In March 1974 farmers digging a well near Xi'an struck fragments of a life-sized clay figure. The terracotta army was found by farmers digging a well, and excavations since then have revealed pits holding an estimated 8,000 soldiers along with horses and chariots, each soldier's face modeled individually, all buried to guard the tomb of the man who first united China. The tomb mound itself remains unopened.

How Qin won

Qin was a frontier state on the western edge of the Zhou world, often looked down on by its neighbors. In the 350s BC its ruler gave power to Shang Yang, a minister whose reforms turned Qin into a disciplined war state. He divided families into small groups who were legally responsible for reporting one another's crimes, rewarded farming and weaving, and replaced noble birth with ranks earned by service in war, so a commoner who fought well could rise. Laws were written, public and harsh. Later thinkers grouped ideas like these under the label Legalism: people respond to rewards and punishments, so the state should rely on clear laws rather than on the virtue of rulers. Shang Yang himself was executed after his patron died, but his system survived him.

For more than a century Qin armies ground down their rivals. In 221 BC King Ying Zheng of Qin conquered the last rival state. Declaring that the old title of king was too small, he called himself Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor, and announced that his descendants would rule for ten thousand generations.

One empire, one standard

With his chancellor Li Si, the First Emperor set out to make the conquered states into one country. The Zhou practice of granting land to hereditary lords was ended. Instead the empire was divided into commanderies and counties run by officials appointed and paid by the center, who could be moved or dismissed. This structure, more than the dynasty, was Qin's most lasting gift: every later dynasty used a version of it.

The government also standardized the written script, weights and measures, and coins, and even fixed the width of cart axles so wheels fit the same ruts. Roads and canals were built, and older walls along the northern frontier were joined into a defensive line against nomadic peoples. These walls were mostly rammed earth; the brick Great Wall that tourists visit today is far later. Hundreds of thousands of laborers were conscripted for these projects and for the emperor's palace and tomb.

Burning books and the fall

According to the historian Sima Qian, writing about a century later, Li Si persuaded the emperor in 213 BC to burn books of history and philosophy outside the imperial library, sparing texts on medicine, divination and farming. The next year, the account says, more than 460 scholars were buried alive. Many modern historians suspect parts of this story were exaggerated by Han writers who wanted Qin to look monstrous, and some note that the victims may have been magicians who had promised the emperor immortality and failed to deliver.

Our picture of Qin changed in 1975, when archaeologists at Shuihudi opened the tomb of a local official and found bamboo slips recording Qin laws and legal procedures. They show a bureaucracy devoted to record keeping, inspections of granaries and the precise valuation of stolen goods. Punishments could be brutal, but the system was also careful and predictable. One statute on labor drafts set fines, counted in shields and suits of armor, for long delays, and a reprimand for a delay of a few days.

The First Emperor died in 210 BC while touring his empire. His successor was weak, court intrigue was deadly, and in 209 BC a revolt broke out among conscripts. Rebellions spread, and the dynasty collapsed in 206 BC. Qin lasted only fifteen years after unification, yet it left behind the idea that China should be one state under one ruler.

Worked example: Chen Sheng and Wu Guang

Sima Qian tells how a group of conscripts heading for frontier duty was stopped by heavy rain. Their leaders, Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, reasoned that under Qin law lateness meant death, and that rebellion could cost no more than that. They killed their officers and raised the first great revolt against Qin. The story became a classic lesson in how harsh rule provokes its own destruction.

The Shuihudi slips complicate it. The labor statute punishes lateness with fines, not execution, and some scholars read a further clause as cancelling a draft delayed by rain. That rule may not have covered soldiers bound for the frontier, and the law may have changed by 209 BC, so we cannot simply call Sima Qian wrong. But the comparison shows why historians test a famous story against documents produced at the time. A tale told by the next dynasty is good evidence about what that dynasty believed, and only sometimes good evidence about what happened. The same habit protects any citizen reading a new government's account of the regime it replaced.