Warlords: History & Biographies

The Kingdom and Empire of Qin

Location
The Kingdom of Qin was known as the “Land within the Passes” by the ancient Chinese. Cut off from the rest of the Chinese Kingdoms by tall mountains, and only accessible by army through four passes, it was a position of great natural strength. The fertile plains of Qin were capable of supporting a great population, and soon the Kingdom was one of the most powerful of the Warring states. The Qin homelands roughly equate to the Shaanxi and eastern Gansu provinces of modern China.

Pre-Qin Empire
The Kingdom of Qin was long considered to be the least civilized and backwards of the major Chinese Kingdoms, having been created on the frontier during the time of the Zhou Dynasty. But the Kingdoms great natural barriers and fertile plains quickly aided it in becoming one of the most powerful of the seven major states of the Warring States Period. While it was Qin Shihuangdi who unified all of China, the foundation for the ultimate conquest of the Empire was done over time, with his great grandfather making huge strides by conquering the southern frontiers of Han, Ba, and Shu, as well as bringing about the ruin of the Zhou Dynasty. Indeed, Shihuangdi’s grandfather was so powerful that all the other states of the Empire rose up against the Qin, and attempted to invade their lands. Their invasion was a failure in the end, however, and broke down in the well-defended passes surrounding the “Land within the Passes”. In 230 BC, after inheriting from his father a kingdom already winning a war against the Hann and Wei kingdoms, Qin Shihuangdi spent the next eight years conquering the rest of the Empire and bringing the other six states: Yan, Zhao, Wei, Han, Qi, and Chu, under his control and founding the Qin Empire, the first real Empire to control all of civilized China.

The Qin Empire
The Kingdom of Qin’s government was made up of a centralized bureaucratic system which Qin Shihuangdi expanded to cover all of the Empire. The Qin used the philosophy of legalism in constructing their laws, and the government was expanded, usually through brutal methods to all of the former Kingdoms. In a dramatic departure from the Zhou Dynasty, legal codes were standardized, as were weights, measures, coinage, and the written characters. This wave of change caused much dissent and in order to silence the resulting criticism, the Emperor set about a program of arresting and publically executing dissenting scholars and collecting books and burning them, sponsoring one of the greatest losses of historical written works ever recorded.

To prevent uprisings, Qin Shihuangdi ordered the confiscation of weapons and stored them in the capital, destroyed the walls and fortifications designed to protect each state from the other, and instituted a one-year mandatory conscription for every male between the ages of seventeen and sixty into the Qin army. With this mass of manpower, the Qin began a set of the most ambitious building projects ever known. To halt the continuous barbarian invasions in the north, the first Great Wall of China was built across the northern plains of the states of Yan and Dai. Huge canalworks were undertaken in Zhao and the Qin homelands, multiple palaces were constructed, and the massive mausoleum at Mt Bashang was begun, where the army of thousands of terracotta soldiers have been excavated in recent years. In 210 BC, Qin Shihuangdi died during the fifth of his processions around the Empire. In less than six months after the accession of his second son Huhai over the dead body of his brother, the entire Empire outside of the Qin homelands had degenerated into rebellion and revolt.

Post-Qin Empire
The Empire of Qin strove valiantly to hold itself together during the great rebellion in 209 BC. But immense corruption in the capital made its efforts go in vain, and despite huge initial successes in the field by the Supreme Commander Zhang Han, the Qin hold on the rest of the Empire dwindled to the point that when Ying Huhai was killed in 207 BC, Ying Ziying only took the title of King of Qin, and not that of Emperor. Thirty days after the accession of Ying Ziying as King of Qin, he surrendered the Kingdom to the advancing army of Liu Bang.

Ying Ziying was killed by Xiang Yu a short time later, and the Kingdom of Qin was left to the less than tender mercies of Xiang Yu and his armies. Upon the destruction of the capital, Xiang Yu split the Kingdom of Qin into three smaller kingdoms named after then ancient states of Di, Yong and Sai.

This division was short-lived however, for as soon as Xiang Yu had left Qin, Liu Bang conquered the entire region and took it as his own. For the next five years, Liu Bang and Xiang Yu fought one another, with Liu Bang using the resources of the still powerful Qin Kingdom to eventually succeed in killing Xiang Yu and naming himself Emperor.

The Kingdom of Qin, however, never existed again as a single kingdom, being split up into more than thirty provinces, each with its own governor. The Han Dynasty kept its capital at the Qin city of Chang An(modern day Xi’an) for the next two hundred years, before moving it east to Luoyang.

Kings Ying Huhai(The Second Emperor) Ying Ziying	Major Officers Li Si Meng Tian Meng Yi Ying Fusu Zhang Han Zhao Gao	Important Officers Dong Yi Li You Shusun Tong Sima Xin Wang Li Yan Yue
Minor Officers Chen Hui Chunyu Yue Feng Jie Feng Quqi Fu Tong Governor Yi Guan Ping	Minor Officers Magistrate of Pei (not Liu Bang) Pai Zhan She Jian Shi Cheng Shi Lu Sima Yi Su Jue Xu Fu	Minor Officers Yang Xiong Ying Gao Ying Jianglu Zhang Ping Zhao Cheng Zheng Guo Zhou Qingchen >

All information derived from the Burton Watson translation of Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian

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