Qin Shi Huangdi and the unification of China in 221 BC: the conquest of the six warring states in sequence (Han 230, Zhao 228, Wei 225, Chu 223, Yan 222, Qi 221 BC); the strategy of diplomacy, bribery and overwhelming force directed by Li Si, Wei Liao and the generals Wang Jian and Wang Ben; the failed assassination attempt by Jing Ke in 227 BC; the proclamation of the new imperial title Shi Huangdi and its ideological meaning; and the scale of the achievement, assessed through the critical use of Sima Qian and the archaeological record

A 3-mark "outline" wants the six states named in the correct order with their years.

The sequence

Qin conquered its rivals one at a time over a decade: Han in 230 BC, Zhao in 228 BC, Wei in 225 BC, Chu in 223 BC, Yan in 222 BC, and Qi last in 221 BC (1 mark for the correct order).

The pattern

The order broadly moved from the states nearest Qin in the west and centre (Han, Zhao, Wei) outward to the larger and more distant states (Chu in the south, Yan in the northeast, Qi in the east), reflecting the long-standing policy of "befriend the distant, attack the near" (1 mark).

The endpoint

Qi, isolated and with its chief minister already bribed by Qin, surrendered in 221 BC almost without a fight, completing the unification and ending the Warring States period (1 mark).

Markers reward the six states in the correct order with years, not a vague statement that Qin "gradually" conquered China.

A 4-mark "describe" wants several developed points on the non-military side of Qin's strategy.

The guiding policy

Qin followed the inherited policy of "befriend the distant, attack the near" (yuan jiao jin gong), keeping the far states neutral or friendly while it destroyed its nearer neighbours one at a time, so its enemies never combined against it (1 mark).

Bribery to break alliances

The strategist Wei Liao advised King Zheng to spend gold lavishly bribing the powerful ministers of rival courts to disrupt the "vertical alliance" (hezong) of the states against Qin; the chief minister Li Si is credited with sending agents to bribe or, where that failed, assassinate the leading men of other states (1 mark).

Bribery to remove a general

In 229 BC Qin could not defeat Zhao's able general Li Mu in the field, so it bribed the Zhao minister Guo Kai to slander him; Li Mu was executed by his own king, after which Wang Jian crushed Zhao in 228 BC (1 mark).

Overwhelming force

Where diplomacy had isolated a target, Qin then applied massive, well-supplied armies under professional generals, as in the 600,000-strong force Wang Jian led against Chu, so that bribery and force worked together rather than as alternatives (1 mark).

Markers reward the combination of diplomacy, bribery and force, with at least one concrete example, rather than a description of battles alone.

A 5-mark "explain" needs the source used, plus supporting own knowledge.

Use the source

Source A shows two Qin generals giving very different estimates for the conquest of Chu, the young Li Xin promising success with 200,000 men and the veteran Wang Jian insisting on 600,000; the king first backs the cheaper option, suffers a defeat, then personally recalls the general he had doubted and grants the full army demanded (2 marks).

Own knowledge: what really happened

This reflects the real campaign against Chu, the largest of the six states. Li Xin's smaller invasion (around 225 to 224 BC) was routed by the Chu general Xiang Yan; King Zheng then restored Wang Jian to command, and with roughly 600,000 troops Wang Jian defeated Chu, captured its king in 223 BC and ended Chu's resistance (2 marks).

What it reveals

The episode reveals that Qin's success rested not only on numbers but on the willingness of the king to commit overwhelming, expensive force and to defer to experienced generals after a setback; it also shows Chu was a genuinely formidable enemy, not a walkover, which is why Qin needed its single largest army to subdue it (1 mark).

Markers reward decoding the source, correct identification of the Li Xin and Wang Jian campaigns with dates, and the point about overwhelming force plus royal willingness to learn from a defeat.

A 6-mark "assess" needs balanced usefulness and reliability, plus own knowledge and a judgement.

Content

Source B narrates the assassination attempt: Crown Prince Dan of Yan, fearing conquest, sends Jing Ke to the Qin court with a map concealing a poisoned dagger and the head of the defector Fan Wuji as a lure; the attempt fails when the king frees himself and kills Jing Ke, and Qin retaliates against Yan (2 marks).

Usefulness

This type of source is useful because it preserves the core, well-attested events of 227 BC: the attempt did happen, it did fail, and it did precipitate Qin's assault on Yan, whose capital Ji fell in 226 BC and whose king was finally captured in 222 BC. It usefully shows Yan's desperation and that assassination was a recognised weapon of the weak against the strong in this period (2 marks).

Reliability and limitation

A dramatised, moralising account of this kind, of the type Sima Qian preserved a century later, is shaped for effect: the vivid audience-chamber detail (the map "unrolled" to reveal the dagger) reads as literary set-piece rather than verifiable record, and later writers had reason to cast Qin's enemies as noble and Qin as the fearsome aggressor. Such a source is reliable for the outline of events but not for the exact words, gestures or motives it supplies (2 marks).

Judgement

The source is therefore most reliable as evidence of the political relationship between a terrified Yan and an unstoppable Qin, and of how the episode was later remembered, and least reliable as a literal transcript of what happened in the chamber; a historian would use it for the fact and consequence of the attempt while treating its dramatic detail with caution.

Markers reward separating the well-attested events from the literary detail, noting the later moralising tradition, and reaching a judgement rather than retelling the story.

A 4-mark "explain" needs the meaning of the title and why it mattered, not just a translation.

A title for an unprecedented achievement

In 221 BC the King of Qin judged that the old title "king" (wang), shared by the rulers he had just destroyed, no longer matched a man who had united "all under Heaven." He therefore invented a grander title (1 mark).

What the title combined

He took "huang" (august or sovereign) from the legendary Three August Ones and "di" (emperor, with connotations of a divine high ruler) from the Five Emperors of antiquity, fusing them into "huangdi", a title claiming to surpass every ruler of the mythical past (1 mark).

"First" of a dynasty meant to last forever

He styled himself Shi Huangdi, the First August Emperor, decreeing that his heirs would be counted Second Generation, Third Generation and so on down to ten thousand generations, projecting a permanent, everlasting dynasty (1 mark).

Ideological break with the past

He also abolished the tradition of posthumous names, which had let ministers and sons pass judgement on a dead ruler, declaring this an intolerable case of the subject judging the ruler; the new title thus asserted an absolute, unaccountable monarchy (1 mark).

Markers reward the meaning of huangdi, the "First of ten thousand generations" claim, and the ideological assertion of absolute rule, not merely "he called himself emperor."

An 8-mark values-and-limitations task needs origin, values, limitations and a judgement, with specifics.

Origin

The Shiji, completed by the Han court historian Sima Qian around 91 BC, roughly a century after unification, contains the "Basic Annals of the First Emperor of Qin", the fullest surviving narrative of the conquest of the six states and the founding of the empire (2 marks).

Values

The Shiji is indispensable: it is a careful, near-systematic account by a trained historian with access to Qin records and earlier writings, and it supplies the dated framework historians still use, the sequence of conquests from Han in 230 BC to Qi in 221 BC, the roles of Li Si, Wei Liao and the generals Wang Jian and Wang Ben, the Jing Ke episode, and the adoption of the title Shi Huangdi. Without it the outline of the unification would be largely lost (2 marks).

Limitations

Sima Qian wrote under the Han dynasty, which had overthrown the Qin and legitimised its own rule by portraying Qin as a brutal, short-lived tyranny (the moralising "Faults of Qin" tradition associated with Jia Yi is appended to his Annals). His work therefore carries a built-in hostile perspective, especially on the First Emperor's character and cruelty, and its vivid set-pieces (such as the assassination scene) blend record with literary drama. It is also a distant retrospective, not a contemporary document (2 marks).

Judgement

The Shiji is highly valuable for the chronology and institutions of the unification but must be read critically on Qin's character and motives, where its Han perspective is strongest; it is best corroborated against archaeological evidence such as the Shuihudi legal slips (discovered 1975), which reveal a functioning, ordered administration less lurid than the moralising tradition, and the terracotta army, which confirms the military scale Sima Qian describes (2 marks).

Markers reward accurate origin and dating, balanced values and limitations tied to the Han perspective, and a judgement that corroborates the text against archaeology rather than accepting or dismissing it wholesale.

A band-6 essay states a clear verdict on "relative importance", marshals dated evidence, and weaves historiography. This is a PLAN plus a model paragraph.

Thesis

The unification was not the product of any single factor but of Qin's long-built structural advantages converted into victory by a coherent strategy, executed by outstanding generals, against rivals who repeatedly failed to combine. Strategy and Qin's institutional strength were the deepest causes; the generals were the decisive instrument; the rivals' disunity was the necessary condition that made a decade-long, state-by-state conquest possible.

Argument line 1: strategy and Qin's built-in strength were the deepest cause

Qin entered the final wars already the strongest state, its Legalist reforms (from Shang Yang onward) giving it a disciplined army, a productive agrarian base and a centralised command. On top of this it applied a consistent strategy, "befriend the distant, attack the near", and Wei Liao's policy of bribing rival ministers to break the anti-Qin "vertical alliance"; Li Si directed the corruption or removal of enemy leaders. This meant Qin rarely faced a united coalition.

Argument line 2: the generals were the decisive instrument

Strategy still had to be executed. Wang Jian crushed Zhao in 228 BC (after bribery removed the general Li Mu), took the Chu heartland with 600,000 men and captured the Chu king in 223 BC; his son Wang Ben flooded the Wei capital Daliang in 225 BC and mopped up Yan (222 BC) and Qi (221 BC). The Li Xin failure against Chu shows that without the right general even Qin could be beaten.

Argument line 3: the rivals' weakness and disunity were the necessary condition. The six states never combined effectively: Zhao executed its own best general on Qin's prompting; Yan resorted to the desperate assassination attempt by Jing Ke in 227 BC, which only provoked its destruction; Qi, isolated and its chief minister bribed, surrendered in 221 BC almost without a fight. Their failure to unite let Qin defeat them one at a time.

Historiography

Derk Bodde stresses Qin's institutional and legal machinery, and the role of Li Si, as the foundation of its success. Mark Edward Lewis (The Early Chinese Empires, 2007) frames unification as the culmination of long-term Qin state-building rather than a sudden conquest. Yuri Pines (Birth of an Empire, 2014) warns that the hostile, Han-era portrait of Qin distorts how we weigh the First Emperor's personal role. On the sources, Sima Qian's Shiji supplies the narrative but must be read critically against the Shuihudi legal slips.

Model paragraph (argument line 3)

The clearest proof that rival disunity was decisive lies in how differently each state fell. Zhao, militarily Qin's near-equal, was undone not on the battlefield but by its own court, which executed Li Mu in 229 BC after Qin bribed the minister Guo Kai; Yan, too weak to resist, gambled on Jing Ke's dagger in 227 BC and, when that failed, simply hastened its own conquest; Qi, having stood aside while its neighbours were destroyed, found itself alone in 221 BC and surrendered without serious resistance. Had these states combined, as the "vertical alliance" was meant to make them, Qin's strategy of attacking them one by one could not have worked. As Lewis argues, Qin's victory was the harvest of long preparation meeting rivals who never learned to act together.

Conclusion

All three factors were necessary, but they were not equal: Qin's strategy and institutional strength were the deepest cause, the generals the decisive instrument, and rival disunity the condition that let the plan succeed. The First Emperor's own role lay chiefly in backing this system with resolve, as when he recalled Wang Jian after Li Xin's defeat.

Marker's note: band 6 answers give a ranked verdict on "relative importance", deploy precise dated evidence (230 to 221 BC, 229 BC, 227 BC, 223 BC), integrate at least two named historians as argument, and read Sima Qian critically rather than accepting the hostile tradition at face value.