Qin dynasty

It, it makes me think Chinese just because, you know, Q-I, um, in the name.

'Cause, 'cause like, okay, we spell it China C-H-I-N-A, but it's actually from the, the, the, the Qin or the Qin dynasty, and one way of spelling that is Q-I-N.

Mm-hmm.

So that's why I say it.

But with China, there also are other explanations, too.

For example, with China, it comes from the Qin Dynasty, who ruled

China.

Oh, no, no, I know.

There's also just like... linguistic or conventional reasons, historical reasons.

For example, we just said, I mentioned China.

China at the time it entered into the Western world, which would then come into English, was ruled by the Qin dynasty, which came into Latin as, you know, Qin, and then China, obviously, and then the English speakers took up China.

That's one way.

Sitting there, sipping the coffee, I thought about the history of this land.

This was once the homeland of Empress Xiaozhuang, a figure of immense importance in Qin Dynasty history.

Her birthplace is marked by a park further west, but her legacy is woven into the fabric of this region.

The Mongolian identity here is strong, proud, and deeply connected to the land.

If any of you had never heard of Xiangyang, then for sure you'd never heard of Fan Ju.

These two, more than anyone else, made the Qin dynasty.

Xiangyang, with his two waves of reforms, put the Qin house in order and put them on a war footing.

Fan Ju was someone of high repute as a politician and strategist, and like Shang Yang, he also originally hailed from Wei State.

King Zhao Xiang of Qin, as I mentioned, he reigned a good 55 years, 306 to 251 BC.

Over on the other side of the world, This was the start of the Punic Wars.

I know I said this last time, but as far as the Qin Dynasty and all the systems of government and national administration that got passed down through the ages, don't give all the credit to Qin Shi Huang.

It was this king, Zhao Xiang, and also Duk Xiao, Duk Mu, Shang Yang, Fan Ju, Bai Qi, and a whole other cast of lesser-known characters who put the Qin on a solid foundation.

But first, let's see an example of the Mandate of Heaven in action.

So the Qin Dynasty only lasted 38 years, but it's one of the most important dynasties in Chinese history.

So important, in fact, that it gave the place its name, Qin.

Can I just tell you guys that we literally just spent 20 minutes on that shot? We shot it like 40 times.

His death set off a chain of court intrigue, succession disputes, and popular uprisings.

And within just a few short years, the mighty Qin dynasty The empire that had unified the warring states and connected the First Great Wall collapsed entirely, giving way to a new ruling house, the Han.

The wall Meng Tian and his labourers had built did not disappear with the fall of Qin, but it also did not remain static.

It would be inherited, reshaped, extended, neglected, rebuilt and reimagined by dynasty after dynasty for the next 2,000 years.

And in our next chapter, we will follow the wall as it grows even longer, stretching far into the deserts of the northwest, guarding not just farmland and villages, but something far more valuable to the empire that came next – a fragile, glittering thread of trade that we now call the Silk Road.

There is another detail worth lingering on before we leave the Qin dynasty behind.

and it concerns the sheer logistics of feeding, housing and supplying an army of labourers spread across thousands of miles of remote and often barren terrain.

Modern estimates, drawn from surviving administrative records and later historical accounts, suggest that the labour force assembled for this project may have numbered somewhere around 300,000 soldiers alone.

And on that last note, you've got to remember that he was trying to make moral sense of history.

There was this incredible upheaval in the history of China, right? The first empire had risen, the Qin Dynasty, Dendubang, if you know him.

And then it fell because of various reasons, and then the Han rose.

So he was trying to make sense of all these huge changes in history.