Professor Julia Lovell

It's great to be here.

Thanks so much for inviting me.

Well, the first emperor of China was born Yingzheng in 259 BCE in the kingdom of Qin in what is now Gansu and Shanxi provinces.

The northern half of what's now China was divided between a number of smaller states which fought each other for control of land and resources.

Now, by 259 BC, there were only seven of those states left on the field, of which Qin was the largest and the most successful.

And it's thought that over the next 40 years, Qin wins out because it has the most thorough, the most controlling and ruthless state apparatus.

And Ying Zheng succeeded to this throne in 246 BCE at the age of only 13.

By the time he was 38, he'd conquered each of the other states and unified them for the first time into a single empire in 221 BCE.

And at that point, he took the name Qin Shi Huang Di, or Great August, First Emperor of Qin, as goes the literal translation.

With the first emperor, you have this strange combination of huge self-confidence and paranoid frailty.

So on the one hand, he proclaims himself first emperor of this unprecedentedly vast state.

He is super controlling.

He builds a government to micromanage ordinary people's daily lives.

But on the other, from this surprisingly young age, he seems terrified of death by human or supernatural forces.

So he was desperate to find an elixir to eternal life.

And he believed this might be contained in cinnabar, an ore of mercury, which he ate a good deal of.

He died in 210 BCE, aged only 49, ironically, probably partly due to mercury poisoning.

So the first emperor died while touring the eastern part of his empire.

And his advisors initially decided to cover this up, perhaps so they could maneuver the succession to suit themselves.

So they pretended that the emperor was refusing to leave his carriage and to mask the stink of his corpse, which was busily rotting while they transported it back to his mausoleum.