Qin Unification of China
Qin conquered the last of the warring states in 221 BC and China was made a single empire for the first time. The Warring States period had run for two and a half centuries, in which seven major states fought each other with armies of hundreds of thousands, crossbows, iron weapons and mass conscription. Qin was the westernmost and was regarded by the others as half-barbarian. Its advantage was administrative. The reforms of Shang Yang from 356 BC abolished aristocratic privilege in favour of ranks earned by military merit, organised the population into mutually responsible groups of five and ten households, opened land to private ownership so that it could be taxed directly, and applied a code of law that made no exception for anyone — a doctrine later called Legalism, which held that human beings respond to rewards and punishments and to nothing else. It also had the Zheng Guo canal and the Chengdu plain irrigation, which fed the armies. Ying Zheng came to the throne at thirteen in 246 BC and took the six other states in ten years between 230 and 221 BC, by a policy of allying with the distant and attacking the near. He took the title Qin Shi Huangdi, first emperor, discarding the older word for king as insufficient. What followed was standardisation on an unprecedented scale: one script, one currency, one system of weights and measures, one axle width, provinces under appointed governors rather than hereditary lords, and the aristocracy of the conquered states moved to the capital. The dynasty lasted fifteen years and the structure lasted two thousand.
- Year: 221 BCE
- Category: Military
