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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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).
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