In China, in the 3rd century BC the period of the Warring States came to a bloody end. These states had evolved from the old kingdom of the Zhou, and for a long time, notwithstanding their wars and rivalries, they had in their mutual relations maintained a certain code of honor, the various princes and their aristocratic vassals constituting one homogeneous elite that recognized the nominal sovereignty of the Zhou dynasty. They fought one another, but seldom to the finish. That had changed already by the 5th and 4th centuries BC: some states absorbed their neighbors, others expanded over hitherto “barbarian” territories. The armies increased in size, both in their mutual wars and in their campaigns against neighboring peoples, thereby inevitably undermining the traditional martial roles of the aristocracy. From the masses of peasants called up for building or repairing dikes and canals, autocratic regimes could also mobilize armies. By the 3rd century BC, cavalry largely replaced the aristocratic chariots, while infantry in large numbers had already begun to fill the battlefields. Warfare between the Chinese states became unmistakably more ruthless and bloody. In the beginning of the 3rd century BC, one state in particular had adapted to the new mode of warfare and had subordinated its entire internal organization to its military goals: western Qin, which protected the heartland of China from incursions by peoples of the western steppes. It is that role that was responsible for the emergence of Qin as a military power. More so than other states, Qin had become militarized—and according to its enemies, “barbarized”—and more than others, it was prepared to disavow traditional customs and codes of conduct and to wage war with all available means. Everything, certainly its system of taxation, and in fact its whole economy, was made to serve that goal. In 256 BC, Qin forces expelled the last representative of the Zhou dynasty from his residence. Between 230 and 221 BC, the remaining six states in China were one by one conquered and annexed by the Qin armies, after which the conqueror had himself proclaimed as huangdi or “august sovereign.” He would go down into history as the First August Emperor of Qin (Qin Shihuangdi). It was the birth of the Chinese Empire, which was to last for more than 2000 years.
The First Emperor introduced a uniform code of law and ordered standardized measures and weights and a single currency for the whole of his empire. A network of roads was built, connecting the various provincial capitals and their garrisons. Along the northern frontier, existing stretches of walls were now connected into one large structure, the first version of what in the course of time would develop into a complex system of ramparts and walls, the Great Wall of China, as a defense against the Turkish and Mongol nomads of the steppes. A bureaucracy was organized according to the principle of merit instead of aristocratic birth, and a policy of centralization began to replace the old feudalism. At the same time, the emperor mercilessly repressed the class of scholars in the tradition of Confucius: a couple of hundreds of them were executed, while learned and philosophical treatises that seemed to contradict the ideology of legalism—which was the official ideology of Qin in its effort to subjugate everything to the interests of the state—were collected and burned.
The First Emperor died in 210 BC; he was succeeded by one of his sons. The discontent provoked all over China by the policies of the legalistic ministers of Qin led to several rebellions and insurgencies. The Second Emperor reigned only four years over a crumbling empire. In 206 BC, with a rebel army surrounding the capital, his courtiers forced him to commit suicide. That was the end of the Qin dynasty. After a few chaotic years, in 202 BC, the most important rebel commander was recognized everywhere as the new emperor of China, the first of the Han dynasty, residing in a new capital, Chang’an, built next to the ruins of the Qin residence. To some extent, a reaction took place against the rigorous changes that had been so violently pushed through by the first Qin emperor. Feudalism was not completely revived, yet was partially reintroduced, and likewise, legalism was only partly abandoned. The militarization of society was scaled back too. The result was a new stress on duty and a sense of community that did not differ very much from the norms of conduct propagated by Confucius. No wonder, around 100 BC, Confucianism was declared the official philosophy of state; Confucian writings were as far as possible saved from the oblivion to which they had been condemned ever since the book burnings under the First Emperor. The ruler of Qin might have founded the Chinese Empire, but it was the Han dynasty—ruling China, with only a short interruption, for some four centuries—that gave China politically and socially its characteristic features for the following two millennia.
Under the Han dynasty, Chinese expansion steadily continued. Before the end of the 2nd century BC, the border with modern-day Vietnam was reached, while in a northeastern direction the greater part of Korea was brought under the control of the emperor. Roughly at the same time, the Silk Road came to be established, connecting China for a long period to come, albeit with sometimes long interruptions, with Central Asia and indirectly with Parthia and the Greco-Roman world. It had come about as a result of the endeavors of the Han emperors to attack the nomads in their own steppes and to find allies against them among peoples further to the west. A diplomatic mission sent to the west for that purpose around 120 BC for the first time reported to the court at Chang’an on the existence of another world stretching beyond the Pamir mountains to the west. Since then, on the Chinese side caravans were equipped that regularly traveled all the way to the area of the Pamir, where their goods, especially silk, were exchanged against gold, silver, and other valuables brought there by merchants from Bactria, Parthia, and India. Across the Pamir mountains, Chinese silk reached Sogdiana and Bactria, from where some of it was transported further to the west to Parthia, or down the Indus valley to the harbors on the Indian Ocean, where ships from Hellenistic Egypt picked up the coveted material and conveyed it further westward to the countries around the Mediterranean Sea.
World History
