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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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.
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