Just curious. I understand that he was the first Chinese emperor and the one who conquered the whole thing and created a unified China, but what was that region, exactly, before it was unified? Was it, like, individual city-states? A bunch of tiny kingdoms? Or just sort-of provinces of one large country?
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Like most other places; there would have been different independent city states or loosely defined nations
We see this history repeated throughout the globe at earliest parts of known human history
Tribes form; tribes expand and either conquer/kill, conquer/enslave or conquer/assimilate. Then this just scales up
China has a long history of reuniting and breaking apart. For most of its history, it is known as “The Middle Kingdom”
The modern name of China comes from the Qin dynasty, which was the last dynasty to rule China.
Before Qin there was the Zhou Dynasty. And before that, there was the Shang Dynasty.
The Zhou dynasty itself is separated into the Western and Eastern. The Western Zhou is closer to a centralized authority, but subsequently had loss of centralization. The Eastern Zhou itself is separated into the Spring and Autumn period and Warring States period, when there was nominally a Zhou King but in reality authority was delegated to individual fiefdoms with some similarities to European feudalism.
By the Warring States the 100s of smaller “states” have merged/been conquered, forming 7 larger states.
China before Qin was a bunch of… well, they weren’t all *tiny*, but, a bunch of **different kingdoms**, yep.
Note that Qin wasn’t the first *important* Chinese dynasty. We have direct evidence in the archeological record for the [Zhou](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_dynasty) and [Shang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shang_dynasty) dynasties that existed before Qin. We say that Qin was the first to unify China, because it was the first to extinguish all the other kingdoms of China…
…although even then, it was only the first to extinguish the other kingdoms that *were Chinese culturally* at the time. The modern areas of Yunnan and Sichuan still had independent kingdoms during the Qin era with non-Han cultures, such as [Dian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dian_Kingdom) or [Yelang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelang).
To challenge the premise of your question, why do we think of China as a unified entity post-Qin? The territory of modern China has been politically fragmented for most of its history up until the Qing; this kind of historical narrative suits only the nation whose territorial claims are legitimized by the idea of a continuously unified civilization-state.
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