Battle of Changping (260 BC): Qin's Crushing Victory over Zhao

The Battle of Changping was a long campaign fought between the Chinese states of Qin and Zhao from 262 to 260 BC, ending in a decisive Qin victory under the general Bai Qi. After a standoff of more than two years in the hills of southern Shanxi, Qin encircled the Zhao army and starved it into surrender, and ancient sources say hundreds of thousands of prisoners were then killed. The battle broke the last state able to resist Qin on equal terms and opened the way to the unification of China.

Background: the struggle for Shangdang

By the 3rd century BC the Warring States of China were locked in a contest for survival. Qin, in the west, had grown powerful since the reforms of Shang Yang in the 4th century BC, which rewarded soldiers with rank for enemy heads taken and organised the whole population for farming and war. Zhao, in the north, was its strongest rival, with tough armies and experienced generals.

The spark came from the small state of Han. In 262 BC Qin captured Yewang, cutting off Han’s mountainous Shangdang commandery from the rest of the kingdom. Rather than surrender Shangdang to Qin, its governor, Feng Ting, offered it to Zhao. King Xiaocheng of Zhao accepted the territory, against the advice of some of his counsellors, and in doing so turned Qin’s anger on Zhao.

The long standoff

Qin forces under Wang He advanced into Shangdang, and Zhao sent its veteran general Lian Po to meet them. After early losses in skirmishes, Lian Po built a chain of walled camps and fortifications around Changping and refused to fight a pitched battle. His plan was to make Qin’s long supply lines and the cost of a stalled campaign wear down the enemy.

The strategy worked on the ground but strained Zhao itself. Feeding a huge army in the hills was expensive, and the king grew impatient with a general who would not fight. Sima Qian reports that Qin agents spread rumours that the only Zhao commander Qin feared was Zhao Kuo, the son of the famous general Zhao She, and that Lian Po was about to surrender.

In 260 BC the king replaced Lian Po with Zhao Kuo. According to the historian, the elder statesman Lin Xiangru warned that Zhao Kuo had only learned war from his father’s books, and Zhao Kuo’s own mother asked the king not to appoint him. Their warnings were ignored. At the same time Qin secretly sent its most feared general, Bai Qi, to take command, and threatened death to anyone who revealed the change.

The encirclement

Zhao Kuo abandoned Lian Po’s defensive policy and attacked. Bai Qi let his front line fall back, drawing the Zhao army forward out of its fortifications. Then, as Sima Qian describes it, a Qin force of 25,000 men cut in behind the Zhao army, and 5,000 cavalry split it from its camps, so that the Zhao troops were divided and their supply routes severed.

Qin built fortified lines to hold the trap closed. King Zhaoxiang of Qin travelled to the nearby Henei region, granted a step in rank to the population and called up all men aged 15 and over to block any relief from Zhao or its allies. Inside the ring, the Zhao soldiers ran out of food. Sima Qian says they went without rations for 46 days and that some were driven to eat one another.

In the autumn of 260 BC Zhao Kuo led a final attempt to break out and was shot dead by Qin archers. Leaderless and starving, the Zhao army surrendered.

The massacre of the prisoners

What followed made Changping notorious. According to Sima Qian, Bai Qi decided that the prisoners were too many to feed and too dangerous to release, and ordered them killed. He reports that about 400,000 surrendered men were buried or slaughtered, and that only 240 of the youngest were sent home to spread terror in Zhao. The historian puts Zhao’s total losses in the campaign at around 450,000.

Modern historians treat these figures with caution. Ancient Chinese sources often inflated numbers, and feeding and killing so many men would have been an enormous undertaking. Still, the scale of the defeat is not in doubt. Since the 1990s, archaeologists working near Gaoping have found pits containing the skeletons of many young men, some showing wounds from weapons, which are widely linked with the battle. Qin’s own losses were also heavy; Bai Qi later said that more than half of Qin’s soldiers had died.

How the armies fought

Changping was a war of mass armies, not of noble chariot warriors. By the 3rd century BC the leading states could raise conscript infantry numbering in the hundreds of thousands, armed with bronze and increasingly iron weapons. Crossbows with bronze trigger mechanisms gave foot soldiers great killing power at range, which helps explain how Qin archers could hold a ring of fortified lines.

The campaign also depended on logistics. Both sides had to move grain over mountain roads for months on end, and Zhao, fighting far from its granaries, felt the strain sooner. Qin’s system of registered households and rewards for service allowed it to mobilise men and supplies on a scale few rivals could match. In the end, the battle was decided less by a single clash than by Bai Qi’s ability to cut supply lines and let hunger do the work.

Key people

• Bai Qi (died 257 BC): Qin’s most successful general, credited by tradition with hundreds of thousands of enemy deaths in his career.
• Zhao Kuo (died 260 BC): Zhao commander, remembered in a Chinese idiom about “discussing war on paper”, meaning theory without practical experience.
• Lian Po: Zhao’s veteran general, whose cautious defence held Qin at bay until his removal.
• King Zhaoxiang of Qin (reigned 306–251 BC): the ruler whose long reign set Qin on its course to dominance.
• King Xiaocheng of Zhao (reigned 265–245 BC): accepted Shangdang and later replaced Lian Po.

Consequences

Qin followed up its victory by besieging the Zhao capital, Handan, from 259 BC. The city held out, and in 257 BC armies from Wei and Chu came to its aid and forced Qin to withdraw. Bai Qi, who had argued against renewing the attack, fell out with the king and was ordered to take his own life in 257 BC.

Zhao survived for three more decades, but it never rebuilt an army that could match Qin. After Changping, no single rival could resist Qin alone, and the other states struggled to form lasting alliances. Under King Zheng, Qin conquered Zhao’s capital in 228 BC and completed the unification of China in 221 BC.

Timeline

• 262 BC: Qin captures Yewang, cutting off Han’s Shangdang commandery, which defects to Zhao.
• 261–260 BC: Qin and Zhao armies face each other around Changping; Lian Po holds fortified lines.
• 260 BC: Zhao replaces Lian Po with Zhao Kuo; Qin secretly gives command to Bai Qi.
• 260 BC, autumn: The Zhao army, surrounded and starving, surrenders after Zhao Kuo is killed.
• 259–257 BC: Qin besieges Handan; Wei and Chu relieve the city in 257 BC.
• 257 BC: Bai Qi is forced to commit suicide.
• 228 BC: Qin captures Handan and conquers Zhao.

Why it matters

Changping was the turning point of the Warring States period. It destroyed the military power of Qin’s strongest rival, showed the ruthless efficiency of the Qin war machine and made the creation of China’s first unified empire four decades later far more likely.