Professor Andrew Meyer

But these other regional states, they're much too powerful, they're much too deeply entrenched to completely disappear.

Beginning in 228, and it takes only about eight years, the ruler of Qin, this Ying Zheng, who ultimately becomes the first emperor,

He conquers the other six warring states.

He wipes them out.

He erases them from the map, and he imposes a kind of centralized, unified control over the entire former Zhou realm, which no one, I think, would have been able to predict was possible.

And it's a remarkable feat of political consolidation, really unprecedented in the annals of the world and rarely replicated in subsequent periods.

The Zhou had regalia, like any royal family, and the most sacred and the most famous of their regalia were these nine cauldrons.

Within the ancestral cult of the aristocracy of the ancient Chinese world, ritual bronze vessels played a very, very important role.

So the nine cauldrons were huge tripod cauldrons made of bronze with very elaborate decorations on them that were used in preparing ritual meals for the ancestors of the Zhou.

And they were considered special regalia.

They were considered special talisman, materially embodying the Zhou dynasty's possession of the mandate of heaven.

And, you know, there's lots and lots of machinations that happen throughout the warring states, different states and rulers trying to take possession of the nine cauldrons.

Everyone felt that this would be an enormously consequential sort of expression of soft power if you could get a hold of those nine cauldrons.

That would create the expectation that even if you weren't the son of heaven now, that you were destined to become the son of heaven.

One of the incidents I talk about early in the book, the ruler of Qin, he's still calling himself king, but he gets special permission of the Zhou son of heaven to go into the sacred chamber where the nine cauldrons are kept.

And he loved to have strongmen around him.

So he points to one of his entourage, who's a famous strongman.

He says, let's have a contest.

Let's see which of us can lift one of these cauldrons.

And the cauldrons were so heavy that he couldn't have been trying to lift it off the ground.