秦始皇是谁？
Who was Qin Shi Huang?
Name: ________________ Date: ________
中国古代的铜钱，为什么大多是圆形的，中间还有一个方孔？这个样子，要从两千两百多年前的一个人说起。他就是秦始皇。
秦始皇名叫嬴政，十三岁就当上了秦国的国王。那时候，中国分为好几个国家，彼此之间的战争持续了两百多年，历史上称为“战国”。嬴政长大以后，用了大约十年的时间，先后灭掉了另外六个国家。公元前221年，中国第一次成为一个统一的国家。
嬴政觉得，“王”这个称号已经配不上自己了。据说，他认为自己的功劳超过了古代传说中的“三皇五帝”，于是从中各取一个字，给自己定了一个新的称号：“皇帝”。他是第一个皇帝，所以叫“始皇帝”。他还希望后代一直传下去：二世、三世，一直到万世。
统一天下不容易，管理天下更难。原来的六个国家，文字的写法不一样，用的钱不一样，连长度和重量的单位也各不相同。秦始皇命令全国统一：文字统一用一种写法，叫“小篆”；钱统一用圆形方孔的铜钱；长度、容量和重量也都定下了统一的标准。就连马车两个轮子之间的距离也要一样。后世把这些概括为“书同文，车同轨”。
他还把全国划分成三十六个郡，郡下面再设县，官员由皇帝直接任命，不再分封给贵族。这套制度，后来的朝代基本上都沿用了。为了防御北方的匈奴，他还把北方原有的城墙连接起来，这就是最早的万里长城。
可是，秦始皇也是一个让人害怕的皇帝。修建长城、宫殿和陵墓，动用了几十万人，老百姓的负担极其沉重。为了控制人们的思想，他命令烧掉大量的书。后世常说他“焚书坑儒”：据《史记》记载，他还活埋了四百多个读书人。不过，这些人究竟是什么人，学者们至今仍有争议。
他最怕的，是死亡。他多次派人到海上去寻找长生不老的药，结果一直没有找到。公元前210年，他在出巡的路上病死了，还不到五十岁。
他希望秦朝传一万代，可是他死后只过了三年，秦朝就灭亡了。从统一到灭亡，秦朝只存在了十五年左右。
不过，他留下的东西，比秦朝长久得多。圆形方孔的铜钱，中国人一直用了两千多年。全国用同一种文字的传统，也一直延续到了今天。所以，下次你看到一枚古代铜钱，可以想一想：中间那个小小的方孔，是从秦始皇统一货币开始，传遍全国的。
Key words
| Word | Pinyin | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 古代 | gǔdài | ancient times; antiquity |
| 大多 | dàduō | mostly; for the most part |
| 方 | fāng | side; party |
| 持续 | chíxù | to continue; to last; to sustain; continuous; ongoing |
| 称为 | chēngwéi | to be called; to be known as |
| 国王 | guówáng | king |
| 战争 | zhànzhēng | war; warfare |
| 灭 | miè | to destroy; to wipe out |
| 称号 | chēnghào | title; honorific name |
| 皇帝 | huángdì | emperor |
| 天下 | tiānxià | land under heaven; the whole world; China |
| 命令 | mìnglìng | order; command; to order; to command |
English (for the teacher)
Why were most ancient Chinese coins round, with a square hole in the middle? To explain that shape, we have to start with a man who lived more than two thousand two hundred years ago. He was Qin Shi Huang.
Qin Shi Huang's name was Ying Zheng, and he became king of the state of Qin at just thirteen. At that time China was split into several states, and the wars between them had gone on for more than two hundred years, a period history calls the “Warring States”. Once Ying Zheng was grown, he took about ten years to wipe out the other six states one after another. In 221 BC, China became a single unified country for the first time.
Ying Zheng felt that the title “king” was no longer good enough for him. It is said that he believed his achievements surpassed the legendary “Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors” of ancient times, so he took one character from each and gave himself a new title: “huangdi”, emperor. He was the first emperor, so he was called the “First Emperor”. He also hoped his descendants would carry it on: the Second, the Third, all the way to the Ten-Thousandth.
Unifying the realm was hard; running it was harder. In the six former states, characters were written differently, people used different money, and even the units of length and weight varied. Qin Shi Huang ordered the whole country to unify: one way of writing characters, called “small seal script”; one kind of money, the round copper coin with a square hole; and one fixed standard for length, volume and weight. Even the distance between a cart's two wheels had to be the same. Later generations summed all this up as “the same script for writing, the same axles for carts”.
He also divided the country into thirty-six commanderies, with counties set up beneath them, and officials appointed directly by the emperor instead of land being handed out to nobles. Later dynasties basically kept this system. To defend against the Xiongnu in the north, he also joined up the walls that already stood there, and that was the first “Ten-Thousand-Li Long Wall”, the Great Wall.
But Qin Shi Huang was also an emperor people feared. Building the Great Wall, palaces and his tomb took hundreds of thousands of people, and the burden on ordinary people was crushing. To control what people thought, he ordered great numbers of books burned. Later generations often say he “burned the books and buried the scholars”: according to the Records of the Grand Historian, he also had more than four hundred scholars buried alive. But who exactly those people were is still debated by scholars today.
What he feared most was death. Again and again he sent people out to sea to look for the elixir of immortality, but they never found it. In 210 BC he fell ill and died on a tour of inspection, not yet fifty years old.
He hoped the Qin dynasty would last ten thousand generations, but only three years after his death, it fell. From unification to its fall, the Qin dynasty lasted only about fifteen years.
Yet what he left behind lasted far longer than the Qin dynasty. The Chinese kept using round coins with square holes for more than two thousand years. And the tradition of the whole country using one script has carried on to this day. So the next time you see an old Chinese coin, think about it: that tiny square hole in the middle spread across the whole country when Qin Shi Huang unified the money.