The+Qin+Dynasty+of+China

Return to Hist 151 Page


 * The Qin (Ch'in) and Han Dynasties - 221BCE~220CE **

Terms to know: warring states period Zhou Dynasty Qin Shihuangdi centralized state Legalism Great Wall of China Li Si Xian As we noted, the **warring states period** in Chinese History began in roughly 551BCE as the **Zhou Dynasty** began to have serious problems with the Hsiung-nu, a nomadic herding group from the north steppe. By 256, the Zhou were no longer legitimately in charge of their empire, and the civil wars were at their zenith. In just this period, a young ruler appeared in a North Western province of the former Zhou empire who would lead his people to conquer the eastern part of the Asian continent and give it the name it has held since then: the land of the Qin (Ch'in) - China. The Qin emperor began his long career at the age of 13, in 246 BCE, when he acceded to the throne of this backward frontier province. He proved to be the right man for the job, and his energy, intelligence, and willingness to listen to advice were unmatched. This man would eventually take the title **Qin Shihuangdi** (the First Emperor of the Qin) and create an empire that stretched from the steppes of Mongolia to the Red River and North Vietnam. In 246 BCE, however, Qin Shihuangdi was just beginning on the military path that would carry him to the throne of China. His greatest assett was, very much like the Zhou in their earliest days, his location. Being nearly surrounded in the Northwest by the Hsiung-nu and other nomadic tribes, the Qin had become very good fighters. They had adopted the nomadic method of fighting, relying heavily on cavalry and mobile, unpredictable assaults, while most of the other states in China relied on armies of foot soldiers armed largely with hand-to-hand weapons. The nomadic method of warfare also relied on a kind of stand-off combat, in which compound bows were used to hit the enemy as far away as 1000 feet, where the foot soldiers were little better than targets for the Hsiung-nu bowmen. This method of warfare was successful against the Hsiung-nu themselves, preserving the Qin state, and proved to be devastating against the armies of Qin Shihuangdi's competitors for power in the central kingdom. By 221 BCE, he had defeated them all, and unified the various states into a single empire now known as China. Where the dynasties we have discussed so far are clearly cultural and linguistic precedents of the Qin state, they really cannot be said to direct predecessors of the China we know today. By contrast, it was the Qin unification of the area that led directly to the institutions and assumptions that make it possible for us to identify China, throughout the ages, based on Qin principles continuously applied. This makes China one of the oldest continuous civilizations on the planet. So what made the Qin empire so different from earlier empires, and so central to what is now China? Largely, it had to do with organization. While the earlier Xia, Shang, and Zhou empires had been built on feudal relationships, and relied on other great houses' loyalty in defense and their obeisance to the imperial house, the Qin created a **centralized state** in which there was only one unquestioned power (that of the emperor). That central power then created and maintained its own army, and used that army both for defense and for enforcement of its laws within the state of the Qin. The policies followed by the first Qin emperor were based on policies that had successfully unified his own territory prior to the conquering of the empire, and had proved their worth by making the Qin state both stable and powerful.

To a great extent, we can say that the Qin state was **Legalist** in its outlook. Its power and centralized structure were based on the idea of a strong emperor whose decrees were enforced by a strong army. The loyalty of the army and the government was to the emperor directly, and they enforced his laws and decrees with immediate and sever punishment for those who broke the law. The Qin state thus rejected both Taoist and Confucian ideas about how human relationships worked, and instead followed the principles of Li Si. Li Si, as we discussed in the last lecture, had said that morality, Mandate of Heaven, and ritual are less effective in creating a stable state than law, strictly laid down and severely enforced.

Once he had consolidated his hold on the states of the Yellow River basin - the "civilized" north of China, Qin Shihuangdi immediately set out on a series of wars of conquest. These wars brought under his power the area of the Yangtze River in the south - the rice basket of China - and the area north of what is now Vietnam, penetrating at one point all the way to the Red River. In a fantastic project, Shihuangdi had his people connect the walls that a number of Zhou states had built along their borders to protect against invasion by the Hsiung-nu and other nomadic steppe tribes. This, the first "**Great Wall of China**," eventually ran for 1400 miles. Its building was accomplished through a Qin innovation - the corvee, also known as the labor tax, by which each family in China owned the imperial government so many days of free labor each year. The building of this wall was an arduous, difficult process fraught with the danger of injury or death by construction accident, or death in a raid by the nomadic tribesmen it was meant to keep out. At tremendous cost, both human and financial (the building of the wall may have cost up to one million lives), the wall was completed before 206 BCE.

The Qin emperor also consolidated his power internally, by creating a powerful, centralized government that had control of all aspects of Chinese society. One of Qin's most important reforms, carried out by his advisor, legalist philosopher **Li Si**, was to bring all former aristocrats and territorial kings into the capital city, Xian. These kings and aristocrats forfeited their land to the emperor, and were given lavish palaces just across the Yellow River from the imperial palace, which was designed to be grand and tremendously large, to impress upon those who viewed it the phenomenal power of the emperor to command labor and capitol in China. Once the land was firmly in the emperor's hands, Li Si divided the empire into forty prefectures, each of which was subdivided into counties. The officials of the counties were responsible to the prefectural governors, who were in turn responsible to the ministries of the central government, and those ministries were, in their turn, responsible directly to the emperor himself. There was a clear devolution of power from the center to the periphery - all authority came directly from the emperor himself. This, of course, meant that the bureaucracy of the Chinese government was, since the time of the first Qin emperor, subject to laws as directed by the emperor himself. This meant that government organization was extremely efficient, minimally corrupt, and committed to serving the emperor. It also meant that every family in China, no matter how rich or poor, was subject to taxation, which provided a tremendous revenue stream, and thus allowed the accomplishment of many of the reforms to follow. Further methods of centralizing the power and authority of the Qin emperor included creating a network of roads that centered on his capital in **Xian**. This sense of all transportation and communication in China subject to a single center point around which all revolved made Xian the geographical as well as political center of the Chinese world. This encouraged those within the empire to think of Xian in terms of a center and themselves as subjects of it.

Shihuangdi also decreed standard measurements for weight, distance, time, and money, so that trade could flourish (the richer the merchants, the richer the mercenary government that taxed them). He made all cart axles a certain width, and built roads according to the measurements of those carts.

In perhaps one of the most far-reaching reforms, Shihuangdi standardized the Chinese system of writing. He standardized Chinese characters, many of which had been written in very different styles, or with very different meanings depending on the local area. The standardization worked remarkably well. It created a unified literary language that most educated Chinese took as their written language, thus creating a unity in thought.

On the downside of all of this was the fact that, due to its Legalist leanings, the government of the Qin was intolerant of other ideas. Books on Confucianism, the Tao, and other ideas that had found their expression during the period of wars, were burned. Soldiers were lightly sent to search any ships with skilled men and women.

The burning of the books, combined with several other measures, including high taxation and severe punishment for even the lightest of crimes began to wear on public goodwill. By 210 BCE, when the first Qin emperor expired, there was a restive atmosphere to China. At the same time, the son of Qin Shuangdi was not the man his father had been. The empire began to fall apart under his rule. Unable to rule China like his father had, he had simply decided to set the stakes high. That, and the fact that tremendous numbers of people were being punished by the state - by death, or torture, made it impossible to avoid uprisings. In 206 BCE, the Qin dynasty collapsed under the weight of its own Legalism.