Much of what came to constitute China Proper was unified for the
first time in 221 B.C. In that year the western frontier state of
Qin, the most aggressive of the Warring States, subjugated the last
of its rival states. (Qin in Wade-Giles romanization is Ch'in, from
which the English China probably derived.) Once the king of Qin
consolidated his power, he took the title Shi Huangdi ( First
Emperor), a formulation previously reserved for deities and the
mythological sage-emperors, and imposed Qin's centralized,
nonhereditary bureaucratic system on his new empire. In subjugating
the six other major states of Eastern Zhou, the Qin kings had
relied heavily on Legalist scholar-advisers. Centralization,
achieved by ruthless methods, was focused on standardizing legal
codes and bureaucratic procedures, the forms of writing and
coinage, and the pattern of thought and scholarship. To silence
criticism of imperial rule, the kings banished or put to death many
dissenting Confucian scholars and confiscated and burned their
books (). Qin aggrandizement was aided by frequent military
expeditions pushing forward the frontiers in the north and south.
To fend off barbarian intrusion, the fortification walls built by
the various warring states were connected to make a
5,000-kilometer-long great wall (). What is commonly referred to as
the Great Wall
is actually four great walls rebuilt or extended during the Western
Han, Sui, Jin, and Ming periods, rather than a single, continuous
wall. At its extremities, the Great Wall reaches from northeastern
Heilongjiang () Province to northwestern Gansu (). A number of
public works projects were also undertaken to consolidate and
strengthen imperial rule. These activities required enormous levies
of manpower and resources, not to mention repressive measures.
Revolts broke out as soon as the first Qin emperor died in 210 B.C.
His dynasty was extinguished less than twenty years after its
triumph. The imperial system initiated during the Qin dynasty,
however, set a pattern that was developed over the next two
millennia.
