Admired and cherished as a unifier, as a centralizer, as an architect of the Great Wall (Changcheng 長城) and of China herself, the First Emperor (Qin Shihuangdi) 秦始皇帝 was on the other side feared and hated as a tyrant, as a book-burner and a mass murderer. The Qin empire was founded at end of a war between a few powers that had lasted for more than two centuries. And it was the result of a development that created a highly centralized bureaucratic state out of a loose feudal system. While the rule of the two Qin emperors endured not even two decades, it marks nonetheless the beginning of a more than two thousand years long history of a centralized state with an emperor being the head of thousands of officers in a state with a likewise uniform culture.