The winner in the dispute between China’s Warring States, the man who created the first Chinese imperial dynasty, wasn’t a warlord: he was a lowly merchant.

Lu Buwei is one of the most mysterious characters in Chinese history. A foreigner in the powerful kingdom of Qin, a merchant in a land where merchants were frowned upon even more than elsewhere in China, he managed to gain massive influence, not only surviving but thriving in a treacherous court that had already taken so many prominent heads before him.

The merchant’s efforts to turn Yiren – a middling son of the king from a middling concubine – into his protegé king were nothing short of astonishingly successful. He managed to marry Yiren to his own concubine, who in 259 BC gave the prince a son that the lady herself later said was actually Lu’s. The merchant then worked his magic until a new king ruled Qin who was fully under Lu Buwei’s thumb, and had Lu Buwei’s own son as his heir.

That boy succeeded his official father after that unfortunate man’s three-year reign ended in 247 BC, at the still tender age of 34. The boy then took the Qin throne as King Zheng, and soon would be Qin Shi Huangdi, the first emperor who built for himself a fabulous tomb in Xian.