Literally,
First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty.
China was first unified under this man's
despotic rule.
Qin was originally the smallest
nation-state of
China, but it waited patiently while its
neighbors coducted
warfare, then struck as they all lay
exhausted. Once
Qin Shihuangdi conquered
China he quickly established a strong, centralized
bureaucracy to manage the huge
empire. He set the first
Chinese imperial capital near present-day
Xi'an, in the
Sichuan Province.
On his command, a standardized system of written characters was adopted, and its use was made compulsory throughout the empire. This was part of his effort to keep the empire more stable through a unified culture. To promote internal trade and economic integration the Qin standardized weights and measures, coinage, and axle widths. Private landholding was adopted, and laws and taxation were enforced equally and impersonally. The quest for cultural uniformity led the Qin to outlaw the many contending schools of philosophy that had flourished during the late Zhou Dynasty. Only legalism was given official sanction, and in 213BC this policy culminated in the Burning of the Books, where the books of all the other schools, except for copies held by the Qin imperial library, were burnt.
The First Emperor also attempted to push the perimeter of Chinese civilization far beyond the outer boundaries of the Zhou dynasty. In the south his armies marched to the delta of the Red River, in what is now Vietnam. In the southwest the realm was extended to include most of the present-day provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan. In the northwest his conquests reached as far as Lanzhou in present-day Gansu Province; and in the northeast, a portion of what today is Korea acknowledged the superiority of the Qin. The center of Chinese civilization, however, remained in the Huang He (Yellow River) valley.
The despot was also known for his cruelty. The best-known achievement of the Qin Dynasty was the completion of the Great Wall. The foreign conquests of the Qin and the wall building and other public works were accomplished at an enormous cost of wealth and human life. Forced labor and conscription of all males in the empire brought massive dissent from the people, and the persecution, torture and execution of many of the scholars in the nation did not improve his popularity. Public works, all constructed by forced laborors, killed millions. The draconian law system, which condemns almost all crimes with the pain of death, further decreased his popularity as a ruler.
When he died, he was buried with the now famous Terracotta Warriors, thousands of life-size clay statues, all with a different face. The practice of burying servants alive with their masters for the afterlife has been abandoned. After his death, his weak son was unable to hold the empire together. Within a few decades, he committed suicide. The "Dynasty to last ten thousand years" ended only after 15 years.