| Abstract |
The Historical Records of Qin Shi Huang records that in the twenty-sixth year of his reign: "Weighing objects was to be done with uniformly sized gauges, all carriages were to have equal spacing between the two wheels, and letters or articles were to be written in the same characters. "There is a considerable amount of scholarly research on the implementation of the 'writing with the uniform characters' system in various parts of the Qin Empire. But how did the Qin empire spread culture and characters to the areas it conquered in the late Warring States period, and what was the impact? In the past, historical records are insufficient, and scholars rarely conduct regional research on this issue. This paper uses the archaeological burials and excavates materials to re-examine the cultural and character transmission of the Qin empire to the conquered areas in the late Warring States period, with a particular focus on the cultural and character phenomena of burials in the Hubei and Hunan regions. This area was originally part of the state of Chu, and a comparison of archaeological materials shows that the influence of the Qin culture was more profound in Hubei and more limited in Hunan, which is closely related to the short period of time that the Qin occupied the area. As for the characters, due to the central government's mandatory policy of writing in the same characters and the issuance of the "imperial edict of renaming", the remains of Chu characters in the six Kingdoms period in Hubei and Hunan in the late Warring States period is basically nowhere to see. Even though the anti-Qin regime in the late Warring States period tried to restore the ancient Chinese characters of the six countries, it may not be possible for later people to completely restore the appearance of the ancient characters of the six countries because the policy of "writing with the uniform characters" had gone through more than a decade. As the Qin characters had been in use for some time, it was the best strategy for the newly established Han empire to inherit the Qin characters system. |
