Qin Shi Huang

. Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature," wrote Kepler, "it benefits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God.".
. "I was merely thinking God's thoughts after him. He also hired several "doubles" to make it less clear which figure was the emperor. The De cometis libelli tres (1619) is also replete with astrological predictions. Late in life, after his assassination had been attempted too often for comfort, he grew paranoid of remaining in one place too long and would hire servants to bear him to different buildings in his palace complex to sleep in each night. In the On the new star (1606) Kepler explicated the meaning of the new star of 1604 as the conversion of America, downfall of Islam and return of Christ.

Nevertheless, these trips provided opportunities for assassins, the most famous of whom was Zhang Liang. As court mathematician, he explained to Rudolf II the horoscopes of the Emperor Augustus and Muhammad, and gave astrological prognosis for the outcome of a war between the Republic of Venice and Paul V. (It was on one of these tours that he died). Kepler is known to have compiled prognostications for 1595 to 1606, and from 1617 to 1624. The emperor often took tours to major cities in his empire to inspect the efficiency of the bureaucracy and to symbolize the presence of Qin's prestige. As part of his duties as district mathematician to Graz, Kepler issued a prognostication for 1595 in which he forecast a peasant uprising, Turkish invasion and bitter cold, all of which happened and brought him renown. The myth also claims that this is the reason why the Japanese language is so similar to the Chinese one, and also the fact that the Japanese people look so similiar to the Chinese. At least 800 horoscopes and natal charts drawn up by Kepler are still extant, several of himself and his family, accompanied by some unflattering remarks.

The myth claims that they settled down in one of the Japanese islands. In The Intervening Third Man, or a warning to theologians, physicians and philosophers (1610), posing as a third man between the two extreme positions for and against astrology, Kepler advocated that a definite relationship between heavenly phenomena and earthly events could be established. These people never returned, as they knew that if they did return without the "immortality pill", they would surely be executed. He strove to unravel how and why that was the case and tried to put astrology on a surer footing, which resulted in the On the more certain foundations of astrology (1601), in which, among other technical innovations, he was the first to propose the quincunx aspect. These deeds became a popular story of the emperor sending a Zhifu islander as the religious leader of ships with hundreds of young men and women in search of the pill of immortality. Kepler believed in astrology in the sense that he was convinced that astrological aspects physically and really affected humans as well as the weather on earth. Qin Shi Huang was interested in immortality and visited Zhifu Island. As one historian, John North, put it, 'had he not been an astrologer he would very probably have failed to produce his planetary astronomy in the form we have it.'.

The video game Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb sends the archaeologist into the tomb of Qin Shi Huang to recover a secret artifact hidden there. Yet, it would be a mistake to take Kepler's astrological interests as merely pecuniary. The Great Wall is actually the symbol for 'help' in his language, and the true reason for its construction was in hope that a passing alien ship would find it and rescue him. Kepler disdained astrologers who pandered to the tastes of the common man without knowledge of the abstract and general rules, but he saw compiling prognostications as a justified means of supplementing his meagre income. In the Area 51 book series, Qin Shi Huang is revealed to be an alien exile stranded on Earth during an interstellar civil war. Although he did not discover gravity, he seems to have attempted to invoke the first empirical example of a universal law to explain the behaviour of both earthly and heavenly bodies. Bob Bainborough portrayed Qin Shi Huang in an episode of History Bites. Kepler also made great steps in trying to describe the motion of the planets by appealing to a force which resembled magnetism, which he believed emanated from the sun.

The 2002 movie Hero tells the story of assassination attempts of Qin Shi Huang (played by renowned Chinese actor Chen Daoming) by legendary warriors. Kepler's willingness to abandon his most cherished theory in the face of precise observational evidence also indicates that he had a very modern attitude to scientific research. The time traveller also interferes with a lot of important historical events related to the emperor. This realization was a direct consequence of his failed attempt to fit the planetary orbits within polyhedra. In the show, Qin Shi Huang is actually a person named Zhao Pan from the Kingdom of Zhao who takes over the identity of Ying Zheng and rises to power with the help of a time traveller from the 21st century. His most significant achievements came from the realization that the planets moved in elliptical, not circular, orbits. The 2001 Hong Kong TVB drama serial, A Step into the Past, presents a whole new perspective on the emperor's story, with Raymond Lam Fung as Qin Shi Huang. To his disappointment, Kepler's attempts to fix the orbits of the planets within a set of polyhedrons never worked out, but it is a testimony to his integrity as a scientist that when the evidence mounted against the cherished theory he worked so hard to prove, he abandoned it.

The 1999 movie The Emperor and the Assassin focused on the identity of his father, his heartless treatment of his officials, and betrayal by a concubine, paving the way for Jing Ke's assassination attempt. In 1975, nine years after its founding, the College for Social and Economic Sciences Linz (Austria) was renamed Johannes Kepler University Linz in honor of Johannes Kepler, since he wrote his magnum opus harmonices mundi ("The Harmony of the world") in Linz during the early 17th century. The 1996 movie The Emperor's Shadow uses the various legends about him to make a political statement on Chinese Communism, and focuses on his relationship with the rebellious musician, Gao Jianli. There is some evidence this association was of ancient origin, as Plato tells of one Timaeus of Locri who thought of the Universe as being enveloped by a gigantic dodecahedron while the other four solids represent the "elements" of fire, air, earth, and water. The 1984 book Bridge of Birds (by Barry Hughart) portrays him as a power-hungry megalomaniac who achieved immortality by having his heart removed by an Old Man of the mountain. In his 1619 book, Harmonices Mundi or Harmony of the Worlds, as well as the aforementioned Mysterium Cosmographicum, he also made an association between the Platonic solids with the classical conception of the elements: the tetrahedron was the form of fire, the octahedron was that of air, the cube was earth, the icosahedron was water, and the dodecahedron was the cosmos as a whole or ether. Jing Ke, in contrast, was a chivalrous warrior and one of his lines was "tens of thousands of injured people are all my comrades." A huge newspaper ad for this play proclaimed: "Invasion will definitely end in defeat; peace must be won at a price." The underdog fighting against the aggression of a cruel and powerful foreign invader and being supported by a sympathetic volunteer from another country was obviously a theme with considerable contemporary relevance. Each of these celestial spheres had a planet embedded within them, and thus defined the planet's orbit.

In the play Ying Zheng was portrayed as a cruel tyrant and an aggressor and invader of other states. To emphasize his theory, Kepler envisaged an impressive model of the universe which shows a cube, inside a sphere, with a tetrahedron inscribed in it; another sphere inside it with a dodecahedron inscribed; a sphere with an icosahedron inscribed inside; and finally a sphere with an octahedron inscribed. The play was based on an actual historical event, the attempted assassination of Ying Zheng by Jing Ke of Wei, at the request of the Prince of Yan, in 227 BC. Here is a selection explaining the relation between the planets and the Platonic solids:. During the Korean War, the play Song of the Yi River was produced. In 1596 Kepler published Mysterium Cosmographicum, or The Cosmic Mystery. To be sure, Qin Shi Huang could always be seen as relevant in fiction and folklore. He thereby identified the five Platonic solids with the five intervals between the six known planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn; and the five classical elements.

The new theory claimed that the cause of the fall of Qin lay in the lack of thoroughness of Qin Shi Huang's "dictatorship over the reactionaries, even to the extent of permitting them to worm their way into organs of political authority and usurp important posts.". The smallest orbit, that of Mercury, was the innermost sphere. To round out this re-evaluation, a new interpretation of the precipitous collapse of the Qin Dynasty was put forward in an article entitled "On the Class Struggle During the Period Between Qin and Han" by Luo Siding, in a 1974 issue of Red Flag, to replace the old explanation. Having embraced the Copernican system, he set out to prove that the distances from the planets to the sun were given by spheres inside perfect polyhedra, all of which were nested inside each other. Unfortunately, he was not as thorough as he should have been and after his death, hidden subversives, under the leadership of the chief eunuch Zhao Gao, seized power and used it to restore the old feudal order. In his cosmologic vision, it was not a coincidence that the number of perfect polyhedra was one less than the number of known planets. The new evaluations described how, in his time (an era of great political and social change), he had no compunctions in using violent methods to crush counter-revolutionaries, such as the "industrial and commercial slave owner" chancellor Lü Buwei. Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion while trying to achieve the Pythagorean purpose of finding the harmony of the celestial spheres.

Personal attributes, such as his quest for immortality, so emphasized in traditional historiography, were scarcely mentioned. In addition, since he was the first to recognize the non-convex regular solids (such as the stellated dodecahedra), they are named Kepler solids in his honor. In the new era, Qin Shi Huang was seen as a farsighted ruler who destroyed the forces of division and established the first unified, centralized state in Chinese history by rejecting the past. theoretical explanation of the camera obscura — and Dioptrice). The work was published by the state press to be a mass popular history, and sold 1.85 million copies within two years. antiprisms and the Kepler telescope (see Kepler's books Astronomiae Pars Optica — i.a. The reevaluation movement was launched by Hong Shidi's biography Qin Shi Huang. He was also one of the founders of modern optics, defining e.g.

Since 1972, however, a radically different official view of Qin Shi Huang has been given prominence throughout China. Kepler also made fundamental investigations into combinatorics, geometrical optimization, and natural phenomena such as snowflakes, always with an emphasis on form and design. The perennial debate of the fall of the Qin Dynasty was also explained in Marxist terms, the peasant rebellions being a revolt against oppression - a revolt which undermined the dynasty, but which was bound to fail because of a compromise with "landlord class elements". No further supernovae have since been observed with certainty in the Milky Way, though others outside our galaxy have been seen. The work described the First Emperor's major steps toward unification and standardization as corresponding to the interests of the ruling group and the merchant class, not the nation or the people, and the subsequent fall of his dynasty a manifestation of the class struggle. It has since been determined that the star was a supernova, the second in a generation, later called Kepler's Star or Supernova 1604. This is exemplified in the Complete History of China, which was compiled in September, 1955, as an official survey of Chinese history. (It was first observed by several others on October 9.) The appearance of the star, which Kepler described in his book De Stella nova in pede Serpentarii ('On the New Star in Ophiuchus's Foot'), provided further evidence that the cosmos was not changeless; this was to influence Galileo in his argument.

The new interpretation given of Qin Shi Huang was generally a combination of traditional and modern views, but essentially critical. On October 17, 1604, Kepler observed that an exceptionally bright star had suddenly appeared in the constellation Ophiuchus. The establishment of the new, revolutionary regime meant another re-evaluation of the First Emperor, this time following Marxist theory. (From the modern vantage point, the equal-area law is more easily understood as arising from conservation of angular momentum.). With the coming of the Communist Revolution in 1949, new interpretations again surfaced. Isaac Newton eventually showed that the laws were a consequence of his laws of motion and law of universal gravitation. Chiang's Northern Expedition of the late 1920s, which directly preceded the new Nationalist government at Nanjing was compared to the unification brought about by Qin Shi Huang. Kepler, however, never discovered the deeper reasons for the laws, despite many years of what would now be considered non-scientific mystical speculation.

Ma compared him with the contemporary leader Chiang Kai-shek and saw many parallels in the careers and policies of the two men, both of whom he admired. Kepler's laws were the first clear evidence in favor of the heliocentric model of the solar system, because they only came out to be so simple under the heliocentric assumption. He called Qin Shi Huang one of the great heroes of Chinese history. Using these laws, he was the first astronomer to successfully predict a transit of Venus (for the year 1631). Another historian, Ma Feibai (馬非百), published in 1941 a full-length revisionist biography of the First Emperor entitled Qin Shi Huangdi Zhuan (《秦始皇帝傳》). The constant of proportionality is the same for all the planets. In the time when he was writing, when Chinese territory was encroached upon by foreign nations, leading Kuomintang historian Xiao Yishan emphasized the role of Qin Shi Huang in repulsing the northern barbarians, particularly in the construction of the Great Wall. Kepler's law of periods: The time required for a planet to orbit the sun, called its period, is proportional to the long axis of the ellipse raised to the 3/2 power.

In the three decades between the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the outbreak of the Second World War, with the deepening dissatisfaction with China's weakness and disunity, there emerged a new appreciation of the man who had unified China. Kepler's equal-area law: The line connecting a planet to the sun sweeps out equal areas in equal amounts of time. The political rejection of the Confucian tradition as an impediment to China's entry into the modern world opened the way for changing perspectives to emerge. Kepler's elliptical orbit law: The planets orbit the sun in elliptical orbits with the sun at one focus. Only in modern times were historians able to penetrate beyond the limitations of traditional Chinese historiography. He finally arrived at his three laws of planetary motion:. Most were designed to tarnish the First Emperor's image. Kepler, unlike Brahe, held to the heliocentric model of the solar system, and starting from that framework, he made twenty years of painstaking trial-and-error attempts at making some sense out of the data.

Almost all of these have been discredited by modern sinologists as hearsay and legend. As shown in the example below, this can even cause the other planets to appear to move in strange loops. There are also many varying tales of Heaven's anger against the First Emperor, such as the story of a stone fallen from the sky engraved with words denouncing the emperor and prophesying the collapse of his empire after his death. We view the orbital motions of the other planets from the vantage point of the Earth, which is itself orbiting the sun. For instance, the accusation that he had 460 scholars executed by having them buried with only their heads above ground, and then decapitated is at the very least unlikely to be completely true and it is probable that the incident was fabricated to create a legend of Confucian martyrdom. However, it was not a simple matter to make sense of these data. Because of this systematic Confucian bias on the part of Han scholars, many of the stories recorded about Qin Shi Huang are of doubtful historical value and many were probably invented to emphasize his negative traits. Kepler inherited from his boss Tycho Brahe a wealth of the most accurate raw data ever collected on the motion of the planets.

He explained the ultimate weakness of Qin as a result of its ruler's ruthless pursuit of power, the precise factor which had made it so powerful; for as Confucius had taught, the strength of a government ultimately is based on the support of the people and virtuous conduct of the ruler. Although the subsections below separate the two, Kepler did not see them as separate. Jia Yi's essay, admired as a masterpiece of rhetoric and reasoning, was copied into two great Han histories and has had a far-reaching influence on Chinese political thought as a classic illustration of Confucian theory. His ideas are therefore a fascinating mixture of what would today be considered mathematical physics and nonsensical mysticism. The famous Han poet and statesman Jia Yi concluded his essay The Faults of Qin with what was to become the standard Confucian judgment of the reasons for Qin's collapse. Kepler lived in an era when there was no clear distinction between astronomy and astrology, and no consensus on the scientific method as the correct way to decide what was correct or incorrect in science. They eventually compiled the list of the Ten Crimes of Qin to highlight his tyrannical actions. In 1632, only two years after his death, his grave was demolished by the Swedish army in the Thirty Years' War.

Later, Confucian historians condemned the emperor who had burned the classics and buried Confucian scholars alive. On November 15, 1630 Kepler died of a fever in Regensburg. Ideological prejudices against the Legalist State of Qin were established as early as 266 BC, when Confucian philosopher Xun Zi compared it to barbarian tribes and wrote "Qin has the heart of a tiger or a wolf … [and is] avaricious, perverse, eager for profit, and without sincerity". However, only the courageous personal intervention of Kepler (despite the risk to be arrested as well) and his reputation as the famous Imperial Mathematician rescued her. In traditional Chinese historiography, the First Emperor was almost always portrayed as a brutal tyrant, superstitious (a result of his interest in immortality and assassination paranoia) and sometimes even as a mediocre ruler. Even though she was subjected to torture, she refused to confess to the charges. In this way his work was carried on through the centuries and became a lasting feature of Chinese society. She was released in October 1621 after attempts to convict her failed.

The next Chinese dynasty, the Han Dynasty, rejected Legalism (in favor of Confucianism) and moderated the laws, but kept Qin Shi Huang's basic political and economic reforms intact. In August of 1620, Katherine, Kepler's mother, was arrested in Leonberg as a witch; she was imprisoned for 14 months. This was a time of extreme civil unrest, and everything the emperor had worked for had crumbled away, for a short period. He initially rejected this idea, but later confirmed it on May 15 of the same year. It was during Qin Er Shi's "rule" that powerful families came to war, with the strongest of them rising to power and bringing order back to the land, thus starting the next dynasty of emperors. On March 8, 1618 Kepler discovered the third law of planetary motion: distance cubed over time squared. The imperial palace and state archives were burned, and the Qin Dynasty came to an end. The question of snowflakes was not resolved until the 20th century.

Revolts quickly erupted, and within four years of Qin Shi Huang's death, his son was dead. He correctly theorized that their hexagonal nature was due to cold, but did not ascertain a physical cause for this. Qin Er Shi was not nearly as capable as his father was. In 1611, Kepler published a monograph on the origins of snowflakes, the first known work on the subject. Qin Shi Huang was buried in his mausoleum, with the famous Terracotta Army, near modern day Xi'an (Shaanxi province), but his burial chamber has yet to be opened. In January 1612 the Emperor died, and Kepler took the post of provincial mathematician in Linz. Huhai became the Second Emperor (Er Shi Huangdi), known by historians as Qin Er Shi. In October 1604, Kepler observed the supernova which was subsequently named Kepler's Star.

They forced his first son Fusu to commit suicide, stripped the command of troops from Meng Tian — a loyal supporter of Fusu — and killed Meng's family too. After Tycho's death, Kepler was appointed Imperial Mathematician (from November 1601 to 1630) to the Habsburg Emperors. After his death, Li Si and the chief eunuch Zhao Gao persuaded his second son Huhai to forge the Emperor's will. In December 1599, Tycho Brahe wrote to Kepler, inviting Kepler to assist him at Benatek outside Prague. Qin Shi Huang did not like to talk about death and he never really wrote a will. She died in 1611 and was survived by two children. Eventually, after about two months, Li Si and the imperial court were back in Xianyang, where the news of the death of the emperor was announced. In April 1597, Kepler married Barbara Müller.

The idea behind this was to prevent people from noticing the foul smell emanating from the wagon of the emperor, where his body was starting to decompose severely. He accepted the position in April of 1594, at the age of 23. Li Si also ordered that two carts containing fish be carried immediately before and after the wagon of the emperor. However, before he took his final exams he was recommended for the vacant post of teacher of mathematics and astronomy at the Protestant school in Graz, Austria. The secretive nature of the emperor while alive allowed this stratagem to work, and it did not raise doubts among courtiers. Upon his graduation from that school in 1591, he went on to pursue study in theology, becoming a part of the Tübingen faculty. Most of the imperial entourage accompanying the emperor was left uninformed of the emperor's death, and each day Li Si entered the wagon where the emperor was supposed to be traveling, pretending to discuss affairs of state. In 1587, Kepler began attending the University of Tübingen, where he proved himself to be a superb mathematician.

Li Si decided to hide the death of the emperor, and return to Xianyang. At age six, he observed the Comet of 1577, writing that he "...was taken by [his] mother to a high place to look at it." At age nine, he observed another astronomical event, the Lunar eclipse of 1580, recording that he remembered being "called outdoors" to see it and that the moon "appeared quite red.". It would take two months for the government to reach the capital, and it would not be possible to stop the uprising. He was introduced to astronomy/astrology at an early age, and developed a love for that discipline that would span his entire life. Prime minister Li Si, who accompanied him, was extremely worried that the news of his death could trigger a general uprising in the empire, given the brutal policies of the government, and the resentment of the population forced to work on Herculean projects such as the great wall in the north of China or the mausoleum of the emperor. This ostracizing probably led him to turn to the world of ideas, as well as an abiding religious conviction, for solace. His death occurred in the beginning of September 210 BC at the palace in Shaqiu prefecture, about two months away by road from the capital Xianyang. Though he excelled in his schooling, Kepler was frequently bullied, and was plagued by a belief that he was physically repulsive, thoroughly unlikable and, compared to the other pupils, an outsider.

Ironically, this potion was meant to make Qin Shi Huang immortal. Born prematurely, Johannes is said to have been a weak and sickly child, but despite his ill health, he was precociously brilliant. Reportedly he died of drinking a potion, which was made by his court scientists and doctors, containing too much mercury. His mother, an inn-keeper's daughter, had a reputation for involvement in witchcraft. The emperor died while on a tour to Eastern China, searching for the legendary Islands of the Immortals (off the coast of Eastern China) and for the secret of eternal life. His father earned a precarious living as a mercenary, and abandoned the family when Johannes was 17. Very little survives today of the great wall built by the First Emperor. His grandfather had been Lord Mayor of that town, but by the time Johannes was born, the Kepler family fortunes were in decline.

It was built much more north than the current Great Wall which was built only during the Ming Dynasty, when China had at least twice more inhabitants than in the days of the First Emperor, and when more than a century was devoted to building the wall (as opposed to a mere ten years during the rule of the First Emperor). Kepler was born on December 27, 1571 at the Imperial Free City of Weil der Stadt (now part of the Stuttgart Region in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, 30 km west of Stuttgart's so center). This wall, for whose construction hundreds of thousands of men were mobilized, and an unknown number died, is the precursor version of the current Great Wall of China. . These tribes (the Xiongnu) were subdued, but the campaign was essentially inconclusive, and to prevent the Xiongnu from encroaching on the northern frontier any longer, the emperor ordered the construction of an immense defensive wall, linking several walls already existing since the time of the Warring States. He is sometimes referred to as "the first theoretical astrophysicist", although Carl Sagan also referred to him as the last scientific astrologer. Qin Shi Huang continued military expansion during his reign, annexing regions to the south (what is now Guangdong province was penetrated by Chinese armies for the first time) and fighting nomadic tribes to the north and northwest. Kepler's career also coincided with that of Galileo Galilei.

Edicts written in the new script were carved on the walls of sacred mountains around China, such as the famous carved edicts of Mount Taishan, to let Heaven know of the unification of Earth under an emperor, and also to propagate the new script among people. Early in his career, Kepler was an assistant to Tycho Brahe. A new script was developed by Li Si, called the small seal script, based on the script in use in the State of Qin, and this new script was made mandatory, thus doing away with all the regional scripts and local Chinese characters that existed in the various Chinese states. Kepler was a professor of mathematics at the University of Graz, court mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II, and court astrologer to General Wallenstein. Perhaps most importantly, the Chinese script was unified. He is best known for his laws of planetary motion, expounded in the two books Astronomia nova and Harmonices Mundi. Qin Shi Huang and Li Si unified China economically by standardizing weights and measures, the currency, the length of the axles of carts (so every cart could run smoothly in the ruts of the new roads), the legal system, and so on. Johannes Kepler (December 27, 1571 – November 15, 1630), a key figure in the scientific revolution, was a German astronomer, mathematician and astrologer.

The emperor also developed an extensive network of roads and canals connecting the provinces to accelerate trade between them and to accelerate military marches to revolting provinces. Somnium (The Dream) (1634) - considered the first precursor of science fiction. Qin Shi Huang ordered all the members of the former royal houses of the conquered states to move to Xianyang (咸陽), the capital of Qin, in modern day Shaanxi province, so they would be kept under tight surveillance for rebellious activities. Tabulae Rudolphinae (1627). In the State of Qin, feudalism had been abolished in the 4th century BC, and the realm had been divided into commanderies with governors dismissed at will by the ruler. Harmonice Mundi (Harmony of the Worlds) (1619). This administrative system was only an extension to the whole empire of the system already in place in the State of Qin before the Chinese unification. Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae (published in three parts from 1618-1621).

An inspector (監  jiàn) was also in post in each commandery, in charge of informing the central government about the local implementation of central policies, reporting on the governors' exercise of power, and possibly resolving conflicts between the two governors. Nova stereometria doliorum vinariorum (New Stereometry of wine barrels) (1615). The civilian governor was also reassigned to a different commandery every few years to prevent him from building up a base of power. Dioptrice (Dioptre) (1611). The civilian governor was superior to the military governor, a constant in Chinese history. Astronomia nova (New Astronomy) (1609). Thus each commandery was run by a civilian governor (守  shǒu) assisted by a military governor (尉  wèi). De Stella nova in pede Serpentarii (On the New Star in Ophiuchus's Foot) (1604).

Civilian and military powers were also separated to avoid that too much power falls in the hands of a single civil servant. Astronomiae Pars Optica (The Optical Part of Astronomy) (1604). Power in the commanderies was in the hands of governors dismissed at will by the central government. Mysterium cosmographicum (The Cosmic Mystery) (1596). They instead divided the empire into thirty-six commanderies (郡). To avoid the anarchy of the Warring States Period, Qin Shi Huang and his prime minister Li Si completely abolished feudalism.

Then in that same year, at the age of 38, the king of Qin proclaimed himself First Emperor (see chapter above). He continued the tradition of tenaciously attacking and defeating the feudal states (dodging a celebrated assassination attempt by Jing Ke while doing so) and finally took control of the whole of China in 221 BC by defeating the last independent Chinese state, the State of Qi. Zheng ascended the throne in 247 BC at the age of 12 and a half, and was king under a regent until 238 BC when at the age of 21 and a half he staged a palace coup and assumed full power. However, the story is dubious since the Confucians would have found it much easier to denounce a ruler whose birth was illegitimate.

This tale arose because Zheng's mother had originally been a concubine of Lü Buwei before he gave her to his good friend Zichu shortly before Zheng's birth. According to a widespread story, Zheng was not the actual son of Zichu, but the son of the powerful chancellor Lü Buwei. Zichu is known posthumously as King Zhuangxiang of Qin. Zichu later returned to Qin after many adventures and with the help of a rich merchant called Lü Buwei, and he managed to ascend the throne of Qin, Lü Buwei becoming chancellor (prime minister) of Qin.

He was the son of Zichu, a prince of the royal house of Qin who served as a hostage in the State of Zhao under an agreement between the states of Qin and Zhao. Zheng was born in Handan (邯鄲), the capital of the enemy State of Zhao. It was governed by Legalist philosophy and focused earnestly on military matters. The competition was extremely fierce and by 260 BC there were only a handful of states left (the others having been conquered and annexed), but Zheng's state, Qin, was the most powerful.

This period of Chinese history is referred to as the Warring States Period. At the time of the young Zheng's birth, China was divided into warring feudal states.
. Westerners sometimes write "Qin Shi Huangdi", which is improper given Chinese naming conventions; it is more conventional to write "Qin Shi Huang" or "First Emperor".

This name Qin Shi Huang (i.e., "First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty") is the name that appears in the Records of the Grand Historian written by Sima Qian, and is the name most favored today inside China when referring to the First Emperor. It seems likely that huangdi was shortened to obtain a three-character name, which matches the three-character name of Chinese people (it is extremely rare for Chinese people to have a name made of four or more characters). The word huangdi (emperor) in his name was also shortened to huang, so that he became known as Qin Shi Huang. The habit started to have his name preceded by Qin (秦), which does not refer to the State of Qin anymore, but to the Qin Dynasty, a dynasty now replaced by the Han Dynasty.

Qin Shi Huang could no longer be called "First Emperor", as this would imply that he was the "First Emperor of the Empire of Han". Eventually, in 202 BC the Han Dynasty managed to reunify the whole of China, which now became officially known as the State of Han (漢國), which can also be translated as the Empire of Han. However, soon after the emperor's death, his regime collapsed, and China was beset by a civil war. Contemporaries called the emperor "First Emperor", dropping the "of the State of Qin", which was obvious without saying.

The name China (中華 or 中國) was never used officially for the country China until 1912 when the Republic of China (中華民國) was founded. The official name of the newly united China was still "State of Qin", Qin having absorbed all the other states. Qin Shi Huang had now become the First Emperor of the State of Qin. He abolished posthumous names, by which former kings were known after their death, judging them inappropriate and contrary to filial piety, and decided that future generations would refer to him as the First Emperor (Shi Huangdi), his successor would be referred to as the Second Emperor (Er Shi Huangdi, literally "second generation emperor"), the successor of his successor as the Third Emperor (San Shi Huangdi, literally "third generation emperor"), and so on, for ten thousand generations, as the Imperial house was supposed to rule China for ten thousand generations ("ten thousand" is equivalent to "forever" in Chinese, and it also means "good fortune").

Qin Shi Huang adopted the name First Emperor (Shi Huangdi, literally "commencing emperor"). This word huangdi was rendered in most Western languages as "emperor", a word with also a long history going back to ancient Rome, and which Europeans deemed superior to the word "king". Thus, by joining these two words, which no one had ever done before, Qin Shi Huang created a title on par with his feat of uniting the seemingly endless Chinese realm, in fact uniting the world (ancient Chinese, like ancient Romans, believed their empire encompassed the whole world, a concept referred to as all under heaven). The word di also referred to the Supreme God in Heaven, creator of the world.

The word huang also meant "big", "great". These Three Huang and Five Di were considered perfect rulers, of immense powers, and very long lives. Wishing to show that he was no more a simple king like the kings of old during the Warring States Period, he created a new title, huangdi (皇帝), combining the word huang (皇) which was used to call the legendary Three Huang (Three August Ones) who ruled at the dawn of Chinese history, and the word di (帝) which was used to call the legendary Five Di (Five Sovereigns) who ruled immediately after the Three Huang. After conquering the last independent Chinese state in 221 BC, Qin Shi Huang was now the king of a state of Qin ruling over the whole of China, which was unprecedented.

(posthumous name) of Qin", but this never happened. Had he received a posthumous name after his death like his father, he would have been known by historians as "King NN. As a king, he was referred to as "King of Qin" only. The given name was never used except by close relatives, therefore it is also incorrect to refer to the young Qin Shi Huang as "Prince Zheng", or as "King Zheng of Qin".

In Chinese antiquity, people never joined family name and given name together as is customary today, so it is anachronistic to refer to Qin Shi Huang as "Ying Zheng". Qin Shi Huang was born in the Chinese month zheng (正), the first month of the year in the Chinese calendar (in the 3rd century BC the Chinese year started before the Winter solstice, and not after as it does today), and so he received the name Zheng (政), both characters being used interchangeably in ancient China. . For all the tyranny of his autocratic rule, Qin Shi Huang is still regarded today as some sort of a colossal founding father in Chinese history whose unification of China has endured for more than two millennia (with interruptions).

Having unified China, he and his prime minister Li Si passed a series of major reforms aimed at cementing the unification, and they undertook some Herculean construction projects, most notably the precursor version of the current Great Wall of China. Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇) (November or December 260 BC-September 10, 210 BC), personal name Zheng, was king of the Chinese State of Qin from 247 BC to 221 BC, and then the first emperor of a unified China from 221 BC to 210 BC, ruling under the name First Emperor.