The king of the western state of Qin who conquered the other six Warring States, declared himself First Emperor of a unified China in 221 BCE, and in a single brutal decade forced a vast field of rival kingdoms into one standardized, centrally governed empire whose basic shape lasted two thousand years -- built on forced labor, fear, and Legalist rule through law, and remembered ever after as both the maker of China and the archetype of the tyrant.
He took a single word and made it the name of a country. The king of Qin spent ten years swallowing the rival kingdoms around him, and in 221 BCE he stood alone over all of China and gave himself a title no one had held before: Qin Shi Huang, First August Emperor. Then he forced the new empire into one shape. One script, one coin, a standard cart gauge. He linked the northern walls into a forerunner of the Great Wall and buried himself with an army of clay. He also worked men to death by the thousands and is said to have burned the books of those who disagreed. Much of the cruelty in his legend was written a century later by historians who served the dynasty that destroyed his. The terror was real. So was the empire. The dynasty died with his son. The imperial China he helped invent did not.