Qin’s Embers: A Commoner’s Blade Rises

Qin’s Ashes: A Commoner’s Blade

A wildfire sparked by a stubborn stone, a tyrant toppled by a commoner.

In 230 BC, Qin conquered Han. On that same day, a baby boy was born to a farming family named Zhao in Yingchuan. They named him Zhao Shi.

Shi, meaning “stone,” was his father’s hope that he would keep to his place like a boundary stone in the fields. It was also the humblest wish of the common folk crushed beneath Qin law: to be hard, if not brilliant.

But the Qin dynasty’s millstone never asked the stones what they wanted.