The history of China is long, and it is monumental. In the middle of the second millennium BCE, in the central basin of the Yellow River, a culture arose that lived in large, walled cities, wrote in pictographs, waged war in chariots, and venerated its ancestors. Later known as the Shang dynasty, this political entity viewed the surrounding peoples as barbarians. In the eleventh century BCE, the Shang was replaced by the Zhou dynasty, which rapidly fell apart into warring states. Even so, each of these kingdoms felt it was part of a shared and superior culture. In 221 BCE, the kingdom of Qin united the country, and an empire emerged that in its prosperity and military might rivalled that of the Romans, simultaneous in its ascendancy ten thousand kilometres away. The king of Qin was a despot. But in his reign, he standardised weights and measures, unified the writing system, connected the country with roads, and kept the northern barbarians at bay through a series of defence works that would, after subsequent dynasties, become known as the Great Wall. He called himself Qin Shi Huangdi – the first emperor of the Qin – and boasted that his bloodline would rule for ‘ten thousand generations’. Qin Shi Huangdi governed the country with an iron fist: Countless peasants were drawn into slavery by threat or deceit to carry out major public works, and legislation was executed in cold-blooded terms. A man failing to report a family transgression was hacked in two. After the death of the first emperor in 210 BCE, major peasant rebellions arose, and the Qin was soon replaced by the Han, a dynasty with a greater capacity for endurance: It did not fall until four hundred years later. The Han set the trend for the two thousand years that followed. It elevated Confucianism to a political doctrine and introduced the principle of meritocracy: The country's administrators were not selected for their family background, but for their knowledge and virtue.