The World

In 239, the king, at the age of twenty, advised by the Councillor, a minister named Li Si, provoked Lao Ai to seize power. Ying defeated Lao’s army, slaughtered his entire clan and had him torn into pieces by five horses, then exiled his mother. A master of human manipulation, the king could be kind – or predatory. ‘When in difficulties he humbles himself; when successful he swallows men up without a scruple,’ wrote a visitor. ‘Should he succeed in conquering the world, we will all be his captives.’

In swift campaigns, devised with the Councillor, Ying Zheng conquered three of the contending kingdoms. In 227, the king of Yan sent two assassins who were to present a map and the head of a traitor to Ying and then kill him. Receiving them in an audience hall (recently discovered by archaeologists) at his capital Xianyang (near modern Xi’an), Ying so terrified the assassins that they dropped the head. One of the hitmen drew a dagger and slashed at Ying, who drew his sword and staged a fighting retreat, managing to cripple both his would-be assassins. Ying soon conquered Yan and the rest of the kingdoms, taking the last one, Qi, in 221, uniting China for the first time – at a cost of around a million lives: ‘Insignificant as I am, I have raised troops to punish rebellious princes and thanks to the sacred power of our ancestors all six kings have been chastised so at last the empire is pacified.’

Now thirty-eight, the king declared himself Shi Huang-di – the First August Thearch, a sacred and cosmological title, emperor of China – boasting that ‘he was the first to achieve a single great peace’. The First Emperor had invented China as a political entity, ruling through forty commanderies, collecting all weapons which were melted down and cast into colossal statues set up in the palace, and adding that new throne hall at Xianyang and a huge pleasure park, the Supreme Forest, containing more palaces. He built the 500-mile Straight Road highway, just one of 4,200 miles of roads, along with a network of canals. The fighting was not over in the north, where a nomadic federation based in Mongolia, the Xiongnu, raided the empire: Ying Zheng started the Great Wall to expand into the grasslands that were crucial to the Xiongnu’s seasonal migrations. Sections of his roads and the Wall survive.

The only obstacle to his ruling forever was the mortality he shared with all people: determined to achieve immortality, he consulted magicians, who advised pursuing immortality through pilgrimages to sacred mountains or over the sea to find the Island of Immortals: fleets were dispatched to look for it.

The First Emperor’s movements were secret, a sensible policy in the wake of two more assassination attempts. When he realized that the Councillor always knew where he was, he had his entire retinue executed. And when his magicians started to call him ‘violent, cruel, power-greedy’ he launched a campaign of terror, executing 460 scribes. Father of scores of children, the First Emperor favoured his eldest son Fusu as heir, but the boy criticized him too, and was sent to serve at the frontier.

Many must have witnessed the emperor as he travelled and inspected his projects: one day, a minor official from Henan, named Liu Bang, born a peasant, escorted some prisoners to work on the emperor’s building projects and was lucky enough to see him in person. Strangely though no one would have believed it at that moment, the future belonged to this young provincial.

Ying Zheng forced 700,000 enslaved labourers to build a colossal tomb at Mount Li, thirty miles east of the capital, a four-sided pyramid within a man-made mountain 400 feet high, which displayed the strange grandeur of its creator – the emperor’s unique and sacred cosmic role. His tomb exceeded anything built anywhere else except the Great Pyramid. It was one of the paramount building projects in world history.^*

There was certainly contact between Qin China and northern India. It was probably Ashoka and his courtiers who first used the name Qin not just for a dynasty but for that vast country, China. The Chinese themselves called it The Central Country. Yet, as Qin united China, Ashoka was losing India.

Ashoka’s decline is mired in legends, some Buddhist, some Hindu, but he may have fallen in love with one of his wife’s maids, Tishyaraksha, a singer-dancer, who turned against Buddhism and flirted dangerously with his favourite son Kunala. In the ensuing showdown, both the latter were blinded. Young wives and aged kings do not go well together. As another son, Samprati, took control, the ailing Ashoka found himself powerless.^* Indian and probably Chinese goods were starting to reach the Red Sea ports of the Ptolemies, who sold them into the Mediterranean. In 236, the marriage of Ptolemy III Euergetes took place amid a murderous–incestuous imbroglio peculiar to the Ptolemy family.