![]() Qin aggrandizement was aided by frequent military expeditions pushing forward the frontiers in the north and south. To silence criticism of imperial rule, the kings banished or put to death many dissenting Confucian scholars and confiscated and burned their books. Centralization, achieved by ruthless methods, was focused on standardizing legal codes and bureaucratic procedures, the forms of writing and coinage, and the pattern of thought and scholarship. In subjugating the six other major states of Eastern Zhou, the Qin kings had relied heavily on Legalist scholaradvisers. Once the king of Qin consolidated his power, he took the title Shi Huangdi (First Emperor), a formulation previously reserved for deities and the mythological sage-emperors, and imposed Qin's centralized, nonhereditary bureaucratic system on his new empire. (Qin in Wade-Giles romanization is Ch'in, from which the English China probably derived.) * In that year the western frontier state of Qin, the most aggressive of the Warring States, subjugated the last of its rival states. Much of what came to constitute China Proper was unified for the first time in 221 B.C. Thus, the Chinese marked the cultures of people beyond their borders, especially those of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Under the Han, a combination of the stricter Legalism and the more benevolent, human-centered Confucianism - known as Han Confucianism or State Confucianism - became the ruling norm in Chinese culture for the next 2,000 years. These were modified and improved upon by the successor Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. Although short-lived, the Qin Dynasty set in place lasting unifying structures, such as standardized legal codes, bureaucratic procedures, forms of writing, coinage, and a pattern of thought and scholarship. The Chinese polity was first consolidated and proclaimed an empire during the Qin Dynasty (221-206 B.C.). The process of assimilation continued over the centuries through conquest and colonization until the core territory of China was brought under unified rule. The refinement of the Chinese people's artistic talent and their intellectual creativity, plus the sheer weight of their numbers, has long made China's civilization predominant in East Asia. Peoples on China's peripheries were attracted by such achievements as its early and well-developed ideographic written language, technological developments, and social and political institutions. Over several millennia, China absorbed the people of surrounding areas into its own civilization while adopting the more useful institutions and innovations of the conquered people.
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