The qin dynasty (221 – 202 BCE)

Chinese imperial history begins in 221 BCE, when the Qin 秦 state completes the conquering of the territory previously under the control of the Zhou royal house under the guide of Ying Zheng 嬴政, who will then declare himself emperor (Qin Shihuang 秦始皇). The first area conquered by the Qin state was the state of Shu 蜀, which corresponds roughly to the Sichuan basin. This gave Qin the ideal territory to produce enough food to feed their troops.

The Qin empire implemented several reforms that will be inherited and continued by the following empires. Standardizations are one of the major achievements: the Chinese script, weights, roads, and the legal system were all reformed to be the same across the empire. For modern scholars, this meant losing much of the legal and intellectual diversity that was present during the Warring States. Recent discovery of bamboo manuscripts have contributed to recovering some of this diversity, although almost all the written material produced during the Warring States has been recovered from tombs and sites that belonged to the Chu 楚 state.

The Qin empire is depicted in traditional accounts as extremely cruel and exploiting of its people. However, one needs to be aware that most of what we know about the Qin dynasty comes from later accounts, which are inevitably biased. One important exception is a group of texts known as the Shuihudi 睡虎地 corpus. This is a group of bamboo manuscripts excavated in 1975 from a tomb in Shuihudi (hence the name). They were produced during the Qin dynasty and record legal and public matters of the first empire.

The Qin dynasty was short lived. The principal reason for its failure lies in internal disputes: after the first emperor died in 210, eunuch Zhao Gao operating in the imperial court schemed to chose as heir the second son of Ying Zheng, precisely because of his weaknesses. Zhao Gao manipulated the new emperor, de fact creating a climate of distrust in the government. Another reason that accelerated the fall of the Qin dynasty was the toll that years of war and the establishment of the empire had taken on the population. The Great Wall 長城 was build by the Qin dynasty (it will be later continued by other dynasties), which required a considerable labour force.