When Qin Shihuang unified the world, what was happening in other parts of the world?

221 BC is a very special year in Chinese history: it was in this year that Qin Shihuang Yingzheng, who had survived for six generations, finally eliminated Qi, the last one of the six Shandong kingdoms. The land of China has ushered in a new era of unified empire. What is happening in other parts of the world at this time? In fact, in the year when Qin Shi Huang completely annexed the Six Kingdoms, he also launched military operations against the Baiyue tribe in the south. In ancient China, the Guyue people lived in today's Jiangnan and Lingnan regions. They were distributed in today's Jiangsu, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Hainan, Guangxi and northern Vietnam, a half-moon circle that is seven to eight thousand miles long. The Yue nationality is divided into different branches such as Yuyue, Yangyue, Ouyue, Minyue, Nanyue and Luoyue, so they are collectively called Baiyue.

After unifying the six kingdoms in 218 BC, Qin Shihuang ordered General Tu Sui to lead an army of 500,000 people to conquer Baiyue in the south. The Qin army was divided into five groups: one group attacked Dongou and Minyue, two groups attacked South Vietnam, and the remaining two groups attacked Xiou. "Huainanzi Human Training" records the difficult journey of Qin Shihuang's southern expedition to Baiyue: "He sent Wei Tu Sui to send 500,000 soldiers to the five armies... He did not disarm his armor and gallop crossbows for three years, so that the prison staff could not be transferred to pay; he also used soldiers to dig canals. And the food road was opened to fight with the Yue people, and killed Xiwujun to translate the Song Dynasty; but the Yue people all went into the jungle with the animals, and they were not willing to be Qin's captives. They appointed Jie Jun as a general and attacked the Qin people at night. When the army was defeated, the generals were killed and hundreds of thousands of people were killed, and hundreds of thousands of people were buried with blood, so they sent out garrison troops to prepare for it." This war lasted for three years. In order to solve the problem of transporting grain and grass for the army, Qin Shihuang ordered the construction of an artificial canal between the Xiangjiang River and the Lijiang River in Xing'an, Guangxi.

In 214 BC, this canal called Lingqu was completed and dug. In the same year, Qin Shihuang sent Ren Xiao and Zhao Tuo to attack the Baiyue tribes again. This time the Qin army successfully conquered the Baiyue tribe in the Lingnan area. Subsequently, the Qin Dynasty established three counties in Lingnan: Nanhai, Guilin, and Xiangjun. From then on, the Lingnan and Guangxi areas became part of the Chinese territory. Among them, the area under the jurisdiction of Xiangjun even has extended to northern Vietnam. The Qin army's march south brought the farming technology and advanced culture of the northern Central Plains to the Lingnan region, allowing the Lingnan region to quickly and smoothly enter the era of agricultural civilization from the era of slash-and-burn farming. Today, many descendants of the ancient Yue people have been integrated into the blood genes of the main Chinese nation. In fact, the abbreviation of Guangdong Province, Yue, is the same as Yue in ancient Chinese. Today, Guangdong has long used the same square characters as other regions in China.

When Qin Shihuang was conquering Baiyue in the south, the Xiongnu tribe in the north had posed an increasing threat to the northern frontier of the empire. In fact, almost at the same time that the unified empire was born in the Central Plains, the nomadic tribes in the northern grasslands also quickly unified: During the Shang and Zhou dynasties, there were large and small Rong and Di tribes scattered on the grasslands. However, by the Qin and Han dynasties, the Donghu and Xiongnu tribes had formed on the grasslands. , the pattern of the three heroes of the Yuezhi coexisting. The time when the grassland tribes were unifying coincided with the formation of the Qin and Han unified empire in the Central Plains. In fact, this is not a coincidence, it is precisely because the birth of the Qin and Han Empire gave birth to the unification of the grassland tribes. The nomadic economy is inherently fragile, so it is actually quite uneconomical for nomads to support a large national organization.

However, the fragility of the nomadic economy is destined to weaken the nomadic people's raiding impulse but cannot eradicate it. Once the settled farming people form a highly centralized unified empire, the original scattered small tribes will be destroyed. No longer able to attack the defense line of such a large empire, their only option is to unite various tribes to form a grassland nomadic empire. In the fierce competition between the three heroes of the grassland, it was the Huns who finally won. As early as the late Warring States Period, the power of the Xiongnu was on the rise. Therefore, countries such as Qin, Zhao, and Yan that bordered the Xiongnu built city walls along their northern borders to prevent the invasion of nomadic cavalry from the north. When the Qin army went east to conquer the six countries, the military strength on the northern border was weakened, and the Xiongnu took the opportunity to occupy Henan (now the Hetao Plain of the Yellow River).

In the spring of 214 BC, Qin Shihuang ordered Meng Tian to lead an army of 300,000 to attack the Xiongnu in the north. Meng Tian regained the Henan area occupied by the Huns in one fell swoop, and then used it as a grazing ground for the troops and horses to guard against the Huns. Qin Shihuang established Jiuyuan County in the Henan area that Mengtian recovered (the administrative seat is northwest of Baotou City, Inner Mongolia today). After Qin Shihuang regained Henan, he immigrated to the mainland from the Central Plains and connected the previous northern Great Wall defense lines of Qin, Zhao, Yan and other countries, thus forming an area starting from Lintao (today's Shanni County, Gansu) in the west and ending in Liaodong (today's Shanni County, Gansu) in the east. Liaoning Province) Great Wall. The northern border defense was thus consolidated, and from then on "the Hu people did not dare to go south to herd horses." However, this blow only temporarily dampened the momentum of the Xiongnu's rise, but it did not cause a fatal blow to the Xiongnu.