The state that unified China began with a gifted horse breeder
Long before Qin Shi Huang united China in 221 BC, his state began as a small fief handed to a man called Feizi because the Zhou king admired his horse breeding. Perched on the western frontier among the Rong tribes, Qin was sneered at as half-barbarian by the central states. That edge became its advantage.
Tradition dates Qin to 897 BC. Its ruling Ying clan claimed descent from the legendary emperor Zhuanxu, and its western branch guarded the frontier beyond Mount Long for the Shang and then the Zhou. Living among the Rong, the clan alternately fought and intermarried with them. Some scholars read the horse-breeding ancestor as a hint of nomadic links, and as late as 266 BC a noble of Wei claimed Qin shared customs with the Rong. Qin was sensitive to the slight and insisted on its Huaxia identity.
Its rise came through crisis. When Zhou nobles overthrew King Li in 842 BC, the Rong wiped out the senior Ying line, leaving the cadet branch at Qinyi. King Xuan made Qin Zhong his commander against them; after he fell in battle in 822 BC, his sons, given 7,000 soldiers, recovered the family lands. In 771 BC nomads and rebel lords sacked the Zhou capital, and Duke Xiang escorted the new King Ping east to Luoyi. The grateful king raised Qin to a full vassal and promised it the old Zhou heartland if it could drive out the Rong, which later rulers did.
Relations with its eastern neighbour Jin swung between marriage alliances and war. Duke Mu sent grain during Jin's famine of 647 BC, was refused help in return, and captured Jin's ruler in 645 BC. After a crushing ambush at Xiao in 627 BC, he turned west again, and his record earned him a place among the Five Hegemons. Another duke, Ai, sent troops to rescue Chu from Wu after a Chu envoy wept in his courtyard for seven days, and composed a battle hymn preserved in the Classic of Poetry.
In the 5th and early 4th centuries BC Qin seemed to fade, probably by choosing isolation rather than through weakness. Sweeping reforms in the 4th century BC then made it a dominant Warring State, setting up the unification of 221 BC.
Source: Qin (state)
