Qin Shi Huang
The king of Qin who unified China in 221 BC as its First Emperor, forging the centralized state that has reassembled itself ever since.
Every time China breaks apart and then pulls itself back into a single state, it is answering a template set by one man more than 2,200 years ago. In 221 BC, Ying Zheng, king of Qin, finished swallowing the last of the warring states and decided that king was too small a word for what he had done. He coined a new title, Shi Huangdi, First Emperor, and expected his dynasty to rule for ten thousand generations. It lasted fifteen years. The country he stapled together has outlived every dynasty since.
One country out of seven
The First Emperor governed as a Legalist, and his obsession was uniformity. He ordered a single writing system, the small seal script standardized by his chancellor Li Si, so that an edict in the north read the same as one in the south. He imposed one currency, the round bronze banliang coin with its square hole, and one set of weights and measures cast in bronze and shipped to local officials. He even fixed the width of cart axles so wheels would fit the same rutted roads everywhere.
More radical still, he abolished the old feudal fiefs. Instead of hereditary lords, the empire was carved into commanderies and counties run by officials the emperor appointed and could dismiss. It was the first centralized bureaucratic state in Chinese history, and its basic shape survived into the twentieth century. To silence dissent, Li Si had him order the burning of privately held books in 213 BC and, tradition holds, the killing of scholars who defied him, a purge of the very Confucian learning that later ages would revere.
Built on the backs of the conscripted
The First Emperor thought in monuments, all of them raised by forced labor. He linked and extended the border walls of the former states into a continuous rampart against the northern Xiongnu, the earliest true Great Wall, thousands of kilometers of rammed earth. He drove a network of imperial roads and canals across the land. And near his capital he ordered a tomb complex of staggering scale, guarded by the Terracotta Army: thousands of life-sized clay soldiers, each with an individual face, buried in battle formation. Forgotten for two millennia, they were found by farmers digging a well in 1974, and more than 8,000 figures have since emerged.
The immortality hunt and the fall
For all his power, the First Emperor could not command the one thing he wanted most. He sent expeditions in search of an elixir of immortality and swallowed tonics that likely contained mercury, which may have hastened the death he was trying to escape. He died in 210 BC while touring the east. His chancellor Li Si and the eunuch Zhao Gao hid the body, forged the succession, and forced the rightful heir to kill himself, installing a pliable younger son. Rebellions erupted almost at once, and by 206 BC the Qin were gone.
The dynasty was a fifteen-year flash. The idea was permanent. The very word China most likely descends from Qin, and every ruler who has since reunified the country has, knowingly or not, restored the First Emperor's design.