Quick questions on Qin Shi Huangdi: standardisation and public works: HSC Ancient History

Alongside the paperwork of standardisation, the First Emperor drove an extraordinary programme of construction that mobilised hundreds of thousands of labourers.

The former states had written the same underlying language in divergent local styles. Li Si oversaw the promulgation of a single standard script, the small seal script (xiaozhuan), pruning and regularising the older forms so that officials everywhere wrote the same characters. A more cursive, faster clerical script (lishu) developed alongside it for everyday administration.

The government imposed one set of standard weights and one set of measuring vessels for length, volume and mass, distributed to officials across the empire. This is the reform for which the archaeological corroboration is strongest: numerous bronze and pottery standard weights and measures survive, cast or inscribed with the imperial edict of 221 BC ordering uniformity (some carry a supplementary edict of the Second Emperor in 209 BC). Uniform measures allowed uniform taxation, land registration and market regulation across former state boundaries.

The Warring States had used a bewildering variety of currencies, knife-shaped, spade-shaped and other forms. Qin replaced them with a single coin, the round banliang ("half liang", nominally weighing 12 zhu) with a square central hole. The round-coin-with-square-hole design became the standard form of Chinese cash for the next two thousand years.

Less famous but revealing, the Qin fixed a single axle-width for carts (che tong gui, "carts of the same gauge"). Because heavily used earthen roads wore into deep ruts, a standard axle-width meant wagons from anywhere could run the same ruts on the new imperial roads, a small measure that made the whole road network usable as one system. The paired ideal, "same script, same cart-gauge" (shu tong wen, che tong gui), became the classic shorthand for Qin unification.

The Qin built a network of imperial highways (sometimes called "speedways", chidao) radiating from the capital, Xianyang, in the Wei valley, so that armies and orders could move quickly across the empire. The most striking was the "straight road" (zhidao), a direct military highway driven north from the capital region toward the Ordos frontier, roughly 700 to 800 km long, built under Meng Tian from around 212 BC and, according to Sima Qian, cutting through hills and filling valleys to run as straight as possible.

To supply the campaigns of conquest against the Yue (Baiyue) peoples of the far south, Qin engineers (tradition names Shi Lu) cut the Lingqu, the "Magic Canal", around 219 to 214 BC. It linked the Xiang River, part of the Yangtze system, with the Li River, part of the Pearl river system, allowing supply boats to pass between two great watersheds. It was a remarkable feat of hydraulic engineering and still carries water today.

Near Xianyang, on the south bank of the Wei River, the First Emperor began in 212 BC a colossal new palace, the Epang (Efang) Palace, its front hall planned on an enormous scale. It was left unfinished at his death in 210 BC and at the fall of the dynasty in 206 BC. Modern archaeological survey of the site has found the great rammed-earth platform but little sign that the superstructure was ever completed, a useful check on the literary tradition.