Chapter 7 China 261Who was the man for whom this astonishing tomb was built? By the third
century B.C.E., the many competing small states had worn themselves down to
six main survivors, each heavily armed and capable of fielding armies of
100,000 men. The western-most of these domains was the large state of Qin,
which encompassed the old center of the Western Zhou. New ideas had been
implemented in Qin to reduce the power of the hereditary aristocracy by creat-
ing a bureaucracy of appointed officials dependent on the king for their power
and survival. The ruler of Qin set out to conquer the other kingdoms, accom-
plishing this by 221 B.C.E. He gave himself the name Qin (for his state) Shi
(“First”) Huang (“Sovereign,” a replacement for wang, “king”), the First
Emperor, and his name, became the name for China itself (Qin = China). He
imagined he was founding a line of emperors to be numbered consecutively for-
ever. By the Third Emperor, his dynasty was ripped apart by violence, but the
title “huangdi” remained a title for the Chinese emperor until 1911.
He ruled only a little over a decade; so brief a reign might be dismissed as a
historical blip, but he accomplished a restructuring of China whose basic out-The army of Qin Shihuang was discovered by farmers digging a well in 1974. The terra-cotta
army, more than 1,100 of them (and possibly 5,000 more), were a replacement for the living
companions in the journey into the otherworld who accompanied earlier rulers. Qin himself
remains respectfully unexcavated in his tomb nearby.