27. Megalomania Reigns Supreme
After consolidating his rule, and with unchecked power and the resources of an entire empire upon which to draw, Chin Shi Huang grew megalomaniacal, and launched huge projects with massive amounts of forced labor. One such project used 700,000 laborers working on his tomb for three decades.
The famous Terracotta Warriors site, discovered in the 1970s and now open to tourism with its thousands of life-size statues, is but a fraction of his gigantic tomb complex. The bulk of the compound is yet to be unearthed. Millions more labored to dig canals, level hills, make roads, and build over 700 palaces. The biggest project of all was the Great Wall of China, which did double duty: keeping the northern barbarians out, and keeping the Chinese seeking to flee the emperor’s onerous taxation and oppressive rule.