Emperor Qin

Was Qin a good emperor or a bad emperor ?

Qin was an emperor of many rules, he was a two faced emperor. Born on 18th February 259 BC, Qin was born into royalty. At only 12 years of age Qin was destined to be king, emperor with lots of ambitions for the whole of his reign. He named himself “Huangdi” which means ”great sovereign“ Qin was an emperor who cut both ways through life, from good to bad. He started to build the Great Wall of China to keep the peasants in and enemy invaders out, which had protected chinese from the invasion of the nomadic people in the north for thousands of years. He conquered the other six kingdoms and ended the Zhou dynasty and then became the first emperor of China. Without him, the chinese people would have spoken in different languages ,wrote in different characters, used different currency, and today's China wouldn't even have existed. He did get married to a widow called Lauo Haeri and together it is rumored that they had 30 children together.

However he was a very vicious leader and often buried people alive. He was obsessed with mortality and went on long quests to try and find a potion to make him immortal. These often contained mercury which sadly killed him in the end .Qin was known to be a cruel ruler where he readily killed or banished those who opposed him or his ideas. He is notorious for burning virtually all the books that remained from previous dynasties. He even banned scholarly discussions of the past. As punishments for not obeying him ,the villager’s were subjected to chopping off hands and feet,being branded inhumanly and cutting off the nose and finally killing them . Following the Sui and Tang Dynasties (581-907 CE) these were changed to penal servitude, banishment, death, or corporal punishment in the form of whipping with bamboo strips. Although the punishments were an important part of Dynastic China's penal system they were not the only methods of punishment used. He and the early Qin leaders accomplished this through ruthless warfare on the rest of China.

Qin set up a bureaucracy in which workers are appointed and trained for their jobs, he headed the bureaucracy and appointed three officials to hold the highest government and military positions. Qin also made all measurements and money the same across the whole empire. He standardized the written characters so everyone could communicate. and he took land away from the nobles, enabling any man to own land. Qin was also able to build canals to help all the water fields and he made sure that all the carts had the same width Qin also ordered the censorship of ideas and the burning of books that did not agree with him.

And yet having succeeded he deported or executed all the aristocracies of the former other states. To assure history started with him he ordered all books in China to be burned and all scholars and teachers murdered so they would not tell the truth. Building the Great wall and other works killed more than 100,000's of villagers,prisoners and many more beneath him. He was so hated that when he died a Civil War broke out and his entire family and all his relatives were hunted down and executed but surprisingly his system lived on.

In my own opinion I think that Qin was an evil emperor because he made rules for everyone to follow and if they did not obey him the penalties were severe and very harsh to the people leading up to torture and the amputations of limbs and other body parts. He started the great wall of china but forced his people to build it and it is rumoured that he buried the dead workers in the great wall . He wanted all of his legacy to last forever, but because of his cruelty, his dynasty ended very soon after he died.