Qin China in 218 B.C.

Qin China — 218 BC · All Under Heaven, Newly Unified.

Qin — all-under-heaven newly bound into a single empire. In 221 BC Ying Zheng, king of Qin, swallowed the last of the six rival warring states and proclaimed himself Qin Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor, the first sole ruler the lands within the four seas had ever known. From his capital at Xianyang on the Wei river he and his chief minister Li Si are tearing up the old feudal order root and branch: the kingdoms abolished, the realm carved into commanderies and counties governed by appointed officers, the script made uniform, the weights, measures, coins and even the axle-widths of carts brought to one standard, the bronze arms of the conquered melted into bells and colossi. Great roads drive out from the capital; armies press north against the Xiongnu of the steppe and south into the Yue lands toward Âu Lạc; and near Mount Li a tomb-mountain rises for the emperor who means to rule for ten thousand generations. Yet the empire is three years old and already groaning under the weight of its own making.

Three years after the unification the First Emperor does not sit still. He travels the empire on grand tours of inspection — eastward to the sea, climbing the sacred mountains to perform the sacrifices that announce a new mandate, and setting up tall stone steles that proclaim his order and his virtue to posterity. The old kingdoms are gone, their kings dead or captive, their nobles uprooted to Xianyang where they can be watched. The people are disarmed, the script and the coin made one, the great roads cut straight across the land. But the conquered remember their lost crowns, and the burden of the corvée — walls in the north, roads and canals everywhere, the vast tomb at Mount Li — already breeds a quiet fury. This year, on the road through the east at Bolangsha, an iron weight comes hurtling out of ambush at the imperial cortège: the empire is not yet loved.