Qin imperial unification in 221 bce is often conceived of as the ‘unification of China’. Although from the long-term perspective of Chinese history this view is surely valid, it obscures some of the major trends of the Warring States period (453–221 bce). Back then, the Zhou (‘Chinese’) world was moving in the direction of the internal consolidation of large territorial states amid increasing political and cultural separation from their neighbours. This process unmistakably recalls similar developments in early modern Europe, where, as is well known, these resulted in the formation of nation-states. In China, by contrast, the development trajectory was markedly different. The potential transformation of the competing Warring States into fully fledged separate entities never materialized. The unified empire was eventually accepted as the sole legitimate solution to political turmoil, whereas individual states were denied the right to exist. Why, despite strong parallels, did the Chinese development trajectory ultimately diverge so conspicuously from what happened in modern Europe?

In search of an answer, this article focuses on the extraordinary role played by politically active intellectuals of the Warring States period. By prioritizing the common good of ‘All-under-Heaven’ over that of an individual polity, by denigrating local identities, and by rejecting the legitimacy of regional states, these intellectuals paved the way for the political unification of the Zhou world long before it occurred. This article addresses the idealistic and egoistic reasons for this choice and explores the cosmopolitan undertones of the universalist outlook of the Warring States-period intellectuals.

This article uses a case study of the Qin Empire to explore the ecology of an agrarian political system, analysis that has become possible because of the archaeological excavation of Qin administrative documents. Qin's power derived from photosynthesis, and its empire mobilized this energy and used it to conquer territory and expand its productivity. The state's power was based on its ability to extract taxes in grain from its subjects, store it in granaries, and then use it to feed laborers working on state projects. Grain and most other taxable materials were too bulky to move very far, so the government relied on a subcontinent-wide system of information gathering and processing that allowed officials at the capital to make decisions about local resource use. Qin's centralized bureaucratic system became the standard model of political organization in China, so it offers clues into the effects subsequent empires would have on their environments.

The horse played a crucial role in China through the first millennium BC, used both for military advantage and, through incorporation into elite burials, to express social status. Details of how horses were integrated into mortuary contexts during the Qin Empire, however, are poorly understood. Here, the authors present new zooarchaeological data for 24 horses from an accessory pit in Qin Shihuang's mausoleum, indicating that the horses chosen were tall, adult males. These findings provide insights into the selection criteria for animals to be included in the emperor's tomb and invite consideration of questions concerning horse breeds, husbandry practices, and the military and symbolic importance of horses in early imperial China.

Reconstructing the history of elite communication in ancient China benefits from additional archaeological evidence. We combine textual analysis with new human stable carbon and nitrogen isotope data from two Chu burials in the Jingzhou area to reveal significant dietary differences among Chu nobles of the middle Warring States period (c. 350 BC). This research provides important new information on the close interaction between the aristocratic families of the Qin and Chu.

This article studies the promulgation of law in Qin and Western Han China (221 b.c.e.–9 c.e.) based primarily on excavated legal and administrative texts. It shows that a new law was handed down from the emperor to the relevant offices on the day of enactment. The article argues that, to an extent, the subject matter and function of a law determined for whom it was passed and promulgated. Depending upon the location, rank, and official duties of the offices, the laws known and used could be quite different. Although it was required that documents of imperial decisions be forwarded swiftly and safely by courier at the prescribed speed, delays in forwarding such documents to distant local offices were probably common in Qin and Western Han China. Evidence indicates that district- and prefecture-level officials publicized laws that needed to be made known by the common people, by reading them aloud in local gatherings, for example, or posting them in conspicuous places. The article further argues that a law came into effect in offices on the day it arrived at local courts or on the day it was enacted in the central court, depending on the existence of related extant laws. It concludes that a new law in Qin and Western Han China was ex post facto, as it reached backwards to a past action and retroactively attached liabilities to the action at the point when it was performed.

The excavation of the Qin wooden documents from Well No. 1 at Liye 里耶, Hunan province has significantly reshaped our knowledge of Qin history. This article examines a multi-slip manuscript from Liye on the Qin management of human resources in a newly conquered area, Qianling County. The manuscript is the best example of the multi-layered structure of a Qin administrative document; it also sheds new light on the difficulties the Qin encountered in resource management during the early years of unification. The manuscript shows that the responsible officials in Qianling County had failed to engage tuli 徒隸 (laborer-servants)—a major labor source in the Qin—in agricultural production, which appears to have deviated from the Qin strategy of managing human resources. To minimize the harmfulness that this deviation might cause, the Qin heavily relied upon a system of supervision and punishment. This article offers a contextualized study of the manuscript with an analysis of the related Qin excavated sources.

During the century of massive expansion of the Qin state in China (ca. 316–222 BCE), and the subsequent fifteen years of the empire (221–207 BCE), it is recorded that millions of persons were forcibly relocated and resettled throughout the empire and along its frontiers. For example, the historian Sima Qian (ca. 145–86 BCE) states that in just the years between 213 and 210 BCE, the First Emperor relocated more than a million people from interior counties of the empire to settle newly-conquered lands on the northern and southern frontiers. Yet this was only one type of forced resettlement carried out by the Qin. The Qin state also relocated thousands of aristocratic households from conquered states to the Qin capital of Xianyang, captured large numbers of non-Chinese peoples and assigned them to localities as slaves to open up agricultural land, exiled wealthy iron industrialists from the interior to the periphery, intentionally expelled the entire populations of conquered cities to replace them with amnestied criminals, and pooled and redirected the labor of convicts gathered from throughout the empire to labor on huge projects such as the First Emperor's tomb. This article seeks to analyze and categorize these various Qin forced resettlements to uncover the ideological and policy motivations behind them and the role they played in the larger project of Qin imperial expansion and colonization.

The Qin jiandu heji 秦簡牘合集 [Corpus of Qin documents written on bamboo and wood] is the result of a long-term teamwork and collaboration project, directed by Professor Chen Wei 陳偉 of Wuhan University. This publication provides a new, updated edition of seven collections of Qin documents, including those from Shuihudi 睡虎地 (Tomb 4 and 11), Longgang 龍崗 (Tomb 6), Haojiaping 郝家坪 (Tomb 50), Zhoujiatai 周家臺 (Tomb 30), Yueshan 嶽山 (Tomb 36), and Fangmatan 放馬灘 (Tomb 1). Although former editions have not become entirely useless for the various reasons evoked in this article, Qin jiandu heji should now be considered the new standard edition for any serious academic research on those materials.

The mythical origins of the Chinese qin have been forged by ancient literature ever since the age of Confucius, nevertheless, very little is known about the morphology of the ancient qin and its embodied symbolism. This article, by analyzing a most recently discovered ancient qin found in a fourth-century b.c.e. tomb in Jiuliandun, Zaoyang city, Hubei province, in 2002, will explore the relief carving and lacquered drawings found on the instrument itself and their symbolic significance as a representation of the worldview and philosophical state of mind of the Warring States period. I will suggest that a qin contemporaneous to Confucius and played by him looks distinctly different from the version produced by the fertile imagination of the medieval Chinese; instead, it was divided into five registers, and it is this segmented subdivision which defines the ancient qin and differentiates it fundamentally from its classical counterpart. Strikingly, the symbolic depictions in which it was clad represent not only the fertile imagination of the Chu aristocracy, but also include portrayal of the more menial tasks of the ordinary Chu farmer and herdsman as he proceeds through the cycle of the agricultural year, and thus provide the modern scholar with an extraordinarily vivid insight into contemporary Chu life.

In this paper I discuss paleographic texts recording local-level religious practices during the Qin dynasty that archaeologists recovered from Liye and Zhoujiatai. The Liye materials are bureaucratic records of state-sponsored sacrifices that took place in 215 and 212 b.c.e., indicating the types of sacrifices and reflecting the processes by which the bureaucracy managed the items offered. The Zhoujiatai text appears to give instructions for individual sacrifices and provides information about the locations and types of offerings, as well as the verbal formulae employed. The article begins with consideration of Qin practices in transmitted texts and of the agricultural spirit Xiannong, which appears in both the Liye and Zhoujiatai texts. Since in the past there was virtually no information extant about local-level religious activity under the Qin, the details in these paleographic texts represent an advance in understanding the history of the period.