By 221 BCE, the final kingdom fell, and Zheng proclaimed himself Qin Shi Huangdi or "First Sovereign Emperor of the Qin Dynasty". He called the united empire "Qin", which many academics believe is ...

By 221 B.C. he had unified a collection of warring kingdoms and took the name of Qin Shi Huang Di—the First Emperor of Qin. During his rule, Qin standardized coins, weights, and measures ...

Qin Shi Huang had work on his enormous mausoleum started early in his reign. The terracotta warriors of the “underground army” guarding the mausoleum, unearthed in 1974, amazed the world.

In 1974, farmers in Shaanxi, China, uncovered the terracotta army guarding Qin Shi Huang’s tomb—a burial site of China’s first emperor, hidden for 2,200 years. Though archaeologists have ...