Qin Shi Huang takes the throne of the Chinese state of Qin at age thirteen in 246 BC and, over the next quarter-century, conquers his rival kingdoms to become the first emperor of a unified China. The film covers his reforms with chief advisor Li Si, standardizing currency, weights, and writing across territories that had never shared a single system, and his forced-labor projects: connecting existing walls into the first Great Wall, building a national road network, and constructing a mausoleum the size of a small city near Xi'an. That tomb, sealed in 210 BC, went undiscovered until 1974, when workmen digging a well found the terracotta army guarding it, close to 8,000 individually sculpted soldiers and horses fired from clay. The film treats the terracotta find as physical evidence of the emperor's ambition and paranoia, a ruler who unified a civilization and then built himself an underground empire to rule in death, still only partly excavated.