China's first emperor invented the very word for emperor
When King Zheng of Qin finished conquering the rival states in 221 BC, the old title of king felt too small. He coined a new one, huangdi, fusing names used for the mythical Three Sovereigns and the legendary Five Emperors. Monarchs in China and beyond went on using it for roughly two thousand years.
He was born in 259 BC in Handan, capital of the state of Zhao, where his father, a Qin prince, lived as a hostage guaranteeing a truce. With help from the wealthy merchant Lu Buwei, the father became king, and his son inherited the throne at 13 in 246 BC, with Lu Buwei serving as regent. In 235 BC the young king took full power after Lu Buwei was banished over a scandal involving the queen dowager.
The new title carried religious weight, which is why some scholars translate it as thearch. Zheng styled himself First Emperor, expecting heirs to follow as Second, Third and so on forever; the scheme actually ended with his immediate successor. His personal name became taboo, he reserved a first-person pronoun for his own use, and from 212 BC he called himself The Immortal.
His reign reshaped China. With his minister Li Si he standardised practices that had differed from state to state, his generals added the lands of Hunan and Guangdong and seized the Ordos Plateau from the Xiongnu, and he linked separate state walls into a single Great Wall and built a vast national road network. He is traditionally said to have burned books and executed scholars. His city-sized tomb was guarded by a life-sized Terracotta Army. He died in 210 BC while touring eastern China for the fifth time.
His villainous image owes much to the Han dynasty that replaced him. One damaging story, repeated in Sima Qian's history, claims his real father was the merchant Lu Buwei, a particular insult in a society that ranked merchants lowest. Modern scholars such as Derk Bodde suspect this passage was inserted later to slander him. Since the mid-twentieth century, historians have reassessed his rule, and sinologist Michael Loewe credits it with shaping an era of Chinese history that lasted until 1911.
Source: Qin Shi Huang
