The Warring States Period was one of the most serious and protracted antagonistic eras in Chinese history.
The term "Warring States" comes from Liu Xiang's "Warring States Policy" in the Han Dynasty.
Liu Xianglu said: "The country of ten thousand times is seven, the country of thousands of times is five, the enemy is fighting for power, and it is a warring state." ”
In 403 B.C., King Weilie of Zhou ordered Wei, Zhao, and Han to be listed as princes, and the situation of the Seven Heroes of the Warring States was officially formed. From more than 140 princes in the early Spring and Autumn Period, after more than 360 years of annexation, to the early Warring States period, there are only more than 20 left, among which the seven kingdoms of Yingqin in the west, Tianqi in the east, Sanjin in the Central Plains, Chuchu in the south, and Jiyan in the north are the strongest. It is known as the "Seven Heroes of the Warring States" in history.
As a result of the annexation wars of the various families, there were fewer princes, and the victors had a larger territory, a larger population, and a concentration of wealth. The wealth of the land and population, which had been scattered in the hands of the various princes, was now concentrated under a few princes. The concentration of resources has led to a sharp increase in the scale and intensity of wars between countries. In the continuous fierce attacks between each other, how to seek to survive the competition and enrich the country and strengthen the army. It has become the primary consideration of the decision-making level of various countries. Under the general needs of this era, a series of reforms were carried out in due course.
The first to initiate the reform was Wei. Wei Wenhou, as the direct mastermind of the "Three Families Divided into Jin", learned a lesson from the demise of the Jin Dynasty. From a strategic point of view, Wei's geographical location in the Central Plains, lacking natural shielding, and the situation in the land of the four wars further deepened Wei Wenhou's sense of crisis.
In order to protect himself and be able to annex other countries, he was a corporal of Lixian, and successively used a large number of outstanding talents such as Wei Chengzi, Le Yang, Wu Qi, Bu Zixia, etc., creating a precedent for recruiting talents in the Warring States Period. When the time came, around 445 BC, Marquis Wen of Wei established a centralized political organization. He appointed Li Kui, the originator of the Warring States Period, as the prime minister, and began to change the law, and launched a series of reform plans in politics, economy, and social governance.
And under the successful diplomatic operation, Wei used Wu Qi as a general, and won victory in the war against Qin, and Qin's Hexi land completely fell to Wei. Then Wei Wenhou destroyed Zhongshan and united with the Three Jin Dynasty to break the Qi State and Chu State, which had been an old power since the Spring and Autumn Period. At this time, Wei was well-deserved as the number one power in the Warring States.
After the Wei State Reform, Wu Qi led the Chu State Reform, and the time was about 395 BC, when the Chu Mourning King appointed Wu Qi as the Chu State Ling Yin, and began to preside over the Chu State Reform Plan. Wu Qi's reform was mainly to purge the powerful and eliminate the bloated aristocratic forces, so as to increase the country's revenue and clean up politics. The change has achieved remarkable results in a very short period of time. The state of Chu annexed a large area of land in the south, expanded its territory, and further strengthened its national strength. Because of Wei, Chu's changes were immediate, causing other vassal states to follow suit.
What followed was Zhao Guo's Gongzhong Lian Reform, South Korea's Shen Buxiao Reform, Qi Guo's Zou Ji Reform, and Yan Guo's Leyi Zou Yan Reform. To a greater or lesser extent, these changes have made the national strength of various countries stronger. The national strength of various countries tended to be balanced, and the war entered a stalemate of the war of Latin America. However, among the countries, only the Qin State had the strongest Shang Dynasty reform, the most thorough reform, and the most profound impact.
In the early years of the Warring States Period, the Qin State was still a relatively backward country politically, economically, and culturally compared to the Six Kingdoms of Shandong, and was always regarded as Yidi by the Central Plains countries, and was excluded in diplomatic activities between countries. When the Wei State was strong, the Qin State was defeated and retreated by the Wei ** team, and the Hexi Land that was slowly encroached upon from the Jin State in the Spring and Autumn Period was completely lost, and could only retreat in Luoshui, and built fortifications along the Luoshui River to take a defensive position against the Wei State. Fortunately, Wei then set its sights on Zhongshan and Qi, and the Three Jin Alliances collapsed.
The setback made the monarch of Qin realize the backwardness of his own system, Qin Xiangong set up three counties in six years, and even the capital Liyang was a county system in eleven years, and how many counties were set up in these five years is immeasurable. It was devastating for feudalism to take the lead in not having a territory. The abolition of the military industry from the death of the Gong Gong is to abolish the privileges of the nobility and popularize the rights of citizenship. The Yue Jue Book made it clear that King Yuan (Xiangong) was epoch-making, and the historical records also recorded it, and Shang Ying only made it a copy. The communal ownership of land in the Qin State began with the dedication of the Gong, and the popularization of the whole country was the first emperor, that is, the land only had the right to use but not the ownership.
The Wei State, which was the first to become strong because of the first change of law, went out to conquer four times in the early forty or fifty years of the Warring States period, and won more with fewer defeats, which can be described as infinitely beautiful. Attacking Qin in the west, attacking Qi and Song in the east, Zheng Chu in the south, and Zhongshan in the north, were invincible. However, with the change of the Qin State Shang Ying, the national strength gradually became stronger, the military resistance became increasingly tough, and the Wei State fought on two fronts, the east and west, plus the Chu State in the south. Under the circumstances, Wei was powerless to completely defeat Qin.
Therefore, in order to avoid the advance of the Qin army, in 361 BC, King Hui of Wei moved the capital from Anyi to Daliang, and built the Great Wall along the Xihe River, and began to take a defensive position against Qin. At this time, the Wei State concentrated its forces and vigorously passed through the Central Plains region, and was forced by the situation that the small states of Song, Wei, Zheng, and Lu submitted to the Wei State, entered the Great Liang Dynasty, and were brought under the control of the Wei State (Satellite State?).）。Then, Wei set his sights on the other two Jin Zhao and Han, who had been called "brothers and sisters" by Wei Wenhou in the past, which was a sign of the beginning of the decline of Wei.
In 354 BC, Wei sent troops to attack Zhao, and the Wei army was far superior to the Zhao army, and soon the army came to the city of Handan. Zhao asked for help from the Qi State, Qi took Tian Ji as the general, Sun Bin as the military advisor, and defeated the Wei army in Guiling with the strategy of "encircling Wei to save Zhao", and the Wei State was greatly injured in this battle. After resting, in 342 BC, Wei attacked Han again, and Korea also asked for help from Qi. Qi once again led the division with Tian Ji and Sun Bin in this pair, so the trick repeated the plan of "encircling Wei to save Han", and set up an ambush in Maling to break the elite of the Wei army again, and the elite of Wei was lost, and the Qin State, which had been planning for a long time, took this opportunity to launch an offensive against Wei and recaptured most of the Hexi land that had been lost for a long time and was of great strategic significance to Qin.
The successive defeats depleted the Wei state, and in the face of the aggressive Qin state, the Wei state had to turn to the Central Plains states to adopt a friendly diplomatic strategy. The Central Plains countries were also afraid that the Qin State, which had been reborn after the Shang Dynasty reform, would come to the east, and they would use Wei as an obstacle to the west, and they also accepted the goodwill of Wei reconciliation one after another. In 334 B.C., King Wei Hui and King Qi Wei made an alliance and were known as "King Xuzhou".
Soon, Zhao, Yan, and Zhongshan (Fuguo) also joined the Covenant, and they were known as the "Five Kingdoms and Kings" in history. The emergence of the situation of "five kingdoms and kings" means that the princes of the Central Plains began to form an anti-Qin alliance, which is called "joint vertical" because of the geographical location of the alliance countries in the north and south. Under the unfavorable situation, the king of Qin disintegrated and merged in order to break the alliance, so as to achieve each breakthrough. Adopting the suggestion of Zhang Yi, a columnist, he put forward a "lianheng" that was in direct opposition to the "joint vertical", looking for a country among the countries of the joint vertical, forming an east-west horizontal alliance with the Qin state, and cutting off the forces of the joint vertical.
In 332 B.C., Qin used both soft and hard measures against Wei, sent envoys to lobby and accompany military attacks, successively captured Quwo of Wei, Pingzhou and other large cities, and inflicted heavy losses on the Han army, and achieved the record of beheading 80,000. Because Wei could not receive effective assistance from all countries, he was forced to form an alliance with Qin under the condition that the heavens should not be and the earth was not spiritual. As soon as the news came out, the countries were frightened, so in 319 BC, Zhao, Han, Yan, Qi, and Chu instigated the anti-Qin forces of Wei to launch a coup d'état. The Qin State took advantage of the situation to counterattack, and Wei Han bore the brunt of it, unable to stop, and both of them were in a row with the Qin State.
The three kingdoms of Qin, Wei and Han became horizontal, and Qi and Chu also confronted each other. In order to break up the Qi-Chu alliance, the Qin State sent Zhang Yi into Chu, and used "six hundred miles of business in the land" as a bait to instigate the king of Chu Huai to stop Qi and pro-Qin. King Chu Huai, who was in a daze, believed it to be true, and the rear knew the plan. In a fit of rage, he sent troops to attack Qin, but he was defeated, the Qin army beheaded 80,000, the main general of the Chu army was Qu Kuo, and more than ten people were captured. King Chu Huai, who was unwilling to fail, was so angry that he once again dispatched a large army to attack Qin, and was defeated again. Subsequently, in the Wuguan Alliance, King Chu Huai was ensnared by Qin, and finally died in Qin.
In 278 BC, Qin General Bai Qi led his troops to attack Chu capital Ying, and after a long time of attack, the river water irrigated the city, and the people of Chu drowned hundreds of thousands, Yingdu was pulled, and hundreds of miles of rich land around were all in Qin's pocket, and the Chu regime was forced to move the capital to Chen. The following year, Qin Shushou captured Wu County and Qianzhong County. The state of Chu, which had suffered successive major blows, has since collapsed. The decline of the Chu state left the Qin state without a threat from the flanks, so it changed its strategy of continuous and horizontal and switched to "long-distance and close attacks".
After Qin's new national policy of "distant friendship and close attack" was released, he immediately made friends with Qi and Yan, which were far away in the east and had no border with their own land;On the one hand, it launched a fierce attack on the three Jin Zhao, Wei, and Han bordering it. The purpose of the war has also changed from a mere siege to a direct or indirect force that seeks to destroy more of all enemy resistance.
In 293 BC, the Qin general Bai Qi defeated the Wei and Han coalition forces at Yique, and achieved an unprecedented astonishing record: beheading 240,000 people and capturing five Korean cities. In 288 B.C., King Qin Zhao proclaimed himself the Western Emperor and respected the King of Qi as the Eastern Emperor.
King Qi saw the weakness of the Shandong countries as a good opportunity for his own hegemony, and the Qi State began to launch a military operation for the purpose of hegemony, taking advantage of the civil strife in Yan to break through the Yan capital, destroy the Song State and monopolize the Song land, plunder the Chu State Huaibei in the south, invade the border towns of the Sanjin Dynasty in the west, and make enemies on all sides of the Qi State. Finally, after decades of anger and hard work, King Yan Zhao found a good opportunity, appointed Le Yi as a general, united Qin, Wei, Zhao, Han, and the five countries to attack Qi, even more than 70 cities, pull out the capital, since the establishment of the capital by Jiang Shang, the prince of Lu, more than 700 years, Linzi, which has never been captured, fell into the smoke of the alien ** team, the treasury treasure was slightly robbed, and the king of Qi was also killed by the Chu generals in the escape. Later, although the Arita Danhuo Ox Formation defeated Yan Jun and restored the country in one fell swoop, the vitality of Qi never recovered.
The two great powers of Chu and Qi declined successively, which objectively made the Qin State form a strong situation. Since the weakening of Chu and Qi, the Qin State concentrated its forces on launching a fierce offensive against the Zhao State, which was still strong in the Three Jin Dynasty. In 265 BC, the Qin army raided Korea and cut off the connection between the seventeen counties of Shangdang County and the Korean mainland, which became the fuse for the decisive battle of Qin and Zhao Changping. The two sides held each other for three years, but Zhao Wangzhong divided the plan and replaced the veteran Lian Po with Zhao Kuo, as a result, the Zhao army was defeated, and Bai Qi buried all the forty-five Zhao soldiers alive, and then entered the siege of Zhao. Under the critical situation, although Wei Guoxin Lingjun "stole talismans to save Zhao", the defeat of Changping made Zhao lose his strength and strength, and it was at the end of the road. Since then, there is no country in the world that can match the Qin State.
In 256 BC, King Zhaoxiang of Qin annexed the Western Zhou Dynasty;In 249 BC, King Xiang of Qin Zhuang annexed the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, and the Zhou royal family was completely destroyed. In 246 BC, he was succeeded by the reign of King Zheng of Qin. In 238, he held a crown ceremony to personally take power of the Qin State and suppress the rebellion of Chang Yu. In the following year, Lü Buwei was deprived of his power, causing him to commit suicide, stabilizing the political situation, and the Qin Wangzheng, who had monopolized the power of the Qin State, reused Li Si and Wei Yu and began to annex the Six Kingdoms.
Under the strategy of Wei Yan, the Qin state combined money bribery and military offensive, and the Qin army was like a bamboo. He destroyed Han in 230 BC, Wei in 225 BC, Chu in 223 BC, Yan and Zhao in 222 BC. Finally, in 221 BC, the state of Qi was destroyed without bloodshed. Qin Wangzheng ascended the throne as the first emperor of the ages, Qin Shi Huang, and China has since entered an era of centralization that lasted for 2,000 years.