58 Fun Facts About Qin Shi Huang

What is distinctive about the faces of Qin Shi Huang's terracotta warriors?

Each one is different: the heads came from only a handful of moulds, but craftsmen reworked every face, beard and hairstyle by hand in fresh clay, so the ranks look like an army of real men.

Today's brick Great Wall dates from the Ming dynasty, so what were Qin Shi Huang's frontier walls mostly built from?

Rammed earth, local soil pounded hard in layers, weathers away, one reason very little of the First Emperor's wall still stands.

Qin Shi Huang boasted that his dynasty would last 10,000 generations, so roughly how long did it survive his death?

About 4 years: his heir's misrule set off revolts across the empire almost at once, and by 206 BC rebel armies had taken the capital and ended the dynasty.

What new title did the King of Qin create for himself in 221 BC, rather than keep the old title of king?

Huangdi joined huang and di, titles of mythical sage rulers, to outrank every king before him; he ordered his heirs to be numbered Second Emperor, Third Emperor and so on without end.

In which city, the capital of the state of Zhao, was the future First Emperor born?

Handan was where his father, a Qin prince, was being held hostage under a truce with Zhao, so the future emperor spent his first years among his state's enemies.

Which wealthy merchant helped Ying Zheng's father to the throne and later served as regent?

Lü Buwei sized up the neglected hostage prince as rare merchandise worth hoarding and spent a fortune making him heir; the old claim that he also fathered Ying Zheng is probably slander.

How was the future First Emperor's personal name, Zheng, said to have been chosen?

From the month of his birth: he was born in Zhengyue, the first month of the old Chinese calendar, and an early commentator says it was on the very first day.

Which man, disguised as a eunuch, became the lover of the King of Qin's mother and staged a coup in 238 BC?

Lao Ai secretly fathered two sons with the queen dowager and meant one of them to be king; when the affair came out he used her seal to raise troops, and lost.

How was the false eunuch who led the 238 BC coup against the King of Qin executed?

Torn apart by horse carriages, as Sima Qian's annals have it, after a price of a million coins was put on his head alive and half that dead; his whole clan was wiped out with him.

How did the disgraced merchant who had been regent of Qin die in 235 BC?

He drank poisoned wine: stripped of office over the queen dowager scandal and ordered off to distant Shu, he feared execution would follow, and his death left the young king in sole charge.

Which assassin, sent by Crown Prince Dan of Yan in 227 BC, hid a dagger inside a rolled-up map?

Jing Ke won his audience with two gifts: the map and the head of a Qin general who had fled to Yan and is said to have cut his own throat to help the plot.

Why was King Zheng's sword useless at first when an assassin's dagger appeared in 227 BC?

It was too long to draw: he dodged around a pillar until courtiers shouted at him to push the scabbard behind his back, then pulled the blade free and cut the assassin down.

The blinded musician Gao Jianli weighted his instrument with which metal to strike at Qin Shi Huang?

Lead turned his zhu, a struck zither, into a club: the emperor so loved his playing that he let him sit closer each time, until he swung the weighted instrument and missed.

Why did Zhang Liang's hired strongman fail to kill Qin Shi Huang with a hurled hammer?

It hit the wrong carriage: the heavy hammer smashed an escort vehicle, and though the emperor ordered an empire-wide manhunt, Zhang Liang slipped away and later helped to found the next dynasty.

Which was the first of the rival states to fall to Qin, in 230 BC?

Han sat on Qin's doorstep and had been raided for years; its king had already offered to become a vassal when, in 230 BC, Qin captured him and turned his state into a commandery.

Which was the last state to be conquered, completing the unification of China in 221 BC?

Qi had sat out the wars, its chief minister bribed with Qin gold, while Qin swallowed the other states one by one; when the Qin army finally came in 221 BC, its king surrendered without a fight.

How did Qin forces bring about the surrender of Wei in 225 BC?

By flooding its capital: a Qin general turned river and canal water against the walls of Daliang until they gave way, and the king of Wei came out to surrender.

Which minister worked with Qin Shi Huang on the great programme of standardisation?

Li Si, an outsider from Chu, nearly lost his post when the king ordered every foreign adviser expelled; his written protest got the order cancelled and launched his rise to chancellor.

How did governors of Qin Shi Huang's 36 commanderies get their posts?

By appointment: the emperor's court chose the governors, who replaced hereditary lords, after his minister argued that handing out fiefs, even to royal sons, would only breed new warring states.

The Ban Liang, the coin Qin Shi Huang made standard, has what at its centre?

A square hole let the coins be threaded on a cord in bulk, and the round coin with a square hole that he made standard stayed the pattern for Chinese cash into the 20th century.

Which style of Chinese writing became the official standard under Qin Shi Huang?

Seal script, in a simplified form known as small seal, replaced the rival regional scripts, so an order written in the capital could be read anywhere in the empire whatever dialect was spoken there.

What did Qin Shi Huang have cast from the weapons he confiscated across his new empire?

Twelve monumental statues stood in his palace, cast from the melted arms of the conquered states, a way of making sure that would-be rebels had nothing left to fight with.

Which school of thought became the official ideology of the Qin dynasty?

Legalism held that people are kept in line by fixed laws with set rewards and harsh punishments, not by a ruler's good example, and Qin's brutal use of it later discredited the school in China.

Books on which subject were spared when Qin Shi Huang ordered most others burned in 213 BC?

Medicine was spared along with manuals of fortune-telling and farming: the ban was aimed at works scholars used to criticise the present by praising the past, not at practical know-how.

Which classic escaped Qin's book burning as a practical manual?

The Book of Changes, the I Ching, was read as a handbook for telling fortunes, a kind of book the edict left alone, so it was handed down without a break into the next dynasty.

Which of Qin Shi Huang's sons openly criticised his harsh punishment of scholars in 212 BC?

Fusu, the eldest son, warned that such severity would unsettle a newly conquered empire; his furious father packed him off to the northern frontier to serve with the army.

Which element and colour did the Qin dynasty adopt under the theory of the five elements?

Water and black: the Zhou were held to have ruled by the power of fire, and water is what overcomes fire, so Qin's court robes, flags and pennants all turned black.

Caught in a storm on Mount Tai, Qin Shi Huang rewarded what with an official rank for sheltering him?

A tree: he had climbed the sacred mountain in 219 BC to announce his unified empire to Heaven, and a pine on the way down is still shown to visitors as the Fifth-Rank Pine.

Which general led the 215 BC campaign that drove the Xiongnu from the Ordos Plateau?

Meng Tian marched north with 300,000 men, cleared the great bend of the Yellow River and stayed on to fortify the frontier; legend also credits him, wrongly, with inventing the writing brush.

What did Qin Shi Huang order done to the old walls that had separated the former warring states?

Destroyed: walls between the old states had become barriers inside one empire and ready-made strongholds for any lord who rebelled, so they came down while the northern frontier defences stayed.

The Lingqu Canal, built for Qin Shi Huang, let boats pass from the Yangtze basin to which southern river?

Pearl River: the canal joins the north-flowing Xiang to the south-flowing Li, and it was dug to carry troops and supplies to the Qin armies conquering the far south.

Which island off the Shandong coast did Qin Shi Huang visit three times on his imperial tours?

Zhifu, now joined to the port city of Yantai, drew him back a third time, when he is said to have shot a great sea creature there that his elixir-seekers blamed for their failures.

Whom did Qin Shi Huang send with ships full of young men and women to find the mystical Mount Penglai?

Xu Fu came back empty-handed, blamed a sea monster, and sailed again with thousands of boys and girls; he never returned, and legend has him settling in Japan.

A 10th-century Chinese monk wrote that Qin Shi Huang's elixir-hunting explorer settled at which Japanese mountain, calling it Penglai?

Mount Fuji: the monk Yichu, writing over a thousand years after the voyage, added that the explorer's descendants there all still bore the family name Qin.

Why did Qin Shi Huang link his 200-plus palaces with covered walkways and walled roads?

To hide from evil spirits: his magicians held that the immortals would come only to a ruler who moved unseen, and from 212 BC he took to calling himself 'the True Man', their name for an immortal.

In 211 BC someone carved a prophecy of the First Emperor's death on what, which he then had pulverised?

A fallen meteorite bore the words 'The First Emperor will die and his land will be divided'; when no one owned up, he had everyone living nearby put to death and the stone ground to dust.

Qin Shi Huang died in 210 BC while doing what?

Touring his empire: he fell ill on his fifth grand progress and died at Shaqiu, weeks of travel from the capital, so his ministers hid the death until they were home.

Which substance in a supposed elixir of immortality is suspected of poisoning Qin Shi Huang?

Mercury was prized by his alchemists as a key to eternal life, so the cure he took for death may have hastened it; Sima Qian says his tomb even held rivers and seas of the metal.

What did Qin Shi Huang's ministers load beside his wagon to hide the smell of his corpse?

Carts of rotten fish covered the stench in the summer heat while his ministers kept up the pretence that he lived, sending in meals and issuing orders from the closed carriage.

Which official, traditionally called a eunuch, conspired with the chancellor to forge Qin Shi Huang's will and enthrone Huhai?

Zhao Gao had once tutored young Huhai in law and now held the emperor's last sealed letter, which summoned the eldest son; it was never sent, and a forgery took its place.

What did the Second Emperor's chancellor insist a deer was, to test which courtiers dared contradict him?

A horse: courtiers who said 'deer' were quietly marked down for punishment, and 'calling a deer a horse' remains a Chinese idiom for brazenly twisting the truth.

What did the Second Emperor do to many of Qin Shi Huang's other children?

Executed them: warned that his siblings would contest a throne he had won by forgery, he put princes and princesses alike to death soon after their father's burial.

According to Sima Qian, how many men laboured to build Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum?

700,000 labourers, by Sima Qian's count, were sent from every corner of the empire; he says they dug down past three levels of groundwater and poured bronze for the outer coffin.

Why is Qin Shi Huang's burial chamber still unopened, as of 2025?

Fear of damage is one reason archaeologists give: whatever has lain buried for 2,200 years could decay quickly once exposed to air, so they have probed the mound from outside and left the chamber shut.

What did Sima Qian say was rigged inside Qin Shi Huang's tomb to shoot intruders?

Crossbows were set to fire by themselves at anyone who broke in, Sima Qian wrote, and once the tomb was closed the craftsmen who had built its devices were sealed inside so none could talk.

What were farmers digging in 1974 when they struck the first of Qin Shi Huang's terracotta warriors?

A well: the farmers were after water and broke instead into a buried pit about a mile from the emperor's tomb mound, holding an army that the historian Sima Qian never mentions.

About how many life-sized figures is Qin Shi Huang's terracotta army thought to contain?

8,000 is the usual estimate, and most of them are still in the ground: the pits have been only partly dug since the first figures came to light in the 1970s.

Which leader boasted in 1958 of surpassing the First Emperor a hundredfold in burying scholars?

Mao Zedong told a 1958 party congress that the emperor had buried only 460 scholars while 'we buried 46,000', and later Maoist histories praised the old tyrant as a great unifier.

Which Argentine writer's 1952 collection Other Inquisitions opens with The Wall and the Books, an essay on Qin Shi Huang?

Jorge Luis Borges took his title from the emperor's two most notorious acts, which met in Qin law: anyone caught keeping banned books was tattooed and sent to labour on the walls.

Jet Li plays a nameless assassin plotting against the King of Qin in which 2002 film?

Hero is told as a duel of stories: the swordsman arrives as the king's champion, claiming to have slain his three deadliest enemies, and the king picks the tale apart version by version.

What did Qin Shi Huang have carved from jade that later dynasties prized as proof of the right to rule?

An imperial seal: the last Qin ruler handed it over when he surrendered, and it passed from house to house as the token of a lawful emperor until it vanished around the 10th century.

Near which modern Chinese city did Xianyang, the capital of Qin Shi Huang's empire, stand?

Xi'an lies a few miles down the Wei River from the site of the old Qin capital, which rebel armies sacked and burned in 206 BC, bringing the dynasty to an end.

What did Qin Shi Huang force 120,000 wealthy families from the conquered states to do?

Move to his capital: uprooted from their lands and followers and resettled at Xianyang, the old ruling families lived under the emperor's eye, forbidden to keep weapons.

The terracotta figures were laid out to guard the tomb from which direction, where the conquered states lay?

East. Qin had been the westernmost of the warring states, so the rivals it conquered lay in that direction, and the clay ranks were drawn up facing them.

The terracotta figures look plain grey today, but what covered nearly every one when they were buried?

Bright paint, laid over a coat of lacquer. Once a figure meets dry air the lacquer curls and peels within minutes, taking the colours with it.

What is in Pit 4 of the mausoleum's four main pits?

Nothing, it is empty. Work on the mausoleum was halted amid uprisings soon after the emperor's death, and the pit is thought to have been left unfinished.

Fire damage and missing weapons in the pits are taken as evidence of looting by which rebel leader?

Xiang Yu, a nobleman of conquered Chu, is reported to have looted the site. The fire that followed is thought to have brought the roof timbers down, smashing the figures beneath.

Most of the 40,000-plus bronze weapon items recovered from the pits are of which kind?

Arrowheads, usually found in bundles of 100. Most of the army's other real weapons were looted soon after the burial or have rotted away.