Qin Shi Huang (Chinese: 秦始皇, pronunciationⓘ; February 259[e] – 12 July 210 BC), born Ying Zheng (嬴政) or Zhao Zheng (趙政), was the founder of the Qin dynasty and the first emperor of China. He is widely regarded as the first ever supreme leader of a unitary dynasty in Chinese history.[9] Rather than maintain the title of "king" (wáng 王) or "overlord" (共主) borne by the previous rulers of Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties, he invented the title of "emperor" (huángdì 皇帝), which would see continuous use by Chinese sovereigns and monarchs for the next two millennia. Ying Zheng was born during the late Warring States period in Handan, the capital of Zhao, to Prince Yiren and Lady Zhao. Prince Yiren was serving as an expendable diplomatic hostage in Zhao at the time, but the wealthy merchant Lü Buwei saw potential in him and lobbied for his adoption by Crown Prince Anguo's childless principal consort Lady Huayang, thus making him the favoured heir presumptive. Crown Prince Anguo died three days after coronation, and Prince Yiren subsequently became King of Qin only to also die three years later in 247 BC, so the teenage Ying Zheng succeeded the throne as King Zheng of Qin (秦王政). King Zheng's early reign was dominated by regency from Lü Buwei (who served as his chancellor), royal aristocrats and consort kins, but after coming of age he managed to purge those influence and seize total control of state power by 235 BC. By 221 BC, he had conquered all the other warring states and unified all of China, and ascended the throne as China's First Emperor (始皇帝). During his reign, his further military campaigns against the Four Barbarians greatly expanded the size of the Chinese dominion: campaigns against the Yue tribes from 221 BC to 214 BC permanently added the Baiyue lands of modern-day Hunan and Guangdong to the Sinosphere, and campaigns against the nomads in Inner Asian steppe in 215 BC conquered the entire Ordos Plateau from the Xiongnu (although after Qin dynasty's fall in 207 BC, the region was later lost and reoccupied by Xiongnu under Modu Chanyu and would not be recovered until 127 BC during the reign of Emperor Wu of the succeeding Han dynasty. Qin Shi Huang is a pivotal figure in Chinese history. As the sovereign of a centralized country, he worked with his minister Li Si to enact major economic, social and political reforms aimed at the standardization and uniformity of various facets of the Chinese society, from writing scripts and currency to measurement systems and wagon axle gauges. He is traditionally said to have banned and burned many books and executed scholars. His public infrastructure projects included the incorporation of diverse state defensive walls into a single Great Wall of China, a massive new national road system, hydraulic engineering projects such as the Zhengguo Canal and Lingqu Canal, as well as his city-sized mausoleum guarded by a life-sized Terracotta Army. Having survived three high-profile assassination attempts, he ruled the nation with an iron fist until his death in 210 BC, during his fifth tour of eastern China.[10] Qin Shi Huang has often been portrayed as a strict Legalist and a ruthless tyrant — characterizations that stem partly from the scathing Confucianist assessments made during the succeeding Han dynasty and have been carried down by Confucian historians through the subsequent dynasties. Since the mid-20th century, modern scholars have begun questioning this narrative, inciting considerable discussion on the actual nature of his policies and reforms, especially after studying textual evidence recorded in newly discovered artifacts such as the Shuihudi and Liye bamboo slips.
