50 Fun Facts About Qin Dynasty

The Terracotta Army stayed hidden until 1974, when local farmers were digging what?

A well shaft struck a pit of full-size clay soldiers about 1.5 km east of the First Emperor's tomb mound. The farmers had only been looking for water.

Which substance is said to have flowed as model rivers and seas inside the First Emperor's tomb?

Mercury may really be down there: soil tests over the unopened tomb mound found levels far above normal, which backs the ancient description.

What was carted beside the dead First Emperor's wagon to mask the smell of his corpse in 210 BC?

Rotten fish covered the stench in the summer heat while plotters hid his death for the two-month journey home, changing his clothes and bringing him meals each day.

Which animal did Qin's chief eunuch bring to court and call a horse to expose disloyal ministers?

A deer was the test, and every official who called it one was executed. Pointing at a deer and calling it a horse survives as a Chinese idiom.

In which object did an assassin hide a poisoned dagger to get near the King of Qin in 227 BC?

A rolled-up map of land offered in surrender hid the blade. The king tore his sleeve free, dodged behind a pillar and survived to become the First Emperor.

What did the First Emperor order collected and burned in 213 BC, on the advice of his chancellor?

Books of poetry, history and philosophy went into the flames, while works on medicine, divination, farming and forestry were spared.

What did the First Emperor send the court sorcerer Xu Fu across the eastern sea to bring back?

The elixir of life was said to be kept by immortals on a peak called Penglai. Xu Fu sailed with thousands of boys and girls, and from his second voyage he never returned.

What delayed a band of 900 conscripts in 209 BC, sparking the first great uprising against the Qin?

Heavy rain flooded their road, and in the traditional account Qin law punished lateness with death, so the men gambled on rebellion instead.

Which record does the Qin hold among China's major imperial dynasties?

Shortest-lived of China's major dynasties, the Qin had only two emperors and collapsed within four years of the first one's death.

What covered the Terracotta Army's soldiers until it flaked off within minutes of being unearthed?

Bright paint gave the figures pink faces and dark facial hair. In the dry local air the lacquer beneath it can curl in fifteen seconds.

Which peasant-born rebel reached the Qin capital first and went on to found the Han dynasty?

Liu Bang had been a local sheriff. He took the last Qin ruler's surrender, then beat his rival rebels to win the whole empire.

Which younger son of the First Emperor took the throne as Second Emperor through a forged will?

Huhai was the eighteenth son, and the same forged edict ordered his eldest brother, the real heir, to kill himself. He reigned for three years as a puppet.

Which eunuch forged the First Emperor's will and later drove the Second Emperor to his death?

Zhao Gao had once tutored the Second Emperor in Qin law. He was killed in turn by the next ruler he put on the throne.

Which rebel general sacked the Qin capital in 206 BC and declared himself Hegemon-King?

Xiang Yu also executed the last Qin ruler and his family, then split the fallen empire into eighteen kingdoms.

Which eldest son of the First Emperor obeyed a forged order to kill himself in 210 BC?

Fusu had been sent north after protesting his father's killing of scholars. His commander doubted the order and urged him to check it, but he obeyed and took his own life.

Which chancellor, who gave Qin one standard script, was cut in two at the waist in 208 BC?

Li Si was framed for treason by the eunuch who had been his partner in the succession plot, and his whole family was wiped out with him.

Which last ruler of Qin killed the kingmaker who enthroned him, then surrendered after only 46 days?

Ziying reigned as a king rather than an emperor, because so little of the empire was left. He gave up the capital without a fight and was later executed.

At which 207 BC battle did rebels sink their boats and smash their pots before routing the Qin?

Julu was won by men left with three days of rations and no way back across the river. The beaten Qin army surrendered to the rebels within months.

Which vast Qin palace, long said to have burned when the capital fell, was in fact barely begun?

Epang Palace became a symbol of Qin luxury lost in the blaze, yet decades of digging suggest that only its front hall was ever built.

Which former farmhand led the first uprising against the Qin in 209 BC and made himself a king?

Chen Sheng was murdered by his own chariot driver within months, but the revolts he set off across the empire did not stop.

Which school of thought, preferring harsh punishment to moral example, guided Qin's rulers?

Legalism earned such a brutal name under Qin that later dynasties proclaimed Confucianism instead, while quietly keeping the bureaucracy Qin had built.

Which era of Chinese history ended in 221 BC when Qin conquered the last of its six rivals?

Warring States is a fair name: seven major powers had fought for supremacy for some two and a half centuries before Qin swallowed the other six in under a decade.

Which nomadic people of the northern steppe was the First Emperor's Great Wall meant to keep out?

The Xiongnu of the Ordos were barred from trading with Qin farmers, so they raided them instead. A Qin army drove them north before the building began.

Which city on the Wei River served as the Qin capital for over 140 years until rebels sacked it?

Xianyang means 'fully yang': it lay south of the mountains and north of the river, both the sunlit sides in Chinese geography.

The First Emperor split his empire into which units, run by appointed officials rather than nobles?

Commanderies numbered 36 at first, split into more than a thousand districts, and they replaced rule by noble families with a central bureaucracy.

The First Emperor set one standard length for which wagon part, to ease travel on his roads?

Axles of one length eased road transport across the empire, part of the same drive that standardised coins, weights, measures and writing.

Qin's standard banliang coin was a bronze disc pierced by a hole of which shape?

Square holes let coins be threaded on a cord and carried in strings, a habit Chinese money kept until the 1910s.

Which new title did the King of Qin coin for himself in 221 BC, usually translated as emperor?

Huangdi joined the names of legendary sage rulers, the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, and monarchs of China kept using it for two thousand years.

Which reformer made Qin a military power with harsh laws, then was torn apart in 338 BC?

Shang Yang fled when his patron died and, the story goes, was turned away from an inn because his own law required guests to show identification.

Which Qin general led 300,000 men north to build the Great Wall, then was made to kill himself?

Meng Tian commanded the border army alongside the rightful heir, so the plotters who forged the First Emperor's will removed them both.

Near which modern Chinese city, once an imperial capital itself, does the Terracotta Army stand?

Xi'an's Lintong district holds the First Emperor's tomb mound, and the old Qin capital stood nearby on the north bank of the Wei River.

Legend says Xu Fu, sent east by the First Emperor with thousands of youths, settled in which land?

Japan has many memorials to Xu Fu, although the claim that he landed there first appears more than a thousand years after he sailed.

According to tradition, what fate befell more than 460 scholars in the Qin capital in 212 BC?

Buried alive is the traditional story, first told over a century later by a historian of the next dynasty. Modern scholars doubt the details.

Which weapons were reportedly rigged to shoot anyone who broke into the First Emperor's tomb?

Crossbows were a Qin strength: more than 40,000 bronze weapons, crossbow triggers among them, have come out of the Terracotta Army pits.

What did the First Emperor cast from the melted-down weapons of the kingdoms he had conquered?

Twelve giant statues, each said to weigh about 30 tons, were displayed at his palace. A warlord melted ten for coinage four centuries later.

Which colour did the Qin adopt for robes and banners because it stood for the element water?

Black matched water, the element next in the cycle after the fire and red of the royal house Qin had swept away.

Which historian, writing a century after the First Emperor died, fixed his image for posterity?

Sima Qian inherited the project from his father and served the dynasty that replaced the Qin, one reason modern historians doubt some of his darkest tales.

Which rich merchant backed a hostage Qin prince and rose to be regent for the boy king?

Lü Buwei is said to have called the prince a rare piece of merchandise worth keeping. The bet paid off for years, then ended in exile and a cup of poison.

Which Qin commander armed convicts from the First Emperor's tomb site to fight the first rebels?

Zhang Han won battle after battle with his pardoned convicts until 207 BC, when he surrendered to the rebels, who later made him a king.

As revolts spread, what did the Second Emperor of Qin do to messengers who brought him bad news?

Arrested them: he also raised taxes, enlarged the army and pressed on with vast building projects, and men all over the empire rose in revolt.

On which material were the Qin laws found at Shuihudi in 1975 written, long before paper?

Bamboo slips, roughly 1,155 of them, had lain in a tomb since about 217 BC, and they let historians read Qin statutes in a Qin scribe's own hand.

In 211 BC a prophecy that the First Emperor would die was found carved on what?

A meteorite is said to have fallen near the Yellow River. When nobody confessed to the carving, everyone living nearby was put to death and the stone was ground to dust.

Which dynasty, nominal overlord of the rival kingdoms, was finally ended by Qin in 256 BC?

Zhou kings had reigned for about 790 years, the longest span of any Chinese dynasty, and Qin itself began as one of their fiefs.

Which southern kingdom destroyed one Qin invasion force, then fell in 223 BC to an army of 600,000?

Chu was so large that the veteran general sent to finish it demanded three times the 200,000 men a rival commander had just lost there.

What was the First Emperor's personal name, used before he took his imperial title in 221 BC?

Ying Zheng inherited the throne of Qin at thirteen and spent his first years as king under a regent.

Which emblem of imperial power did the First Emperor have carved from a famous piece of jade?

The Heirloom Seal passed from emperor to emperor as proof of a ruler's right to the throne, until it vanished in the 10th century.

Which eastern kingdom was the last to fall to Qin in 221 BC, completing the unification of China?

Qi had stayed out of the wars after Qin bribed its chancellor. When Qin's army slipped past its border defences, its king surrendered without a fight.

On which sacred mountain did the First Emperor proclaim his empire's unity in 219 BC?

Mount Tai still has a 'Fifth-Rank Pine', a tree first given that name by the First Emperor; the one standing now is a later replanting.

Which 214 BC canal, dug to supply Qin's southern armies, links the Yangtze and Pearl river systems?

Lingqu was the first canal in the world to join two river valleys, giving boats a route of some 2,000 km between north China and the far south.

Which assassin, sent by the crown prince of Yan, lunged at the King of Qin with a dagger in 227 BC?

Jing Ke won his audience with a grisly gift: the severed head of a Qin general who had defected and agreed to die for the plot.