Sketch Map of the Qin Great Wal

First of all, in order to resist the aggression of the nomadic Huns from the north, he employed soldiers and civilian laborers to link up the defending walls built by the states of Yan, Zhao and Qin before, and finally completed the so-called 10,000-li Great Wall whose actual total length was a little more than 4,000 li(unit of length equal to 0.5 kilometer).

Ying Zheng then gave orders to construct royal roads that radiated in all directions from the capital of Xianyang. Each road was 11.55 meters wide, with pine trees planted on either side at an interval of 6.93meters. There were a total of six such roads nationwide, namely, the Shangjun Road towards northern Shaanxi, the Linjin Road towards Shanxi, the Eastern Road towards Shandong, the Western Road towards Ningxia and Gansu, the Wuguan Road towards the coastal area in the southeast, the Plank Road towards Sichuan, and the Straight Road towards Inner Mongolia.

Sketch Map of the Qin Royal Roads

Whilst the Qin troops were marching southward to attack Guangdong and Guangxiin 214 BC, Supervisory Censor Lull built the Ling Canal in the north of present Xing’ an County of Guangxias a supply route. The 30-kilometer-long canal linked up the rivers of Xiang and Liand connected the river systems of the Yangtze and the Pearl. Still in use today, it’s the best preserved ancient canal in the world.

The Ling Canal, the Zheng Guo Canal in Shaanxi, and the Dujiang Weirs in Sichuan have been jointly called the “three great water control projects of the Qin Dynasty.”

Nevertheless, the construction of the grand Epang Palace and the imperial mausoleum had drained the empire of its manpower and treasury, and hastened its eventual collapse.

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