He Ended China’s Centuries-Long Warring States Period by Conquering All the Warring States
When the future Chin Shi Huang ascended the throne towards the end of the Warring States Period, China consisted of seven competing states: Chin, Chi, Chu, Chao, Han, Wei, and Yan. After the king resolved his domestic dramas at home, what with his mother and her lovers, he launched campaigns of conquest to and bring the six other states under his control.
For generations, Chin armies had engaged in more or less regular warfare with their neighbors. By 230 BC, the Chin king had consolidated his position domestically, and felt strong enough to put in play an ambitious plan of expansion. The aim was not simply to enhance Chin power at the expense of its Warring States rivals, but to outright conquer all the Warring States.
The Chin strategy was to ally with the states farthest away from their borders, Yan and Chi, contain and deter the states of Wei and Chu, while conquering the states of Han and Chao. Han was the weakest of the Chin’s six rivals, so they began by invading it in 230 BC. The Han capital was captured within a year, and the Han king was forced to surrender soon thereafter. His erstwhile kingdom became a Chin province.
Next was the kingdom of Chao, which had been weekend during the 230s BC by bouts of intermittent warfare against Chin. It was further weakened in 231 – 230 BC by an earthquake that caused widespread devastation, followed by a famine that sapped the kingdom’s energies and resources. It made the Chin armies’ job that much easier, and by 228 BC, Chao had been conquered and annexed to the Chin kingdom.
The Chin then prepared to invade Yan, which led its crown prince to order the failed assassination attempt described in the previous entry. Using that assassination attempt as an excuse for what he had planned to do anyhow, the Chin king sent his armies into Yan in 226 BC. The Yan king bought temporary peace by sending the Chin his son’s head as atonement for the assassination attempt, but the peace was short lived. The Chin armies returned in 222 BC, and swiftly overran Yan, snuffing it out as an independent state and annexing it to Chin.
Wei lay between the states of Han to its south, and Chao to its north, with the Chin on their western border. After the Chin conquered Han and Chao, Wei found itself surrounded by the Chin on three sides, like a juicy morsel in a wolf’s mouth. In 225 BC, the Chin wolf snapped its jaws shut, invading with 600,000 men. After a siege of the Wei capital culminated with the Chin redirecting a river to flood it, killing over 100,000 in the process, the Wei king surrendered.
Chu was the most powerful of Chin’s rivals, so it was saved until 224 BC. An overconfident Chin general convinced his king that Chu could be conquered with only 200,000 men, but that proved woefully insufficient. The Chu ambushed the invaders, and wiped out the 200,000 Chin. The Chin king regrouped, and launched another invader under the command of a different general, with 600,000 troops this time. The second invasion met with more success, and Chu was conquered in 223 BC.
By 221 BC, Chi was last state yet to be conquered by the Chin. Their turn came that year, when the Chin king used a Chi refusal to meet with one of his envoys as a casus belli, and sent in his armies. The Chin invaders managed to outflank the Chi defenders, bypassing their fortified positions and penetrating deep into Chi, to arrive before its nearly undefended capital. The Chi king surrendered without a fight.
Having conquered all the Warring States and incorporated them into his kingdom, the Chin king proclaimed the Chin Dynasty, and himself Chin Shi Huang, meaning “First Emperor of Chin”. He divided his empire into 36 provinces, ruled from the Chin imperial capital of Xianyang. He then set about creating a centralized state that became the model for all future Chinese dynasties until 1911, when the last imperial dynasty was overthrown.