Though Qin Shi Huang ruled for just 12 years, and his dynasty fell soon after his death, the emperor created the concept of China familiar to us today—a vast civilization of varied culture and ethnicity sharing a common identity and the same written language.
Securing China’s Frontiers
In the five centuries of disunity and civil war between the feuding dukes of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, much of China’s population was displaced and its agricultural regions desolated.To the north, the nomadic Xiongnu people took advantage of the chaos to drive south and pillage Central China.
Six years after conquering China, in 215 B.C., Emperor Qin ordered General Meng Tian to lead 300,000 men on a punitive expedition against the encroaching Xiongnu. Meng retook lands north of the Yellow River and in today’s Inner Mongolia, establishing dozens of new imperial counties.
After dealing with the Xiongnu, Emperor Qin directed his focus southwards, to the Yangtze River and beyond. Half a million people were moved into the area occupied by the Yue race in the southeast, assimilating the local population. These lands were reorganized and eventually became today’s cities of Suzhou and Fuzhou.
Further campaigns to the south brought the Baiyue (literally, “the hundred Yue”) tribes into the Qin fold.
The emperor dispatched commander Weitu Sui deep into the regions now known as Guangdong and Guangxi, and set up three prefectures in these new territories. Another general, Chang E (not to confused with the Lady of the Moon, whose name is also romanized as Chang E), penetrated the former lands of Chu State to the mountainous and heavily forested regions of Sichuan and Yunnan in southwest China. He constructed a highway that connected these parts to the rest of the Qin empire.
The Great Wall
General Meng’s campaign also allowed the Chinese to connect and expand on various disjointed and incomplete defensive walls built by the former Yan and Zhao states, starting the Great Wall of China. This wall spanned 10,000 Chinese li (one li is about a third of a mile), from the west in today’s Gansu Province east to the Yalu River, which separates China from the Korean peninsula.The Great Wall is one of the First Emperor’s most famous achievements. Sun Yat-sen, the father of republican China, compared its construction with the legendary deeds of Emperor Yu the Great and held that without the protection afforded by the Wall, China would have long been overrun by the northern nomads.
Building the Great Wall required hundreds of thousands of conscripted laborers, a point commonly brought up in criticism of Emperor Qin.
Writing and Roads
Emperor Qin did much to ensure that China would stay undivided long after his death. Most famously, he standardized the systems of writing and road gauges that would continue to be used for thousands of years. A Chinese idiom that roughly translates as “on books, the same characters; on carriages, the same gauge” pays homage to this achievement.Chinese characters, in use since legendary ages, were standardized under Qin’s rule into basic brush strokes that are still legible to modern readers. No major changes were made to these forms until the 1950s reform by the communist authorities that mandated the simplification of Chinese writing. Traditional characters are still in use in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
While standardized writing brought the nation’s thoughts together, Qin’s revolutionary system of roads physically held the vast territory of the empire together. The emperor, who actively toured his domain, would have massive highways laid down ahead of him on his travels across old country roads.
Radiating out of the Qin capital at Xianyang (the modern city of Xi'an), these highways extended to Inner Mongolia, the Shandong Peninsula in the east, what is today Guangzhou in the south, and modern-day Gansu in the west.
Imperial Order
Emperor Qin set subdivisions of prefectures and counties, and tended carefully to the management and development of his conquests. This laid strong political and cultural foundations for the next two thousand years of Chinese civilization.Qin abolished the old position of king and established that the emperor’s authority, granted by Heaven, was second to none in the mortal realm. His queen was not merely the first among many wives, but a paragon of motherhood in charge of all the imperial concubines and their palace quarters.
As legal inheritor to the throne, the imperial crown prince was the only person who obtained his post through hereditary succession. All the old hereditary titles and feudal positions were abolished and replaced by appointed officials and ministers. Three lords (among them a chancellor) and nine ministers answered directly to the emperor and held responsibility for the various administrative departments in charge of government, supervision, and justice. The three categories were distinct so as to limit corruption and bureaucratic infighting.