While Li Bing was busy with his sluices, Zhaoxiang, the longest-reigning king (306–251 BC) of the now resource-rich Qin, had already been flexing his new military muscle. Primed on Sichuan’s growth steroids, Qin burst from the blocks of Sichuan’s strategic location. Command of the upper Han and Yangzi valleys constituted a direct threat to any state or states based on their middle and lower reaches: and this, in the third century BC, meant the great southern state of Chu. As early as King Hui’s time, while debating the pros and cons of building ‘Stone Cattle Road’, a Qin minister had observed that of all the ‘warring states’ only Qin and Chu had the resources to prevail over the rest. By the 280s BC the pressing question was simply which had the resources to prevail over the other.
At around the time that Qin’s forces had been subduing Sichuan, Chu’s had been subduing Yue. Yue was even farther from the Yellow River and its ‘warring states’ than Sichuan. It lay south of the Yangzi delta and adjacent to Wu, a state on and about the delta itself that had been the scourge of Chu back in the sixth century BC when the marquis of Zeng had offered sanctuary to Chu’s king. Courtesy of what amounted to an interstate food chain, matters had been getting slightly simpler. Wu had been devoured by Yue in the early fifth century BC, and then Yue (including Wu) had been overrun by Chu in the late fourth century BC. Naturally if Chu (now including Yue and Wu) were to succumb to Qin, the entire Yangzi valley, including its far-reaching feeders such as the Han River, would be united. Qin would be practically invincible, two-thirds of ‘core’ China would be under its rule and, quite incidentally, an excruciating era of same-sounding states would be nearly at an end.
Well aware of the threat posed by Qin’s outflanking move into Sichuan, Chu had first tried to cobble together an anti-Qin alliance. When this failed, in c. 285 BC a Chu force thrust up the Yangzi, pillaged in Ba and Shu and then veered south into either Guizhou or Yunnan province. The geography is uncertain but the motivation is clear: to outflank the outflanker. Qin responded with a countermove that severed this Chu tentacle. Cut off in the far south-west, the Chu expeditionary force settled down among the indigenous people, and while advancing the process of casual cross-culturation, played no further part in the tug-of-war between Qin and Chu.
Seizing the moment, in 280–277 BC Qin hit back with a pincer movement involving two amphibious advances, one down the Han valley and the other down the Yangzi. The first struck deep into Hubei province and captured both the Chu capital and the ancestral tombs of its kings. The second ended Chu influence in Ba and secured the Yangzi down to below its famous gorges. Chu never recovered from these twin disasters. The loss of territory was severe, and the subsequent drift of Chu’s domain towards the coast and Shandong should be seen as less in the nature of compensation, more of dissipation. Worse was the loss of prestige and legitimacy. Deprived of his capital and unable to perform the sacrificial rites at the tombs of his ancestors, Chu’s king had clearly forfeited Heaven’s favour. In terms of moral authority as much as military clout, his state could no longer be regarded as a serious contender for supremacy.
Yet Chu would stagger on for another fifty years before finally being extinguished; nor was it even then forgotten. To cries of ‘Great Chu shall rise again’, it would do just that when the Qin experiment in empire foundered. From Chu would come the contenders for a new dynastic dispensation; and under one of them, the founder of the Han dynasty, its softening southern mix of extravagant expression, encrusted artistry, shamanic mysticism and lachrymose verse would colour the mainstream of northern Chinese culture. Once regarded by the Yellow River’s ‘warring states’ as uncivilised ‘barbarians’, both Chu and Qin pursued trajectories that converged on the ‘central plain’, so belying the idea of all political power and high culture radiating outwards from it. The dynamic was as often centripetal as centrifugal; ‘Chinese civilisation’ was as much compounded as diffused.4
Unlike Chu’s king, King Zhaoxiang of Qin must have been vastly encouraged by the success of his arms in Hubei. Qin’s star was clearly in the ascendant; its resources had been further augmented; and from the middle Yangzi to distant Shanxi its territories now wrapped themselves around the Yellow River’s ‘warring states’ in a maw-like embrace. But despite every strategic advantage, King Zhaoxiang’s final trumphs were dearly bought. As already noted, appalling slaughter accompanied the defeat of Zhao, Wei and Han (the Jin successor states) in the 250s BC. Even the 256 BC overthrow of the ancient house of Zhou was not without its bloody aftermath in that six years later the last Zhou king, now a pensioner of Qin, was put to death on suspicion of plotting a comeback.
In the previous year, 251 BC, but of natural (if long-overdue) causes, old King Zhaoxiang of Qin had himself died. In quick succession his son and then his grandson succeeded. When the latter died in 247 BC, the succession passed to this latter’s presumed son, the thirteen-year-old Zheng, who would become the First Emperor. But because of his age, Zheng did not actually take up the reins of power – or ‘receive the cap of manhood and put on the girdle and sword’ – until 238 BC.
Royal longevity being an important factor in the stability of any dynasty, this interlude of seldom uncontentious successions, plus a nine-year minority, could well have been fatal to Qin’s prospects. Disappointed court factions mounted rebellions, outlying ‘commanderies’ wavered in their allegiance, and the surviving ‘warring states’ hastened to take advantage. But fortune, no less than unrivalled wealth and a compliant populace, favoured Qin. The rebellions were suppressed and the external attacks heavily punished. ‘At this time’, says the Shiji, referring to Zheng’s accession in 246 BC,
Qin had already annexed the regions of Ba, Shu and Hanzhong [the ‘middle Han’ river] and extended its territories to Ying [the Chu capital], where it set up Nan [‘Southern’] Province. In the north it had taken possession of the area from Shang province east, which comprised the provinces of Hedong, Taiyuan and Shangdang, and east as far Xingyang…setting up the province of Sanchuan.
These northern acquisitions extended up to the steppes of Mongolia and gave Qin command of more than half the lower Yellow River basin. They were further extended during Zheng’s minority as Qin generals took some thirty more cities and set up yet another new province.5
Thus when young King Zheng came of age in 238 BC, Qin was in effect already supreme. It possessed over half of its future empire and regarded most of the surviving states as inferiors or vassals. Apart from the massacre of a suspiciously approximate 100,000 in Zhao in 234 BC, the Shiji is unusually reticent about casualties during this final phase of unification. Presumably they were not significant. Zheng himself characterised his campaigns as essentially corrective – ‘to punish violence and rebellion’. The object was no longer annihilation but annexation. Han and Zhao’s submission was followed by that of an already fractured Wei in 225 BC, of the displaced and enfeebled Chu in 223 BC, and finally of Yan in the extreme north-east and Qi in the Shandong peninsula in 222–221 BC. ‘Thanks to the ancestral spirits, these six kings have all acknowledged their guilt and the world is now in profound order,’ gloated the victor.6
It remained only to mark the achievement by a suitable upgrading of King Zheng’s title. Deliberations were held and a form of words meaning ‘Greatly August One’ was proposed. Zheng, acutely aware of his newly won precedence, had a better idea. ‘We will drop the “Greatly”, keep the “August”, and adopt the title used by the emperors of high antiquity [that is the mythical Five Emperors], calling ourselves Huangdi or August Emperor.’
An official proclamation immediately confirmed the new designation: from now on there were to be no more posthumous names; emperors were to be known only by the numerical titles they inherited. ‘We ourselves shall be called First Emperor [Shi Huangdi], and successive generations of rulers shall be numbered consecutively, Second, Third, and so on for 1000 or 10,000 generations, the succession passing down without end.’7