spies and bribes to sow discord in the Zhao court, specifically getting the king of Zhao, Yumi, to distrust Li Mu and relieve him of his position. The former general died around 229 BC, either executed or forced to commit suicide. Afterward, Ying Zheng found it much easier to defeat Zhao. He captured Handan, the state’s capital, in 228 BC and executed King Yumi, effectively eliminating Zhao as a threat.

However, one of the king’s sons, Prince Jia, managed to flee to the northern region of the kingdom called Dai, proclaimed it a new independent state, and named himself king. He lasted for another six years before being ultimately vanquished, thus completing the total annexation of the Zhao state.

Next, Ying Zheng set his sights on the kingdom of Yan. The crown prince, Dan, realized that there would be no match against Qin in battle, so he dispatched an assassin named Jing Ke to eliminate Ying Zheng in 227 BC. Jing Ke approached the Qin court posing as a Yan nobleman ready to betray his homeland, claiming to possess valuable maps of the territory ahead. This was always intended as a suicide mission, armed with a poison dagger. Jing Ke’s deception was only meant to get him close enough to the king to kill him, as he would surely be struck down by the guards afterward.

Unfortunately for him, he failed in his assassination attempt, which provided Ying Zheng with a great excuse to invade Yan, not that he really needed one. Bizarrely enough, Jing Ke became somewhat of a folk hero in China, and during the Han Dynasty, he was immortalized in poetry, songs, and stories. Later, a mountain and a town were named after him, and even in modern times, he has been the subject of movies and television shows.

The war went decidedly in Qin’s favor. Ying Zheng invaded Yan in 226 BC and soon captured the capital of Ji Sheng. In a desperate attempt, King Shi of Yan executed his own son, Crown Prince Dan, and sent his head to Ying Zheng as a way of apologizing for the assassination attempt. This sort of worked, as Ying delayed his conquest for a few years but returned in 222 BC to finish the job. This was a clear sign to the king of Qin that he could focus his attention on the next target, as Yan was no longer a threat and could be annexed at any time.

Ying Zheng began his conquest of the states of Wei and Chu around the same time, mainly because he believed that otherwise, one of them might attack his flanks while he was waging war against the other. Fortunately for Ying, he also had one of the most skilled generals of that era in his retinue: Wang Jian, whose son Wang Ben became a successful commander in his own right.

In 225 BC, Ben marched an army into Wei while his father took on the more difficult task of conquering Chu, a state that almost rivaled Qin in size and power. The kingdom of Wei proved to be an easy target after Wang Jian employed a clever strategy to redirect the waters of the Yellow River to flood the capital of Wei. The king had no choice but to surrender. Chu turned out to be much more resilient. In fact, the first Qin invasion, which was not led by Wang Jian, was successfully repelled. It wasn’t until 224 BC that Ying Zheng sent another army three times as big, this time led by his skilled general, to conquer Chu and permanently add it to his growing empire.

Even so, it took almost two years before Wang Jian was ultimately successful. Only one state was still left to conquer: Qi, which turned out to be a bit of a pushover. Ying Zheng invaded the kingdom in 221 BC and conquered it later that same year, encountering very little resistance. Some say this was because prior to this, he had bribed many officials from Qi, including the chancellor, to ensure that the opposing army was poorly organized and equipped.

In 221 BC, Ying Zheng had fulfilled his ambition: he had conquered the Warring States and united ancient China under his rule. From now on, he was Qin Shi Huang, founder of the new Qin Dynasty. Just because Qin Shi Huang conquered all the other Chinese states did not mean that he was done fighting. He had to deal with many rebellions from small armies that refused to recognize his authority, but there were also external threats to contend with.

Of them all, the most dangerous was the nomadic Xiongnu people, who claimed dominion over a vast territory in the Eurasian steppes. The origins of the Xiongnu are a mystery, as they were a confederation of nomadic tribes that didn’t leave behind historical records. The first mentions we have of them come from the Chinese, and it has been speculated that the Xiongnu were the ancestors of the Huns, who emerged from the same area a few centuries later.

The Chinese and Xiongnu had long-lasting conflicts that eventually erupted into a full-blown war, but this happened about 80 years after Qin Shi Huang’s death. During his time, the situation was not quite as tense, but the emperor still recognized the possible threat posed by the nomadic tribes gathering near his northern border. Therefore, he sent his general Meng Tian to launch a victorious preemptive strike against the Xiongnu in 215 BC.

Inside his empire, Qin Shi Huang narrowly avoided another assassination attempt, this one courtesy of Zhang Liang, an official from the former Han state who wanted to avenge the conquest of his kingdom. His plan was to organize an ambush on the imperial convoy and destroy the emperor’s carriage. Unfortunately for him, he picked the wrong one, as Qin Shi Huang traveled with two identical carriages for this very reason.

Zhang Liang might have failed, but ultimately he had the last laugh, as he proved to be instrumental in the fall of the Qin Dynasty after Shi Huangdi’s death. For most of his reign, the emperor was concerned with the administration of his empire. He wanted to distance himself from the feudal approach that had been present in China for most of the previous thousand years, knowing that as time passed, this would lead to noble families gaining more power, ultimately resulting in another situation like the Warring States.

Therefore, he established a central government in the capital of Xianyang, divided his empire into 36 administrative divisions called Jun, and forced all important aristocratic families to live in the capital instead of ruling over their own lands far from the government. Qin Shi Huang enacted reforms such as issuing state coinage, introducing universal standardization, and improving the empire’s road and wall network to safeguard it against barbarians. His most famous construction project was the Great Wall of China, although some sections of the wall had existed for hundreds of years by that point, dating as far back as the 7th century BC.

As the years went on, Qin Shi Huang became more tyrannical than paranoid. The main targets of his oppression were intellectuals, especially those who followed Confucianism. He undertook a large-scale campaign to burn most books that didn’t pertain to medicine, agriculture, divination, or the history of the Qin state. Essentially, he didn’t want the history of China to exist before his reign.

In his most infamous act, Qin Shi Huang reportedly arrested 460 Confucian scholars and buried them alive. While he certainly punished and even executed those he perceived as subversive to his totalitarian regime, whether or not this specific event actually happened is a matter of debate among historians. Their biggest concern is that the only source of information comes from the Han Dynasty, which took power after the Qin Dynasty fell. Not only were they enemies, but the Han were followers of Confucianism, and this could have been an attempt to slander their former oppressor.

In his final years, the emperor became obsessed with the concept of immortality. Multiple assassination attempts might have contributed to this obsession. He dedicated vast resources to the search for an elixir of life that would allow him to live forever, traveling throughout his empire to meet with alchemists, healers, and magicians who could provide him with what he desired. Of course, none of them could, and consequently, most were put to death for being charlatans.

It was during one of these trips in 210 BC that Qin Shi Huang fell ill and died at the age of 49. His exact cause of death is unknown, but it may have been ironic, as the emperor may have inadvertently poisoned himself by drinking an immortality elixir that contained mercury. He was buried in a giant mausoleum that he had built for himself, surrounded by thousands of