China Unified: Qin and Han

For more than two centuries, from about 475 BC, China was split into rival kingdoms. Historians call it the Warring States period.

By the 200s BC, seven big states remained. The one in the far west, Qin, in the Wei River valley, was about to swallow all the others.

From 356 BC, the minister Shang Yang reshaped Qin. Land could be bought and sold, families were grouped to watch each other, and rank came from success in war, not birth.

Punishments were harsh and laws were applied to everyone. This approach was later called Legalism.

Qin also built canals and irrigation works, like the Zhengguo canal, that made it rich in grain.

King Zheng of Qin came to the throne as a boy in 246 BC. From 230 BC his armies conquered the other states one after another: Han, Zhao, Wei, Chu, Yan and finally Qi, in 221 BC.

For the first time, all of China’s heartland was under one ruler. He took a new title, Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor.

The First Emperor abolished the old kingdoms and divided the land into 36 commanderies, run by officials he appointed, not by nobles.

He standardised writing, weights and measures, coins and even the width of cart axles, so roads and markets worked the same across the empire.

Critics were crushed. In 213 BC, according to the historian Sima Qian, many books were burned. Later Han writers painted him as a tyrant.

The general Meng Tian drove the northern nomads back and joined older walls into a long northern barrier, an ancestor of the Great Wall. The walls you can visit today are mostly much later, from the Ming dynasty.

Near his capital, workers built the First Emperor’s tomb. In 1974, farmers digging a well found part of its guard: thousands of life-size clay soldiers.

The emperor died in 210 BC while touring his empire. His burial mound itself has still not been opened.

In 209 BC, conscripted labourers led by Chen Sheng and Wu Guang rebelled. Revolts spread, and in 206 BC the last Qin ruler surrendered.

Two rebel leaders then fought for the empire: the aristocrat Xiang Yu and Liu Bang, a former minor official of humble birth.

Liu Bang won in 202 BC and became Emperor Gaozu of the Han dynasty, with a new capital at Chang’an, today’s Xi’an.

North of the wall, the Xiongnu, a confederation of steppe peoples under Modu Chanyu, built a powerful empire of horse archers.

In 200 BC they surrounded Emperor Gaozu at Baideng. Afterwards the Han paid them silk, grain and princess brides, a policy called heqin, “peace through kinship”.

For sixty years the Han rebuilt their strength at home, keeping taxes low.

Emperor Wu ruled from 141 to 87 BC. His generals Wei Qing and Huo Qubing drove the Xiongnu out of the Gansu corridor, opening the road west.

In 111 BC Han armies conquered Nanyue, in today’s southern China and northern Vietnam. In 108 BC they set up commanderies in the north of the Korean peninsula.

To pay for the wars, the state took over the trade in salt and iron.

In 138 BC Emperor Wu sent an envoy, Zhang Qian, west to find allies against the Xiongnu. He was captured and held for about ten years, but escaped and reached Bactria.

He returned in 126 BC with news of kingdoms, horses and markets no one in China had known about.

Han armies and caravans followed. Silk went west and horses, grapes and new ideas came east, along routes later called the Silk Road.

Emperor Wu made Confucian teaching the state’s official learning, and in 124 BC set up an Imperial Academy to train officials.

Officials were recommended for their learning and character, an early step toward the later civil service exams.

A census in AD 2 counted about 57.7 million people, one of the oldest surviving population counts in the world.

In AD 9 the minister Wang Mang seized the throne and founded his own Xin dynasty. It collapsed amid floods and revolts, and in AD 25 the Han returned, now ruling from Luoyang.

In AD 105 the official Cai Lun presented an improved method of making paper to the court. Paper was older, but his method helped it spread.

In AD 166, Chinese records say envoys from “Da Qin”, the Roman Empire, arrived by sea, perhaps merchants claiming to speak for the emperor.

Court factions of eunuchs and officials fought each other while farmers suffered. In 184, the Yellow Turban rebellion swept the north.

Generals who crushed the rebels became warlords. The last Han emperor became a figurehead.

In 220 he gave up the throne. China split into three kingdoms, Wei, Shu and Wu, the setting of the famous novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Qin lasted only fifteen years, but it created the idea of a single empire run by officials. Han lasted four hundred years and made that idea normal.

Later dynasties, from the Tang to the Qing, would fall apart and come back together around the same model. Most people in China still call themselves Han.

Next: Rome, the empire at the other end of the Silk Road.