秦始皇是谁？

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.