etymology of ‘Qin = China’ is far from straightforward. Sanskrit’s adoption of the ‘sin’/‘cin’ root seems to predate the rise of Qin; it could, in that case, derive from Jin (pronounced ‘zhin’), the hegemonic state headed by Chonger in the seventh century BC. Much later, the Graeco-Roman world in fact knew two Chinas: Sinai/Thinai and Seres (or Serica), both of which exported silk but were not thought to be the same place. Medieval Europe then added yet another, Cathay. This was the country that Marco Polo claimed to have visited. Polo seldom mentions anywhere called ‘Chin’ (or ‘China’) and then only as a possible alternative name for ‘Manzi’, which was the southern coastal region.20 In this restricted sense ‘Chin’/‘China’ was used by Muslim and then Portuguese traders, but it figured little in English until porcelain from this ‘Chin’ began gracing Elizabethan dinner tables. Shakespeare caught the mood in Measure for Measure with mention of stewed prunes being served in threepenny bowls and ‘not China dishes’.21 After long gestation, china (as porcelain) was lending currency to China (as place) – just as in Roman times seres (the Latin for ‘silk’) had led to the land itself being called ‘Seres’. Ultimately, then, it was contemporary crockery from the south of the country, not an ancient dynasty from the north, which secured the name of ‘China’ in everyday English parlance and led, by extension, to the term being applied to the whole empire.
Appropriately enough, Qin was acquainted with this later, southern, ‘Chin’. In the wake of his victory over Chu (including Wu and Yue) the First Emperor extended his conquests deep into the extreme south of the country. They seem to have embraced Guangdong province and parts of Guangxi and Fujian (which together formed Marco Polo’s ‘Chin’), plus on paper at any rate what is now northern Vietnam. But uncertainty surrounds not only the extent of these acquisitions but also their timing. If, as the Shiji has it, Qin’s successful southern campaign was in 214 BC, this was only four years before the First Emperor’s untimely death and the rapid disintegration of his empire. Three new commanderies are said to have been established in the south, but since all would have to be reconquered by the Han dynasty, it must be doubtful whether Qin’s control was fully effective. Whatever its extent, the First Emperor’s southern dominion was fleeting.
As in Sichuan, though, it was notable for the cutting of an important canal. This linked a southern tributary of the Yangzi to a northern tributary of the West River, which itself debouches into the estuary of the Pearl River near Hong Kong. Designed in 219 BC to facilitate a southern advance and to provide an inland waterway through Hunan to Guangzhou (Canton), the canal would be much realigned but, like Li Bing’s waterworks, still exists. In the same year, the emperor himself reached the southernmost point of his imperial travels when he turned back somewhere just short of the proposed canal in the vicinity of Changsha. At the time the hill country to the south had not yet been secured, which should have been a good enough reason for heading north again. But the Shiji offers a different explanation, indeed one that seems designed to reveal an imperial trait which was of growing concern to ministers such as Li Si and to the whole Qin court.
Apparently the emperor was much drawn to hilltops. His inscribed stelae were usually positioned on them and he liked to climb them in person. But on an eminence near Changsha his progress was halted by what sounds like a tornado. Taking this as a personal affront, he excused the wind but blamed the hill, ordering it to be stripped of trees and painted red. Three thousand convicts were put to work immediately. Since ‘red was the colour worn by condemned criminals’22 and clear-felling the nearest thing to limb-by-limb amputation, it is evident that the hill was being punished for lèse-majesté. Delusions of more than mere grandeur were afflicting the emperor: a sense of transcendence had overcome him; ‘all under Heaven’ was his, and that included natural features. When some 2,200 years later Comrade Mao’s Long Marchers sang songs about ‘painting the countryside red’, they may not have been aware of this ominous precedent.
More significant, because it resulted in the construction of the so-called Great Wall, was the empire’s extension northwards. Sima Qian’s Shiji continues to be vague about the geography and chronology, but it seems that the First Emperor’s conquests extended right along the northern perimeter of the erstwhile ‘warring states’ and that these conquests were undertaken continuously throughout his eleven years as emperor (221–210 BC). As in Sichuan, colonists were speedily dispatched to the newly conquered territories; and frequent mention of these deployments provides a few clues as to the advance. So does the alignment, insofar as it can be established, of the Qin wall, part of which was much farther north than most of its successors. On this basis, the First Emperor’s forces look to have mounted a three-pronged advance, pushing north of west to Lanzhou in Gansu province, north of east to the edge of the Korean peninsula, and due north across the Ordos, an undulating desert wilderness within the Yellow River’s great northern loop, towards Mongolia.
The last advance, that due north across the Ordos, is the only one of which Sima Qian has much to say – and most of that in the course of a biographical note on Meng Tian, the Qin general responsible. Meng Tian was sent north with either 100,000 men or 300,000 men, probably in 221 BC, to disperse the Rong and Di peoples and take control of the Ordos. Once established there, he set about building walls. At a time when in Europe Hannibal was overcoming the natural frontier that was the Alps, Meng Tian determined to construct an artificial frontier. Its line reportedly covered a distance of 10,000 li (c. 5,000 kilometres – 3,000 miles) from Lintao (near Lanzhou) to Liaodong (east of Beijing); and initially it ran north across Ningxia province until, on reaching the Yellow River, it followed round that river’s great northern bend. Thereafter Sima Qian says nothing about its alignment; nor does he anywhere mention its purpose. He did, though, visit the scene of Meng Tian’s labours, albeit a century later. On site he seems to have been as much impressed by the 850 kilometres (530 miles) of road that Meng Tian had constructed up through the badlands of the Ordos as he was by the wall itself.
I have travelled to the northern border and returned by the direct road. As I went along I saw the outposts of the long [i.e. Great] wall which Meng Tian constructed for the Qin. He cut through the mountains and filled up the valleys, opening up the direct road. Truly he made free with the strength of the common people.23
From this it would seem that Meng Tian’s ‘Great Road’ involved more engineering than his ‘Great Wall’. The former is said to have been ‘cut through the arteries of the earth’, while the latter ‘followed the contours of the land…twisting and turning’ and ‘used the mountains as defence’ and ‘their defiles as frontier posts’.24 If Sima Qian’s 10,000 li are to be taken literally, the wall was certainly longer than the road. On the other hand it is generally accepted that Meng did not start his wall from scratch. Wall-building, both as a demonstration of exclusive sovereignty and as a defensive precaution, had been practised by the ‘warring states’ for at least a century. In places Meng Tian had merely to repair these existing stretches and connect them up.25
The term used in Chinese literature for Meng Tian’s wall, as for the ‘Great Wall’ of later fame, is changcheng, literally meaning ‘long wall’ or, as with zhongguo (‘Central States’/‘Middle Kingdom’), ‘long walls’. Cities, palaces and even villages might be surrounded by changcheng. Thus according to another interpretation, Meng Tian’s wall was not in fact a continuous construction but a succession of the ‘outposts’ observed by Sima Qian, each surrounded by its own changcheng.26 This would certainly help to explain why Qin’s changcheng receives so little mention in later history and also why it was (or they were) apparently so ineffective as a defensive rampart. If the textual context provides a clue, the section north of the Ordos was more
