The dynasty that lasted only fifteen years and made China — a short, ferocious regime that ended five centuries of warfare, welded a vast field of rival states into the first unified Chinese empire, standardized the written word and the width of cart axles alike, and burned so hot it consumed itself in a generation, leaving a centralized imperial template that shaped China for two thousand years.
The Qin Dynasty ruled a unified China for just fifteen years, and almost everything about it has outlasted it. The very word "China" likely comes from "Qin." Its First Emperor abolished the old nobility, split his realm into provinces run by appointed officials, and forced a single script, a single coin, and a single cart-axle width onto every corner of the land. He linked the northern walls into a forerunner of the Great Wall and was buried with an army of clay. Much of his lurid reputation as a tyrant comes from later historians who hated him, and the death tolls are guesses. But the system he built was real, and so was its cruelty. The dynasty died with him within four years. The unified empire it invented did not.